Feminism (7 page)

ized Samuel Richardson’s heroines – Pamela (1741), who gets
her man, and the tragic Clarissa (1748) – is taken to
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extremes, while Ann Radcliffe’s
The Mysteries of Udolpho

(1794) and
The Italian
(1797) are slightly later, more knowing, versions of Wollstonecraft’s
The Wrongs of Woman
.

Jane Austen affectionately parodied Gothic excesses in

Northanger Abbey
(1818); but though her naïve heroine’s
fantasies are discounted, she is confronted with something
worse: real selfishness and cruelty. The extravagances of
Gothic fiction offered women readers and writers a way of
exploring their feelings, of facing their darker fantasies and
fears about men, marriage, and their own choices in life.

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by the classic cruel stepmother, then put out to work as an apprentice, only to be raped and impregnated by her master. After aborting her baby, Jemima became a pick-pocket, was seduced and abandoned, and began working in a ‘house of ill fame’. She seeks refuge in a work-house, and is then hired by the owner of a madhouse who, it turns out, preys on the inhabitants. For all its Gothic exaggerations, the novel makes a radical point: that both a middle-class and a working-class woman may find themselves helplessly exploited in a male-dominated world.

Wollstonecraft had defended her last novel angrily against criticisms from a male friend:

I am vexed and surprised at your not thinking the situation of Maria sufficiently important, and can only account for this want of – shall I say it? Delicacy of feeling – by recollecting that you are a man.

Her point was a serious one, and one that constitutes her legacy:
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women must speak out, tell their own life stories, articulate their
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feelings, acknowledge both their own hopes and their sense of being cheated and wronged.

Wollstonecraft left notes outlining the bleakest of futures for her heroine: ‘Divorced by her husband – Her lover unfaithful –

Pregnancy – Miscarriage – Suicide.’ She probably could never have imagined a convincingly happy ending for her. Though Wollstonecraft herself, all too briefly, found peace and contentment with William Godwin, she died a few months after they married, giving birth to her second child: another Mary, who would grow up to marry the poet Percy Shelley, and to write that extraordinary and troubling novel,
Frankenstein
.

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Chapter 4

The early 19th century:

reforming women

The 19th century saw an increasingly widespread and articulate statement of women’s claims – perhaps in reaction to the emergence of an image of true ‘femininity’ that seemed to become more constricted as the century wore on: a class-based ideal of gentility and refinement. But though many women (and men) spoke out eloquently against and acted on their beliefs, it was not until the second half of the century that any organized campaigns –

particularly for better education for women, for the possibility of their working outside the home, for a reform in the laws affecting married women, and for the right to vote – began to emerge.

In 1843, a married woman, Marion Reid, had published in Edinburgh
A Plea for Women
, which has been described, rightly, as the most thorough and effective statement by a woman since Mary Wollstonecraft’s
Vindication
. Reid covered most of the areas that would preoccupy reformers for the rest of the century and her book deserves to be better known. (At the time, it was widely read, and reprinted several times, though it seems to have been more popular in America than in England.) Reid offers a cool and damning analysis of the way her contemporaries – and, she admits, they are mainly other women – talk so confidently about a ‘woman’s sphere’, and equate womanliness with the renunciation of self. ‘Womanly’

behaviour, in practice, means ‘good humour and attention to her husband, keeping her children neat and clean, and attending to 41

domestic arrangements’. But Reid insists, more forcibly than anyone else in the period, that this apparently noble and virtuous

‘self-renunciation’ in practice usually involves ‘a most criminal self-extinction’.

The education that most girls are given merely ‘cramps and confines’ them, she claims: ‘Any symptom of independent thought is quickly repressed . . . the majority of girls are subdued into mere automatons.’ Reid also comments bitterly on the almost insurmountable difficulties many women face in

‘obtaining the means of a good substantial education’. Most girls are brought up to ‘a mechanical performance of duty . . .

their own minds all the while lying barren and unfruitful’.

This question of education would remain crucially important all through the 19th century; too little seemed to have changed since the days of Mary Astell and Mary Wollstonecraft.

Education for girls – whether at home by governesses, who were often barely trained, or at inadequate schools – remained a hit
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and miss affair.

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Reid is careful to acknowledge women’s domestic responsibilities, though she claims that most women go about their household duties in ‘a cold, hard, mechanical, loveless spiritless way’. She admits that, as things are, domestic work must form part, and

‘perhaps even the chief part’, of a woman’s life. But she argues that there is no reason why woman should be
limited
to domesticity. A shade reluctantly, she allows that some ‘subordination’ of herself may be ‘due to man’. But, she asks, ‘if woman’s rights are not the same as those of man, what are they?’ In one sense, she admits,

‘woman was made for man, yet in another and higher she was also made for herself ’. Innocence, she argues, is not the same thing as virtue.

But a married woman – living in a ‘shackled condition’ – has no rights over her own property; even the produce of her own labour is at the disposal of her husband, who can, if he chooses, take and 42

‘waste it in dissipation and excess’. Moreover, ‘her children, as well as her fortune, are the property of her husband’.

In what was, for the times, her most radical argument, Reid asserts that ‘womanliness’ is quite compatible with voting. After all, woman, as much as man, is ‘a rational, moral and accountable creature’. She has no particular wish to see women representatives, she remarks cautiously; probably few women would ‘consent to be chosen’ and few electors would choose them. But she sees no reason why women should not stand, if any are ‘able or willing to overleap natural barriers’.

The two best-known 19th-century arguments for women’s rights
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were written by men; though in both cases, the authors – William
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Thompson and John Stuart Mill – acknowledge the influence and inspiration of their wives. It is intriguing that neither of these women – who were well educated and articulate – chose to speak out for themselves. Was this a nervousness about breaking with
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convention and speaking out in their own voices, or simply a tactical
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recognition that a man’s arguments might be taken more seriously?

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In 1825 the Irish-born William Thompson published his
Appeal of
ome

One Half of the Human Race, Women, against the Pretensions of the
n
Other Half, Men, to Restrain them in Political and thence in Civil
and Domestic Slavery
. He describes the book as ‘the protest of at least one man and one woman’ against the ‘degradation of one half of the adult portion of the human race’. It is addressed to, and acknowledges the inspiration of, the widowed Anna Wheeler. Anna Wheeler had been married off when she was only 15 years of age; the couple had six children, but when her husband proved a drunkard, Anna found the courage to leave him, and in 1818 spent some time in France, where she came into contact with Saint Simonian socialists. After her husband’s death two years later, she returned to London, where she became well known for her interest in reform movements. She was attacked by no less a figure than Benjamin Disraeli, who remarked sarcastically that Anna was 43

‘something between Jeremy Bentham and Meg Merrilees, very clever but awfully revolutionary’.

Thompson shared and expressed Anna Wheeler’s radical views. ‘I hear you indignantly reject the boon of equality with such creatures as men now are’, he wrote to her: ‘With you I would equally elevate both sexes.’ The book concentrates on the situation of the married woman, who is reduced to being a piece of ‘movable property and an ever-obedient servant to the bidding of man’. For a married woman, her home becomes a ‘prison-house’. The house itself, as well as everything in it, belongs to the husband, ‘and of all fixtures the most abject is his breeding machine, the wife’. Married women are in fact slaves, their situation no better than that ‘of Negroes in the West Indies’. Mothers are denied rights over their children and over family property, and most are treated like ‘any other upper servant’.

The
Appeal
was in part couched as an answer to James Mill’s
Essay
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on Government
, well known at the time, which argued that women
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need no political rights as they are adequately represented by their fathers or husbands. ‘What happens to women who have neither husband nor father?’ Thompson asks. He then goes on to attack, pungently and at length, the unthinking assumption that the interests of husband and wife are always identical, and to criticize, bitterly, the unjust situation. He also looks forward to a time when the children of all classes, both girls and boys, will be equally provided for and educated.

Anna Wheeler later went on to become an effective writer and lecturer on women’s rights. Sadly, her own daughter strongly disapproved of her radical inclinations, claiming that she was unfortunately deeply imbued with the pernicious fallacies of the French Revolution, which had then more or less seared their trace through Europe, and . . . was besides strongly tainted by the corresponding poison of Mrs Wollstonecraft’s book.

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Interestingly, William Thompson, too, criticizes Mary Wollstonecraft, but for quite opposite reasons: he attacked her

‘narrow views’ and the ‘timidity and impotence of her conclusions’.

(He was perhaps betraying his own lack of historical awareness.) But he calls on women to make their own demands for education, and for civil and political rights; in the long run, he feels, that must benefit men as well:

As your bondage has chained down man to the ignorance and vices of despotism, so will your liberation reward him with knowledge, with freedom and happiness.

In 1869 John Stuart Mill published
The Subjection of Women
,
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which also argued that the subordination of women was both
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wrong and ‘one of the chief hindrances to human improvement’.

(Ironically, he was the son of the James Mill whose conservative views on women had so infuriated William Thompson.) Mill was profoundly influenced by Harriet Taylor, whom he had met in 1830.
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She was already married, with two small sons; the pair maintained
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an intense friendship for nearly twenty years, and eventually, two years after her husband died in 1851, they were able to marry.

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Harriet had published a short article on ‘The Enfranchisement of
ome

Women’ in the
Westminster Review
in 1851; and she had written,
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though, interestingly, not published, papers that criticized the marriage laws and claimed a woman’s rights and responsibilities towards her own children. When she and Mill eventually married, he remarked that he felt it his duty to make ‘a formal protest against the existing law of marriage’ on the grounds that it gave the man ‘legal power over the person, property and freedom of action of the other party, independent of her own wishes and will’. Mill admitted that

the opinion was in my mind little more than an abstract principle

. . . that perception of the vast practical bearings of women’s disabilities which found expression in the book on
The Subjection of
Women
was acquired mainly through her [Harriet’s] teaching.

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19th-century American feminism

In the 19th-century United States, feminism emerged out of
the anti-slavery movement, in which women were very active.

Anti-slavery societies proliferated from the 1830s onward;
ironically, some groups were open only to whites. In London
in 1840 a World Convention on slavery was attended by
Americans, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton; women were
banned from taking part in the debate. That moved Stanton
and Lucretia Mott to become feminists. In 1848, they organized a women’s convention in Seneca Falls, New York, and
campaigned for rights, including the vote, for women and for
blacks. Sarah and Angelina Grimke, from a Southern slave-holding family, but converted Quakers, became ardent and
effective abolitionists. In 1863, Angelina published
An

Appeal to the Christian Women of the Southern States
, and
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two years later,
Letters on the Equality of the Sexes
. She
responded angrily to criticism that she had stepped outside
woman’s proper sphere. A former slave, Sojourner Truth,
mocked clerics who insisted that women needed to be protected by men, and spoke out angrily after the Civil War and
the emancipation of slaves, when the vote was given to former slaves – but only males. In 1920, women were
enfranchised, but it was only in 1970 that the vote was given
to all blacks.

Mill based his arguments in the
Subjection
on the belief that the then existing – and blatantly unequal – relationship between the sexes was anything but natural. ‘Was there ever any domination which did not appear natural to those who possessed it?’ he asks, citing the way, until recently, its beneficiaries had defended the slave 46