Feminism (8 page)

trade in America. What we presently call womanliness is something artificial, ‘the result of forced repression in some directions, unnatural stimulations in others’. He seems to have come to this notion only gradually, and probably under Harriet’s influence; in 1832, not long after they met, he had written informing her that ‘the great occupation of woman should be to
beautify
life . . . to diffuse beauty, elegance, & grace everywhere’.

But in the
Subjection
he denies that

anyone knows, or can know, the nature of the two sexes as long as they have only been seen in their present relation to one another. All the moralities tell them that it is the duty of woman, and all the
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current sentimentalities that it is their nature, to live for others.

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It is hardly surprising, given the poverty of their education and the narrowness of their lives, he argues, that women have not yet produced ‘great and luminous ideas’. He also claims, even more
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dubiously, that they have not yet created ‘a literature of their own’.

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Ann Radcliffe, Fanny Burney, Jane Austen, Susan Ferrier, the Brontë sisters: they all seem to have escaped his notice.

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In an ideal world, Mill believed, men and women would resemble
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each other: men would be more unselfish, and women would be free of the ‘exaggerated self-abnegation’ expected of them. Mill never goes so far as to argue for the possibility of divorce. But he insists that there is no justification for not giving women the vote immediately, and under exactly the same conditions as men; in fact, he remarked, many of them deserve it more than some of the present voters. In 1866, Mill presented the first women’s petition for the vote, and he moved amendments to the 1867 Reform Bill in favour of women.

Some modern feminists have criticized Mill for concentrating almost exclusively on married women, while ignoring the situation of, say, daughters or single women. But married women – as both 47

Reid and Thompson had recognized earlier – were indeed, legally at least, particularly vulnerable. The problems wives might face were dramatically illustrated in the notorious case of Caroline Norton.

Born in 1808, she was the granddaughter of the playwright Richard Sheridan, and she was beautiful, lively, and well educated. She certainly never set out to become a champion of women’s rights, asserting, in fact, that she ‘never pretended to the wild and ridiculous doctrine of equality’. She married, she once admitted, partly because she ‘particularly dreaded’ the prospect of ‘living and dying an old maid’. But she found herself, in 1826, tied to a husband who soon proved hopelessly uncongenial. Their relationship gradually deteriorated, and broke down in scenes of outright violence. Eventually, Norton not only refused his wife access to her own property (everything she had inherited, and everything that she later earned); he denied her all contact with her three children.

He vengefully pushed her into a harsh public spotlight, making her the focus of scandal when he (probably unjustifiably) accused her of adultery with the then Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne. Though
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the case was dismissed, Caroline Norton understandably felt
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humiliated and betrayed, and her reputation was permanently tarnished.

Norton could not go to law to defend or protect herself, or to argue her rights of access to her own children, because, she discovered, a married woman had no legal existence. ‘It is a hard thing to feel legally so helpless and dependent while
in fact
I am as able to support myself as an intelligent man working in a modest profession’, she complained. In 1838, she supported the passing of a bill reforming an Infants Custody Act which gave a mother limited rights over her children until they were 7, and in 1854 and 1855, she produced pamphlets based on her own case:
The Separation of
Mother and Child by the Law of Custody of Infants Considered
and
English Laws for Women in the 19th Century
, both of which reached a wide audience. ‘I have learned the law respecting married women piecemeal, but suffering every one of its defects of protection’, she remarked. In her 1855
Letter to the Queen
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supporting a proposed bill on the Reform of Marriage and Divorce, she wrote that ‘I believe in my obscurer position that I am permitted to be the example on which a particular law shall be reformed’. A Divorce Reform Act was passed in 1857, but the circumstances in which a woman could file for divorce remained very limited.

Though Norton’s life dramatically illustrated some of the cruel anomalies in the status of married women, hers was certainly not a solitary, or even an unusual, case. Charlotte Brontë, for example, when she married not long before she died, discovered that her husband owned the copyright to her novels, as well as everything she earned. But Caroline Norton dissociated herself from other women who, in the mid-1850s were beginning to meet together
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over women’s issues, and who soon took up the cause that her case
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had publicized; indeed, a Married Women’s Property Committee, set up by the group known as ‘the Ladies of Langham Place’, was probably the first organized feminist group in England. But Caroline Norton, perhaps feeling that she had been too much in the
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public eye, perhaps anxious to retain at least the shreds of her
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reputation, kept her distance.

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Florence Nightingale was another remarkable woman who flatly
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refused to be associated with the emerging women’s movement,
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though, in the long run, her example proved inspiring, and much more effective than anything she actually said. She famously remarked that ‘I am brutally indifferent to the wrongs or the rights of my sex’, and insisted that if women are unemployed ‘it is because they won’t work’. She would be prepared to pay a woman well to act as her secretary, she once said, but could find no one who was either able or willing to take on the work. But she herself came up sharply against the way society divided the sexes and constricted women’s lives. The daughter of a well-off and well-connected family, she complained that she was a martyr to genteel and leisured femininity. Why, she asked sarcastically, would it be ‘more ridiculous for a man than a woman to do worsted work and drive out everyday in a carriage?’ ‘Why should we laugh if we were to see 49

a parcel of men sitting around a drawing-room table in the morning and think it all right if they were women?’

Nightingale seems to developed her interest in nursing after undertaking some typically female duties – looking after her grandmother and her old nurse. But her growing interest in the work led to vocal disapproval, and to constant demands on her time from her mother and her sister Parthenope. In 1844, the family flatly refused to let her spend time at Salisbury Infirmary. ‘There is nothing like the tyranny of a good English family’, Nightingale once remarked bitterly, claiming that most women ‘have no God, no country, no duty to them at all except family’. But in 1849 she managed a visit to Kaiserwerth in Germany, an orphan asylum and hospital run by Lutheran deaconesses. Though she was critical of its standard of nursing and hygiene, she admitted that ‘I find the deepest interest in everything here and am so well in body and mind’. But at the age of 37, she was still asking bitterly, in a fragment of a novel which she called
Cassandra
, ‘Why have women
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passion, intellect, moral activity – these three – and a place in
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society where no one of the three can be exercised?’

Her life changed when, in 1853, her father decided, against his wife’s strongly expressed wishes, to allow Florence £500 a year. She was finally freed from domestic tyranny, and in August of that year, she became resident superintendent of the Invalid Gentlewoman’s Institution in Harley Street. She had already determinedly set about learning everything she could about nursing, and regularly rose at dawn to study Government Blue Books, though she was still occasionally plagued by worries about whether it was ‘unsuitable and unbecoming’ for a woman to devote herself to ‘works of charity in hospitals and elsewhere’. In 1854 she worked at the Middlesex Hospital in London during an outbreak of cholera.

Nightingale had established enough of a reputation to be invited to go to Scutari with a group of nurses during the Crimean War; she soon became a national heroine. Ironically, at the time she was hailed, 50

4. Florence Nightingale was a national heroine – the ‘Lady with the Lamp’ – often, as here, celebrated
for her compassion and womanly tenderness towards the wounded soldiers in the Crimea, rather than
for her truly remarkable talent for administration and organization.

sentimentally, as a truly ‘feminine’ woman – indeed, a ministering angel – who had renounced a life of luxury and high fashion to bring comfort to wounded soldiers in the Crimea. Images of the ‘Lady with the Lamp’ were widely circulated, icons that celebrated her compassion, but also her delicate refinement, her gentility, and her ladylike grace. Nightingale certainly had great concern for her patients and sympathy with the ordinary soldier. But her greatest contribution, perhaps, lay in the fact that she was such a superbly efficient and clear-headed administrator. ‘I am now clothing the British army’, she wrote at the time, ‘I am really cook, housekeeper, scavenger . . . washerwoman, general dealer, storekeeper.’ The years during and following the Crimean War were undoubtedly the most satisfying, in every way the happiest, period of her life.

For she refused to stop when the war ended, instead undertaking an ambitious investigation into the health of the British Army. When, later in her life, she retired to bed for long periods – a habit that made a parody of fashionably ‘feminine’ fragility – it was simply in
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order to have time to work more effectively, undisturbed by the
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demands of her mother and sister. She remains an intriguing paradox: on the surface, and by reputation, the archetype of

‘feminine’ self-sacrifice and devotion to others; in fact, a model of determined, even heroic, self-assertion, who opened up the possibilities available to women. Her example certainly helped to make acceptable the idea of a woman training for some specific occupation, and working outside the home or the family business.

Harriet Martineau, too, insisted that her defence of women was impersonal and rational. Martineau, who dismissed Mary Wollstonecraft as actually harmful to the cause of women, saw herself as an educator. Her first book,
Illustrations of Political
Economy
, appeared in 1832 when she was 30, an unknown provincial. It did well, and she became a widely read journalist who specialized in popularizing economic and social theory. Having travelled in the United States and worked there with Abolitionists, Martineau applied their arguments about slaves to women: 52

justice is denied on no better plea than the right of the strongest. In both cases the acquiescence of the many and the burning discontent of the few of the oppressed, testify, the one to the actual degradation of the class, and the other to its fitness for the enjoyment of human rights.

At the same time, she consistently, and perhaps short-sightedly, refused to support ‘the cause of women’, arguing that ‘women, like men, must obtain whatever they show themselves fit for’. After
Society in America
was published, dozens of women wrote to her complaining of how the ‘law and custom’ of England oppressed them and asked for help in changing things; others offered ‘money, effort, courage in enduring obloquy’ if she would offer advice.

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But throughout, Martineau nervously shied away from overt emotion. She was deeply unsympathetic to a woman like Caroline Norton, whose exposure of her personal problems in an attempt to change marriage laws, Martineau felt, ‘violates all decency’.

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However, unexpectedly and touchingly, some of her surviving
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letters to her mother suggest real anxiety about her own choice of an independent life.

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I fully expect that both you and I shall occasionally feel as if I did not
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discharge a daughter’s duty, but we shall both remind ourselves that I am now as much a citizen of the world as any professional
son
of yours could be. My hours of solitary work and of visiting will leave you much to yourself.

Understandably, perhaps, she never fully came to terms with this conflict between her own ambition and the current ideal of proper feminine behaviour. When she was 35, Martineau was offered the editorship of a new economics periodical, which would have meant money, prestige, and have been the culmination of her own ambitions, and of her hopes for women. She dithered, until a disapproving letter arrived from her brother James, and – obviously half-relieved – she turned the opportunity down. Instead, she wrote 53