Women, Resistance and Revolution (2 page)

Beginnings are hard to find. People don’t see themselves as beginners. How are they to know what comes ahead? They can see behind them not in front. There is no ‘beginning’ of feminism in the sense that there is no beginning to defiance in women. But there is a beginning
of feminist possibility – even before it is conceived as such. Female resistance has taken several historical shapes.

‘You have stepped out of your place,’ the Calvinist church fathers in the Massachusetts Bay colony told Anne Hutchison in the mid-seventeenth century. ‘You have rather been a husband than a wife, and a preacher than a hearer, and a magistrate than a subject, and so you have thought to carry all things in Church and Commonwealth as you would and have not been humbled for it.’
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They worked hard at humbling her. She had gathered round her a group of followers, mostly women. They met together and Anne Hutchison preached on texts, criticized some of the ministers, and became respected for her knowledge of scripture and of healing herbs. She believed every individual should aspire to direct communion with God and that God dwelt in every human being. She upset Calvinist dogma, political differentiation, and masculine superiority. She was accordingly tried by both civil and religious authority. Pregnant and ill, at one stage while she was being questioned she almost collapsed, but they wouldn’t let her sit down. The governor of the colony merely noted tersely in his record of the trial: ‘Her countenance disclosed some bodily infirmity.’ Finally she faltered and confessed to heresy. But they were still not satisfied. ‘Her repentance is not in her countenance.’ She was banished from the colony. Her fearlessness, her knowledge of scripture, her eloquence infuriated them all the more because she was a woman.

Anne Hutchison was not alone in her insubordination; Richard Hubberthorne, a Quaker, was a more tolerant man than the governor of Massachusetts Bay in the 1650s. But the most tolerant of men know where to draw the line. Travelling through England Richard drew it rather firmly when he encountered Mildred, one of the group called ranters who emphasized uncompromisingly the direct communion of true believers to God. He called her ‘an impudent lass that said she was above the apostles’.
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It is apparent that Anne and Mildred were far from being the first women to question their place in the world and aspire to something better. However, the context and language in which they expressed their aspirations represented the beginning of completely new ways of proceeding. Ideas of insubordination fell on fertile ground in the seventeenth century. People were finding new footholds and climbing at a great pace. Puritanism could give their presumption a
justification and confidence which made it much more dangerous to all those who cherished the established state of things. Time and industry appeared every day to produce new knowledge, Jonah came crying out of the belly of the whale – Nature, Reason, Justice, Rights, Liberty, Property and Freedom! There were changes in the organization of work, in the scope of trade, in the rhythm of industry. There was a protracted struggle in parliament, a civil war, a series of republican experiments. People used old principles only to find them transformed by touching this impatient reality. Anne and Mildred were just part of a much wider revolution. The growth of early capitalism, of puritanism and of new ideas of reason and science caused people to see many questions in a new light. This was true not only of religious and political ideas of order and unity, of economic ideas about poverty and idleness; it also allowed the expression of doubt about the nature of relationships between men and women, parents and children, the family and society, which the Aristotelean and Old Testament traditions had kept buried for centuries. The fact of revolution gave them a new authority. While a succession of heresies had challenged the hierarchy of clearly defined authorities – God, king, priest, husband, father, master – they had never presumed legitimacy before. They had lurked only in by-ways, murmured in taverns, whipped the crowd up at fairs, crept slyly into the universities, been defrocked, sought communion with nature, heard the music of the spheres, worshipped the sun, pursued the millennium and been hanged, drawn and quartered or burned at the stake for prophesying the possibility of heaven on earth.

Now the prophets of heaven had emerged, tempered, stern, serious and bitter, killed a king and set themselves up as the rightful government of the Commonwealth, thus upsetting the establishment and certainty of order, subordination and authority for ever. They provided the prophetesses with an amazing justification for impudence. Thus, just when the ground was being taken from under everyone’s feet and a man needed a bit of peace and privacy in his own home, who should start spouting texts and interpreting God’s word but the women. This seemed a preposterous and unnatural development to the man. Women’s subordination was apparently part of the immutable order of things. It was well known that with a woman, a dog and a walnut tree, the more you beat ’em the better they be. Equally ‘natural’ was the duplicity of women. According to proverbial wisdom
they were saints in the church, angels in the streets, devils in the kitchen and apes in bed. Sexual ‘greediness’ was a common theme in seventeenth-century drama. The preachers warned men to take heed of young women and of prophetesses. Sexuality and female theorizing combined dangerously.

There had been impudence before. The difference was that now people seemed to be acting on it. Within medieval society there had been isolated social and political rebellion, but it had proved capable always of containing discontent and absorbing the restless in the old order of things. The effect of the puritan revolution is sometimes discussed in terms of whether it made life ‘better’ for women. This is a confusion. It is not so much that it made it ‘better’ but that it made it different, and the effects of change were felt differently by women of various classes. Feudalism and Catholicism circumscribed possibility. The life of the peasant woman consumed in labour or child-bearing, with few rights over her property or person, did not lend itself to free inquiry. Perhaps she might escape, but only to join the travelling flocks of whores who accompanied the medieval armies. An adventurous life, but uncertain and perilous, where her main preoccupation would be disease, and where death hung about her like a proprietor.

But even the aristocratic woman, whose life was not so close to necessity, was simply passed from father to husband, the land she brought was more important than her feelings, and her ‘right’ to say what she wanted went unconsidered. She came into her own a little if she was widowed, because she had property. Widows were notorious for their ambition towards independence and their lascivious delight in young husbands. But these privileged women were unlikely to make their subordination a matter for confrontation. First, there were too many retreats for them, comfortable pockets and pouches where they could lead a respected if restricted life. Second, their powerlessness was masked in elaborate ceremony and ritual which paid them court and gave them the sense of being venerated. Third, there was little in the intellectual world of the Catholic Church which could give them the means of challenging the way things had apparently always been. Rather than conflicting with masculine versions of their nature and situation, these women accepted the circumscribed dignity and security of the nunnery or the court. Sheltering behind the nun’s habit, or perhaps the elaborate
homage of courtly love, they evaded realization of their own powerlessness. It was as well, as they had little means of effecting material change, and the suffering would have been too great to bear. At one side there is the elevation and formalization of woman as the object of sublimated sensuality, at the other there is the constant religious malediction of the lewdness of woman. When Joan heard her voices and led an army they burned her for her pains. Christine de Pisan led no army. She simply said drily of the view of women in
Roman de la Rose
, the manifesto of courtly love, that it was not the women who had written the books. She had no army or popular following and was treated more gently.

Where could an alternative conception of women’s potentiality take root? Female inferiority could be upheld within medieval Christianity by the persistent connection to animality, which Eve was held to represent, and hence with baseness. Only when she remained physically unfulfilled was the woman worthy of worship. Respect was due to the Virgin, but to man belonged the higher world of the spirit. Some medieval scholars even wondered if women had an immortal soul. Women meanwhile made their own clearings and lived as best they could. Catholicism had a way of accommodating the tortured psyche. Margery Kempe, a fourteenth-century mystic, saw devils after a difficult childbirth, communed with heaven, and subsequently ‘… never desired to commune fleshly with her husband, for the debt of matrimony was so abominable to her that she would rather have eaten or drunk the ooze and muck from the gutter than consent to any fleshly communing save only for obedience’.
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Released from her husband, after a brief theological commotion with the local bishops, she proved her orthodoxy and became a wandering preacher, and was respected for her saintliness.

An impetus towards feminism came with the renaissance cult of the woman of poise, grace, beauty, wit and erudition. Renaissance writers envisaged a wider, more humane education for the girls of the aristocracy. This only affected the fortunate few, but it established the themes of education and emancipation, which were to be crucial demands of feminism. More explosive, and provoking more repression at the time, was the relationship of women to the numerous heresies, millenarian and otherwise. There was much confusion in the fervent imaginings of heretical doctrine on the nature and position of women. They at once denied the flesh, and demanded its
fullest expression for the faithful, were deeply suspicious of women, but allowed them equal status as believers. This ambiguity, which heresy repeatedly emphasized, at source, was a dilemma within Christianity – rejection of direct experience for trust of the will in certain revealed propositions about God. The natural universe was associated with pain and peril. The church was rock and security. Defence of the church was essential. Outside was unknown, pagan, uncivilized, animal, spontaneous, dangerous. In love-making as in the extremes of religious ecstasy human beings encountered this beyond. Here individual isolation in its moment of absolute intensity broke out of itself to be at one with the self beyond. Man interpreted the world and identified woman with experience beyond the boundaries. For him she came to represent the nature he feared. She gave birth, she was fertility. But the man who was called heretic, who had to define himself in opposition to authoritatively received truth, was in a peculiarly uncertain no-man’s-land. Just as homosexuality, or stepping out of ‘manliness’, was continually connected by opponents to doctrinal aberration, orgiastic sensuality and ascetic devotion were also associated with heresy. It was the fear of extreme emotional experience where pleasure and pain interpenetrated, and His body was commonly accessible to the unlearned, ignoble, impure. The heretic displayed a consequent nervousness towards women and found support in the Bible. However, despite the distrust of female sexuality, despite the narrow scope the sect offered them, heresy proved consistently popular with a section of medieval women. These were women in the growing towns, freed from constant labour but not admitted to the privileges of convent or court. They found in the heretical sect an important outlet, emotional, intellectual and otherwise, which they could not find elsewhere. Originally attracting many unmarried women and widows in the upper strata of urban society, they proved increasingly popular with the wives of small merchants and artisans and it was their popular character as much as their theological content that upset the orthodox powers. The two aspects of the pre-puritan religious sect appear in English Lollardy. Women drummed Lollard preachers who denounced female concupiscence out of town, but the wives and daughters of early ‘protestants’ were reading the newly printed English Bible for themselves and interpreting texts.

Female preachers and martyrs figured prominently in the heretical
sects. Not surprisingly women messiahs appeared to claim the millennium for femininity. The ‘beginnings’ of feminism could perhaps be located not with Anne and Mildred but with Guillemine of Bohemia at the end of the thirteenth century, who, believing that the work of redemption had not been accomplished by Christ for women, and that Eve had yet to be saved, created round her a woman’s church which attracted women of the people as well as the wives of the upper bourgeoisie and the aristocracy. The sect she left was denounced by the Inquisition in the early fourteenth century. This feminist impetus which called into question woman’s part in nature, which conceived of her in direct communion with God, and gave her the authority of interpretation and the responsibility of prophecy, was to develop into another tendency in the liberation of women. Secularized later it resulted in startling conceptions which abolished God and replaced him with Love.

By the sixteenth century the traditional retreats are becoming blocked. Clearings become hard to find. Religious and secular authorities had become increasingly bureaucratic and were less able to allow for mystical eccentricity. In England the closing down of religious houses meant the convent was no longer possible. Alarm at urban growth, the insecurity of the woollen industry, fear of social upheaval and vagabondage made the lives of would-be Margery Kempes hazardous. As the pattern of industry changed men looked jealously at the traditional women’s trades. The wife of Bath would have had a rough time of it competing with men in the sixteenth century. The break up of agricultural communities meant that the tolerance in the countryside of pre-marital sex, as long as a couple was later secured by the church sacrament, was replaced by a new intransigence towards women’s sexuality. Unwanted children in the town meant money and trouble.