Women, Resistance and Revolution (4 page)

Feminist literature of this kind penetrated England during the Commonwealth and contributed to the secularization of ideas about emancipation. By the late seventeenth century, on the ‘authority’ of reason and ‘good sense’ the case that a woman was ‘as good as the Man’
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was being argued. The justification for women’s rights was no longer that of being God’s handmaidens or daughters of Jael but the demand to make women reasonable beings. The nature of reasonableness in a woman was still often complementary. Defoe argued they should become fit companions for their men.

In a period when a man’s value was becoming the price his wits fetched him on the open market, a woman’s value was harder to measure. Restrained from competing on the work market she was
expected to do her business on the sex market. She could either take her wares to the exchange, protected by a marriage settlement, or she could play her stock on the kerb with Moll Flanders. Like other commodities women were subject to the flux of trade and governed by laws of supply and demand. A character in Steele’s
The Tender Husband
rates a woman at her selling price. ‘Ah but Brother you rate her too high. The war has fetched down the Price of Women. The whole Nation is overrun with Petticoats, our Daughters die upon our Hands … Girls are Drugs, Sir, mere Drugs.’
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Just as they invested their capital in land the new accumulators put their money into women. The marriage settlement spiralled in the early eighteenth century. A family of daughters could cripple a small landowner who had made his money in the City. In the sale of daughters and the resistance which built up against it, two concepts of the family jostled one another. One came from the world of great estate where marriage was a matter of convenience; the other from the puritanism of little people now grown big and complacent. Equally contradictory notions conflicted about the worth of individual human beings. One asserted an innate value and dignity, another measured it more neatly in terms of capital, either in the form of land or stocks. But the most crucial factor in deciding the peculiar helplessness of women was the exclusion of the privileged from production. As bourgeois man justified himself through work, asserting his own industry and usefulness against the idea of aristocratic leisure, his woman’s life was becoming increasingly useless. Bourgeois women did not make capitalism, they merely attached themselves to its makers and lived off their man’s activity. Their dowry helped him to accumulate. Their bodies served him as ornament, toy, and mirror. Women were for relaxation.

An elaborate mythology evolved round natural feminine uselessness. The helplessness, frivolity, illogicality of female creatures was put about. A kindly paternalism cloaked women’s real powerlessness. Their masters kindly protected them for their own good. They were far too weak to face the harsh, competitive world of early capitalism. In Lord Chesterfield’s words, women were but ‘children of a larger growth’. Confronting a world which made a mockery of kindliness men exercised their generosity on pets at home. Women’s dependence provided the possibility of virtue and well-being. They became the objects of a frustrated humanity, and in the process they were
deprived of the exercise of the independent human-selfness the men were claiming for themselves.

There were other aspects to this. In pornography, which in the eighteenth century expressed an unrestrained sexuality, or nature, breaking through every social convention, despising the sanctity of religion, the family, and political order, men treated women as objects in a rather different way. Pornography depends on a relationship between human beings which of necessity denies human response in the object of desire. In the eighteenth century it represented a retreat for the upper-class man from a growing self-consciousness, a search for the absolute feeling self in the absolute unfeeling thing. It was associated with a particular form of anarcho-sadistic individualism which had a curious relationship to the orderly individualism of capitalist accumulation. Its connection with nature, anarchy, energy, destruction made it apparently most threatening to bourgeois sensibility. It quite explicitly denied the concept of inviolability. It belonged to the feckless aristocrat or to the déclassé demagogue who tickled the fancy of the mob and the inferior sort of people rather than appealing to the interests of the middling people. In France there was a correlation in bourgeois intellectual groupings between opposition to
Ecole des Filles
, a seventeenth-century pornographic work, and support for the American War of Independence. Later de Sade’s career is illustrative of a similar opposition. In fact though, while admitting the reality of violent human emotion, destruction and the desire to experience pain, pornography only expressed this at the level of fantasy. It challenged the hypocrisy of the bourgeois in regarding selfishness and the power to dominate others as the most essential features of manhood while taming them in the service of industry and family stability. But it never challenged selfishness or domination as the basis of sexual relations. How could it? Pornography itself would have been called into question if women had quite consciously participated. If women were explicitly and independently enjoying themselves, most of the paraphernalia of domination would dissolve. Not surprisingly, eighteenth-century pornography favours virgins. They were at an obvious disadvantage. Not surprisingly too the first recorded use of the word ‘nymphomania’ is in 1775. The frantic clitoris must be subdued, tamed, disciplined, taught to know its own presumption.

The vast majority of women, however, qualified for neither protection
nor pornography. For them contempt went unmasked and undisguised. It was quite complacently assumed that the hardest drudgery and the lowest paid work should be reserved for the women of the poor. The ‘value’ of the woman was thus delicately adjusted to the ‘value’ of the man.

As yet nobody argued for most women. But serious and thoughtful men and women questioned morally the worthlessness of the lives of privileged women. Fénelon in France had dreamed of preparing young girls of good families to earn their living. Mary Astell in her
A Serious Proposal to the ladies
in 1694 asked them, ‘How can you be content to be in the world like Tulips in a garden, to make a fine show and be good for nothing?’
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She gathered round her a group of the most privileged women who supported her ideal for a female academy. The idea of becoming something, of having your own calling to your name, was well suited to the development of capitalism. But access to this new world of activity was barred for women of the upper classes. Education became consequently the focus of emancipation. It was the means of making a new woman. ‘Had we the same literature, they would find our brains as fruitful as our bodies.’
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This was to be a recurring theme in feminism. The exclusion from education provided an explanation of women’s subordination adequate to the needs of privileged women. Access to knowledge and training was the obvious means of overcoming this. It opened the way into the closed outside world of male domination.

Because they met with resistance not only from men but from other women, the thwarted aspirations of the early feminists to compete with bourgeois man held a more generous radical impulse than the values of their men and intimated common cause with the downtrodden. Though this was still restricted to moral observation, in no sense were they equipped to emerge for practical action. A feminist
movement
at this stage would have been inconceivable. But Mary Astell’s comment, ‘To plead for the weak … seemed a generous undertaking’,
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was an early hint of the tendency in feminist thinking which later was to connect the liberation of women with the liberation of all people, and this strain in feminism was to conflict eventually with the emphasis upon absorption of a limited number of privileged women into the existing state of society.

Having confronted the fact of their exclusion the question was who was responsible for it? By the early eighteenth century another
current entered feminism – contempt for the male. ‘Sophia’ writing in 1739 used the authority of reason in an insolent manner, ‘We have reason and thanks to it we can see that men are brutes.’
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Observing bourgeois man they criticized what they saw and generalized his characteristics into a statement about men in general. Why should women take such beings as men as their criteria of what they could become? Why shouldn’t they make their own criteria? Weren’t men after all either fools or hypocrites? Didn’t they all lie to women with their promises? Where was real feeling, real charity, real nobility, in these money grubbers with their pompous screen of morality? Many women who had acquired literacy and ‘accomplishments’ at the female academies, who had time on their hands, must have wondered sometimes about matters they had been taught to take for granted. Why were the terms of the contract so unequal? Why was inviolability so essential in one partner and irrelevant in the other? Who decided the forms of the contract originally? What was the relationship between woman’s chastity and the security of property? Didn’t the individual woman have a right to choose her husband in opposition to the ties of kin which maintained family aggrandizement by property marriage? The old puritan notion of the right to dispose of your own person as you will resurrected itself. Innocent heroines started to demand innocence in men. It was their way of claiming equality. What was right for the woman must be right for the man (though sometimes they were content simply to domesticate a rake). All these dilemmas appear in contemporary novels read avidly by literate if ill-educated women.

Richardson’s book
Clarissa Harlowe
marks a further stage in this moral disaffection. Clarissa resists an arranged marriage, remains ‘pure’ despite being raped, and is able to extend her experience with the generalized reflection on ‘one half of humanity tormenting the other and being tormented themselves in tormenting’. It was not only that woman was humiliated and oppressed; man in being compelled to act the brute lost his true manhood. Feminism becomes not just the assertion of a new hope for women, it carries hope of a new kind of world for human beings. But Clarissa can only conceive her situation as tragic irony. Women could still only lament an apparently unalterable state of affairs and hope for improvement. There is no recourse for Clarissa in the outside world, no way of challenging the basis of the alien and externally imposed ‘morality’. She has only
the inner voice. All she can do is transcend her situation spiritually. She is forced to fight her family and Lovelace, because they cannot allow her freedom without destroying something essential to themselves. Clarissa as yet had no way out, there was no social solution to her dilemma – though a woman corresponding with Richardson pointed out some of the radical implications of his story. Lady Bradsheigh declared the laws of society were made by men ‘to justify their tyranny’
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and argued for equality in personal relationships.

The temptation to accommodate rather than resist was strong. Some women used learning to find a privileged niche for themselves. Although some of these educated women, the original ‘blue stockings’, contributed to early feminist thinking, others were extremely hostile to the aspirations of other women. They enjoyed male respect and patronage in the little world of the salon. Their situation resembled that of the mulatto servant in slave society, aspiring only to be a sub-white, and thus enjoying the protection of whites. He let her into his castle but only because he could trust her not to give the key away. Mrs Barbauld, one of the blue stockings, advised women, ‘Your best, your sweetest empire is to please.’
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For the vast majority of women there was little chance either to reason or to please to any advantage. Their history is still almost unknown. They have been regarded as static unchanging factors, as part of the background, as completely passive. They were not in fact submissive. But their resistance erupted in crime or sexual ‘immorality’ almost synonymous in the eyes of their betters. The revolt against ‘their’ world was a personal one, the attempt to shift for yourself as best you could in painfully narrow confines: stubborn women continually claiming relief from the old Poor Law, returning infected with venereal disease, coming to have their child on the parish, driven out of town to give birth under the hedges or in the removal cart. Collectively their protest is registered in the eighteenth-century food riot, the traditional manner in which the poor tried to reassert a pre-capitalist moral economy which placed need before profit, and the old community against the new state. The close connection of women to consumption meant that they figured prominently in these riots. Within this narrow necessity few had the leisure to muse on masculine superiority. Nor was this superiority evident in their men’s relation to them, except in their physical strength. Their resistances were defences against new kinds of industry and
trade, they were completely unconnected with the feminist consciousness developing in a small circle of privileged women. The demands for education or the right to be useful were nonsensical in the situation of the poor woman. More likely she would identify her interest as the encouragement of her man in precisely the virtues capitalism was concerned to develop amongst its labour force, sobriety, thrift, regular work patterns, the abandonment of Saint Monday as a ‘Fuddling Day’. A Sheffield cutler’s wife upbraids her husband at the end of the eighteenth century:

Damn thee, Jack, I’ll dust thy eyes up,

Thou leads a plaguy drunken life;

Here thou sits instead of working