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February 3 - February 3, 2021
‘I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is’, the writer Rebecca West remarked, sardonically, in 1913. ‘I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute.’
in England, right up until the 1960s at least, the word ‘feminist’ was usually pejorative.
how often, still, do we hear women anxiously asserting ‘I’m not a feminist but …’ as they go on to make claims that depend upon, and would be impossible without, a feminist groundwork?
‘the feminist’ is now the name given to the disliked or despised woman, much as ‘man-hater’ or ‘castrating bitch’, ‘harridan’ or ‘witch’, were used before the 1960s.
By the late 16th century, increasing numbers of women were beginning to argue their case more consistently and more aggressively, though still within a religious framework.
But any woman wanting to defend her sex had to tackle powerfully negative scriptural images of women: Delilah was treacherous, Jezebel murderous, while Eve was directly responsible for the Fall of the human race: ‘the woman tempted him and he did eat’.
Brownists, Independents, Baptists, Millenarians, Familists, Quakers, Seekers, Ranters. Whatever their theological differences, they all believed the necessity for spiritual regeneration in every individual.
The appeal to divine inspiration was probably of limited value as a means of female emancipation; the feminism of the future would depend less on the assertion of women’s spiritual equality and more on natural rights, and a denial that there is any intellectual difference between the sexes.
But ‘what poor Woman is ever taught that she should have a higher Design than to get her a Husband?’ she asked in her 1700 book Some Reflections Upon Marriage
the central importance of modesty, which was often used as a polite synonym for chastity.
Macaulay also attacked the sexual double standard, insisting that a single sexual experience does not transform a virgin into a wanton.
Taught from their infancy that beauty is a woman’s sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adore its prison.
Moreover, she added, all the women she knew who had acted like rational creatures, or shown any vigour of intellect, had accidentally been allowed to run wild as children.
Like man, she is subject to the law, and may be accused and tried according to the law. But that means that woman must also be granted an equal responsibility for public life and in decisions about law and taxation;
Any woman who tries to act like a human being, Wollstonecraft remarks, risks being labelled ‘masculine’, and she admits that the fear of being thought unwomanly runs very deep in her sex.
It is interesting, and rather sad, that other women – even some highly literate ones – were among Wollstonecraft’s sharpest critics.
it is in part Wollstonecraft’s inconsistencies, her implicit recognition that there are no easy solutions to the problems she explores, that make her such an enduringly interesting writer.
In 1843, a married woman, Marion Reid, had published in Edinburgh A Plea for Women,
In what was, for the times, her most radical argument, Reid asserts that ‘womanliness’ is quite compatible with voting.
In 1869 John Stuart Mill published The Subjection of Women, which also argued that the subordination of women was both wrong and ‘one of the chief hindrances to human improvement’.
What we presently call womanliness is something artificial, ‘the result of forced repression in some directions, unnatural stimulations in others’.
In an ideal world, Mill believed, men and women would resemble each other: men would be more unselfish, and women would be free of the ‘exaggerated self-abnegation’ expected of them.
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.
Charlotte Brontë, for example, when she married not long before she died, discovered that her husband owned the copyright to her novels,
Florence Nightingale was another remarkable woman who flatly refused to be associated with the emerging women’s movement,
‘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’.
Ironically, at the time she was hailed, 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
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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.
Mrs Gaskell’s heroines all want, however vaguely, something more than convention allows them. Mary Ann Evans – who, interestingly, wrote as George Eliot – explores the often difficult relations between brother and sister in The Mill on the Floss (1860). In Middlemarch (1871–2), the intelligent, idealistic Dorothea, seeking to devote her life to something – or someone – worthy, is soon trapped in a miserable marriage. Though she finally achieves happiness of a kind with another man, she feels that there was something better that she might have done. George Meredith’s The Egoist (1871) is a
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The women came together, in part, as a reaction against what seemed to be a narrowing definition of ‘femininity’ and an increasingly conventional and constricting notion of a proper ‘womanly sphere’. A Victorian woman’s highest virtue seems to have been nervously, if frequently, equated with genteel passivity.
Mary Ann Evans – George Eliot – despite her remarkable understanding in Middlemarch (1871–2) of the way a woman’s intelligence and talents may be denied an adequate outlet, and despite the fact that she became a close friend and supporter of Barbara Leigh Smith, remarked in 1853 that ‘woman does not yet deserve a better lot than man gives her’.
‘It is no wonder,’ the young Davies wrote, ‘that people who have not learned to do anything cannot find anything to do’.
Josephine Butler and her rapidly growing band of highly respectable supporters soon became a remarkably effective pressure group; their campaign exposed, dramatically, a brutal double sexual standard that long custom had made virtually invisible.
women – as well as a few male champions like Thompson and Mill – had been arguing for votes for women all through the century;
In the course of the 19th century, the vote gradually became central to feminist demands. It was seen as important both symbolically (as a recognition of women’s rights to full citizenship) and practically (as a necessary way of furthering reforms and making practical changes in women’s lives).
The petitioner, Hunt pointed out, paid taxes like any man; moreover, since women could be punished at law, they should be given a voice in the making of laws, as well as the right to serve on juries.
Queen Victoria was sometimes hailed by suffragists as an example of what a woman was capable of; Barbara Leigh Smith, for example, pointed out that ‘our gracious Queen fulfils the very arduous duties of her calling and manages also to be the mother of many children’. But Victoria notoriously exclaimed in horror against the ‘mad wicked folly of women’s rights’.
In New Zealand, women could vote from 1893; in Australia, state after state granted women the vote during the 1890s, until in 1902 women could finally vote in Federal elections. A conservative (male) professor remarked, darkly, in 1904, that ‘I think Australia is doomed’. (On the other hand, Australian Aboriginals, male or female, could not vote until the late 1960s.) In America, the states, one by one, enfranchised white women; by 1914, women could vote in 11 states, though they had to wait until 1919 for the national vote. Denmark enfranchised women in 1915, and the Netherlands in 1919.
The term ‘suffragette’ was coined in 1906 by the Daily Mail; it was a derogatory label that the growing militant movement adopted as their own and transformed.
By the early 1870s, a few women were taking the idea of ‘no taxation without representation’ literally, and refusing to pay.
1903, when the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) was founded by the Pankhurst family.
Mrs Emmeline Pankhurst had served as a Poor Law Guardian, and had remarked that ‘though I had been a suffragist before I now began to think about the vote in women’s hands not only as a right, but as a desperate necessity’.
The suffragettes began by heckling politicians at public meetings; they moved on to organizing their own mass meetings and processions. From the start, they displayed a remarkable instinct for the propaganda effects of spectacle; they rapidly became adept at making their points visually and dramatically. There were mass marches through the streets and demonstrations outside the Albert Hall, in Hyde Park: these public gatherings of women were, in Edwardian London, startling enough by themselves.
Cat and Mouse Act (relating to the release then re-arrest of hunger strikers from prison),
As early as 1908, suffragettes who had been imprisoned for some form of direct or violent action had begun protesting against the authorities by going on hunger strikes.
The passage of the Prisoners’ Temporary Discharge Bill, popularly know as the Cat and Mouse Act, aroused great controversy: women were released from prison until they recovered their health, at which point they were re-arrested.
In 1918, women over the age of 30 were given the vote; and in March 1928, under a Conservative government, they finally won it on equal terms with men.
in the war years, the number of women employed outside the home rose by well over a million. Some worked in munitions factories and engineering works, others were employed in hospitals; many demanded pay rises, sometimes insisting their wages should be equal to men’s.
In 1919 and 1920, two women – the Conservative Lady Astor and the Liberal Margaret Wintringham – succeeded to their husbands’ seats.
In 1919, the Sex Discrimination (Removal) Act, in theory at least, opened the professions and the civil service to women.
