As this suggests, the tendency to overstate the extent to which all men are alike (in contrast to women) and all women are alike (in contradistinction to men) also ignores the substantial variations that have always existed within each sex. For there have always been many different, simultaneous versions of femininity, ways of presenting and representing oneself as a woman, and they are often defined against those of other women rather than against those of men (as, for instance, in the case of sexual orientation); by the same token, there have always been many different variants of masculinity and ways of presenting and representing oneself as a man, which are likewise often defined against those of other men rather than against those of women (as, again, in the case of sexual orientation).65 There are, in short, multiple femininities, as well as multiple masculinities, which means, as the historian Alexandra Shepard observes, that we need to appreciate “the multifaceted nature of gender identities,” which go substantially “beyond the binary opposition of men and women.… To discern the full complexities of the workings of gender in any society, we need to be as aware of the gender differences within each sex as those between them.” We need to understand that despite the Bible or Thomas Paine or John Gray, gender is not exclusively a male-female dichotomy.66
Such differences within each sex are well documented among the men and women of the Middle Ages. In a classic essay, Eileen Power argued that all medieval women were “Christian wives,” but she also admitted that they were divided by class and geography into feudal ladies, townswomen, or countrywomen, and were also differentiated in many other ways. For example, their marital status varied over time: some passed their entire lives as single women, some married so young that they spent their adult lives as wives, some lost husbands so early that their lives were mostly shaped by widowhood, and some passed slowly through all three stages. Religious status also cut across many lines, not just in terms of Christian, Muslim, and Jewish identities, but also because there were laywomen, professed nuns, pious mystics, true believers, or heretics. Legal status incised deep divides too, differentiating free from serf, and serf from slave; so did ethnicity, locality, and sexual orientation.67 The same was true regarding the varied gendered identities and plural masculinities of medieval men, and many of their distinctions revolve around the same axes as those of women, namely age, class, marital status, religion, legal status, ethnicity, locality, and sexual orientation. An elderly, peace-loving, celibate monk was a very different version of masculinity than a young, aggressive warrior who was also a sexual predator. All this made for a bewildering array of different forms of masculinity and femininity, a reality often in sharp contrast to single, divinely sanctioned polarity between the two sexes on which most medieval writers insisted.68
The same ambiguities hold in the early modern period, during which those distinct and monolithic categories of men and women were repeatedly broken down, disarranged, overlain, and undermined by the competing differentials of age, marital status, material resources, religious conviction, legal position, language, region, and sexual preference; and they were further complicated by differing modes of conduct and behavior, for there were many ways of fashioning and conducting oneself as an early modern man or woman. By the end of the eighteenth century, there were fewer nuns, mystics, and witches than at the beginning of the sixteenth, and there were more women teachers, writers, and governesses. There were also mistresses, harlots, and unmarried mothers, and there were pious evangelical women.69 In the same way, there were many different archetypes of early modern masculinity, ranging from youthful misrule to aged dependency. Some men expressed their maleness by being self-consciously strong, courageous, prudent, and reasonable, and by embracing appropriate religions and employment and wives; others did so by being self-indulgent, profligate, spendthrift, drunk, disorderly, even violent. The social practices of manhood and womanhood were thus “enormously diverse,” destabilizing the rigid male-female dichotomy by means of a multiplicity of early modern gender identities.70
By the nineteenth century, the alleged polarity between the sexes had been further broken down under the impact of urbanization and industrialization. It was, for example, not the case that all men were for production while all women were for reproduction. Many working-class men were frequently out of work during economic downturns, or were only casual laborers, or unfit to do a job owing to illness, injury, or old age. Most middle-class men, whether in business or as professionals, did not produce anything, while many gentry and aristocrats did not work with their hands. By contrast, many women not only bore children but also worked, even joining trade unions, while (as always) some women could not or did not have children. Nor did the nineteenth century witness an alleged hegemonic bourgeois masculinity that eventually embraced the whole male population. Some middle-class men were entrepreneurial, individualistic, and religious, but by no means all of them. On the other hand, the “strong sense of social responsibility, purpose and commitment to hard work” so often thought characteristic of Victorian middle-class men was also to be found among all classes—and in both sexes. This means it is surely right to question whether “gender trumped class as the basis of social identity.”71 In truth, neither identity was all that pervasive, which means that Engels’s late-life attempt to link and conflate the two, by arguing that under capitalism all men were dominant bourgeois while all women were exploited proletarians, was unsustainable—although this would not prevent feminists such as Germaine Greer from later embracing this view.72
These many significant qualifications to humanity’s essential division into the two distinct sexes cast serious doubt on the numerous accounts based on the assumption that this is how things have always been and still are.73 The supposedly all-pervasive polarity of male and female often turns out on closer inspection to be nothing of the kind, and men and women have generally gone through life in ways at least as much dividing each sex as unifying them, and in ways at least as much uniting the two sexes as setting them in opposition to each other. It is thus scarcely surprising that the billions of men and women spread around the globe have for the most part existed inert and lifeless in their self-consciousness as males and females, embodying their sex and gender biologically and culturally “in itself,” but not energizing and mobilizing it “for itself.”74 As Simone de Beauvoir noted, women lacked “concrete means for organizing themselves into a unit which can stand face to face with the correlative unit” (by which she meant men), because they had no “solidarity of work and interest” that might have provided the sort of common and shared experience that would help them acquire a sense of shared identity.75 Only at “certain moments,” as Joan Scott observes, “have ‘women’ become consolidated as an identity group.” “The identity of women,” she goes on, “was not so much a self-evident fact of history, as it was evidence—from particular and discrete moments in time—of someone’s, some group’s effort to identify and thereby mobilize a collectivity.”76
A further barrier to the successful mobilization of women as such has been what is termed the “difference-versus-equality” dilemma.77 For if the initial presumption is of women’s essential difference from men, then what are their special needs, how should they be recognized, and how should they be met? But if the starting premise is of women’s no less essential sameness as men, then how should they set about defining and achieving the equality that is their common right, and ought to be their shared possession, as morally equivalent human beings? Across the last century and a half, women’s movements have oscillated uncertainly between what seem to be mutually exclusive approaches to their common history and identity, to their mobilizing strategies, and to their collective ambitions.78 Meanwhile, other feminists have sought a way out of this dilemma by urging the need both to recognize the differences between men and women and to achieve equality between them, with the aim of realizing a new version of common humanity, which will include happier and more fulfilled women and might also include happier and more fulfilled men.79
The “difference-versus-equality” dilemma faced by feminists has also forced a choice between alternative strategies as to how to realize either of these ends. Should women, when organized and energized to self-awareness and self-consciousness, be reformist or revolutionary? Should they seek to achieve their goals by collaboration with men, or should they preserve their gender solidarity and act entirely on their own? Are women willing to make gradual but incremental gains, with the help of men, or should they seek to usher in the feminist utopia by getting rid of patriarchy in one single, heroic, self-reliant effort? Should they want a share in what men already do and have, or should they want the true liberation that can be achieved only by creating a new postgendered world? Should women want to make capitalism work better, by getting more involved with it, or should they prefer to overthrow it in the name of a feminism that is committed to socialism? Should they wish to join the male bourgeoisie, or should they see themselves as a revolutionary female proletariat bent on eradicating it? Are the collaborationist writings of Betty Friedan or the subversive polemics of Germaine Greer the better inspiration?80 And one further question reveals the haziness of the feminist project even more forcibly: for how many women the world over, who do not belong to the well-educated and comfortably well-off Western middle class, are any of these matters of immediate and practical relevance? Who could plausibly claim to speak for them, or for women as a whole?81
CONSCIOUSNESS-RAISING AND MOBILIZATION
Movements of women mobilized to improve the position of their sex and articulate its collective identity are scarcely 150 years old. To be sure, there are occasional episodes from earlier times when some women took public affairs into their own hands and organized with demands that were specific to their sex and gender. In ancient Greece, according to Aristophanes’s play Lysistrata, they mobilized by denying their husbands and lovers sex in an effort to force them to stop fighting in the Peloponnesian War; and in ancient Rome, according to Livy and Plutarch, the Sabine women tried to keep Roman and Sabine men from killing each other. Women subsequently participated in riots across early modern Europe, but they were mainly about food, they took place in collaboration with men, and they were not specifically concerned with women’s issues or rights. Not until the French Revolution, and in part inspired by such authors as Olympe de Gouges, was there a visible flurry of political activity by groups of women with a discernible feminist agenda, who sought to advance the claims of women, or a segment of them, to greater political participation. Yet they were also divided among themselves; they spoke the language of equality but they mixed this with an awareness of biological difference; and their movement did not last long, and in the short run it achieved nothing.82
Since then, the collective mobilizations of women have been virtually confined to the Western world, generally emerging in industrialized, urbanized, and developed countries, where married and well-educated women already played a significant part in the labor force and sought to assert themselves further on the basis of rising rather than falling expectations.83 The so-called first wave of feminism that crested during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the United States, Australia and New Zealand, and much of Protestant Europe was largely reformist, and it was mainly (but not exclusively) concerned with winning legal and political rights.84 At a time when more men than ever were able to vote, extending the franchise to women was both important in itself and was also seen as the necessary precondition for further reforms. Many of the women who campaigned for the franchise were benefiting from the greater educational and career opportunities that were opening up by the final quarter of the nineteenth century, and they organized on an unprecedented scale. In 1897, more than fifty campaigning associations in England joined to form the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies. In France, all women’s groups united into a feminist council, which grew from twenty-one thousand members in 1901 to nearly one hundred thousand in 1914. The following year, the National American Woman Suffrage Association, which had been established in 1890 by merging two rival organizations, boasted two million members.85
These were large, national organizations, and the next step was to create an international women’s suffrage association. The International Council of Women was established in America in 1888 on the fortieth anniversary of the Seneca Falls Declaration, and in 1904 the International Women’s Suffrage Alliance was set up in Berlin to function as a coordinating and policymaking group, pushing national organizations toward effort and cooperation.86 For just as the campaign for women’s suffrage was both national in focus yet also international in scope, so the winning of votes for women required national legislation yet also contained an international pattern, beginning in late-nineteenth-century Australia and New Zealand, and ending on both sides of the Atlantic in the immediate aftermath of the First World War. Of all “Western” countries, New Zealand was the first to grant the vote to women in 1893, and the confederation of Australia did so from the time it was established in 1901 (though not to Aborigines). In Europe, Finland led the way by granting full female suffrage in 1909, and the rest of Scandinavia soon followed: Norway in 1913, Denmark and Iceland in 1915, and Sweden in 1921. By then, women had been given the vote in the United Kingdom and the United States, and also in many of the new nations of central Europe that were created from the ruins of the prewar German, Russian, and Austro-Hungarian empires.87
Here was a remarkable achievement, involving unprecedented numbers of women being mobilized into gender consciousness; but there were serious limitations and qualifications. Those who were campaigning for suffrage were a minority of all women, and they often disagreed on the arguments they should put forward, as they found themselves caught (for the first time, but not the last) on the horns of the “dilemma of difference.” Some suffragists campaigned for the vote on the grounds that women were the same as men and in all ways equal to them, so the extension of the franchise was a matter of universal rights and natural justice. But others contended that while women were equal to men and in no way inferior to them, they were also different, and it was that very difference which would enable them to make a unique and necessary contribution to the political life of the nation. In the United States, the concept of equal rights for men and women had been active from the time of the Seneca Falls Convention, but by the 1900s the unique qualities of women were being increasingly emphasized: “womanly women, stamping the womanliness of our nature on the country,” as one campaigner put it.88 In the United Kingdom, the arguments in favor of difference carried more weight, and most supporters of suffrage stressed the specific contributions women would make to political culture: they were domestic, and would help soften the hard masculine world of Westminster; they were more moral than men, and would elevate the substance and the tone of politics; and they were anxious about the welfare of women, children, and the poor, whose concerns they would bring before Parliament.89
There were other ways in which campaigning women disagreed. Should the vote go to single, propertied women (primarily widows and spinsters), or to all women, whether married or unmarried, propertied or propertyless? Should the means of getting the vote be gradualist, reformist, peaceful, and in collaboration with men, or (as in the case of the suffragettes in England) radical, aggressive, noncollaborationist, publicity-seeking, disruptive, even violent?90 There were other divisions concerning level of commitment, marital status, party affiliation, region, religion, employment, class, and race.91 Married women with households to run and children to bring up had less time than single and childless women. Many campaigners were liberals, but there were more conservatively inclined feminists than has often been recognized, as well as radicals drawn to the socialist parties that were expanding across much of Europe at this time.92 Moreover, many regional suffrage organizations were only loosely affiliated with their national headquarters, and were often exclusively organized around religious or professional affiliations. In Britain women campaigning for the vote tended t
o be more radical in large industrial cities like Manchester than they were in London, and a similar pattern was marked in the United States, where suffragists were more conservative in Henry James’s Boston than Edith Wharton’s New York. Cross-class alliances encompassing patrician and plutocratic ladies, middle-class graduates, and working women were always inherently unstable, while in the United States, Australia, and New Zealand there was also the vexed question of whether the vote should be extended to women of color.
But it was not just that the campaigners were divided among themselves, for while they often claimed to be advancing the cause of womankind as a whole, they could not plausibly speak on behalf of all women. Some committed feminists did not think that winning the vote was the most important matter, and they preferred to work on substantive rather than (as they saw it) symbolic issues, in particular with reforming the divorce laws (which in terms of property and procedure and child custody were strongly weighted in favor of men) or with repealing legislation concerning sexually transmitted diseases (because they made clear the connection between women’s sexual and political subordination).93 Some women were opposed to giving the vote to any members of their sex, among them Queen Victoria, who thought the whole cause of women’s rights was “mad, wicked folly”; the novelist Mrs. Humphry Ward, whose essay “An Appeal Against Female Suffrage” was signed by many prominent women; and large numbers of Catholic women, which explains why feminist movements were weak in non-Protestant countries such as France, Spain, and Italy.94 And working-class women, who often felt patronized by college-educated middle-class feminists, were more committed to the collective advancement of their class than of their gender—with getting the vote for working-class men (often still unenfranchised) than for comfortably well-off women, or in campaigning for improved pay and better working conditions.95
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