Significant Sisters

by Margaret Forster

  She gives an account in her memoirs of a friend who longed to buy a new stove to heat her house properly but did not dare to do so because she feared her husband’s anger at such expense. Elizabeth advised her to buy it when her husband was away. When her friend looked frightened and asked what she would then do when her husband came back and raged Elizabeth said, “. . . sit and gaze out of the window with that far away sad look women know so well how to effect . . . men cannot resist beauty and tears.”62 Feminine wiles, in short, were always to be kept in reserve when rational argument failed. Elizabeth Cady Stanton saw nothing inconsistent in this. “Our trouble,” she wrote, “is not our womanhood but the artificial trammels of custom under false conditions.”63 It was the conditions which must change. There was no need, in the process, to eradicate femininity. A woman was as entitled to use this as a man was to use his greater physical strength just so long as that was not all she was allowed to use. This was why the vote was so important: political responsibility must not be denied women because of their femininity. When she told her friend to use tears and sighs on the domestic front she did not mean her to use them exclusively. Tears and sighs, those cunning feminine wiles, were no good at all in weightier matters than new stoves. She only had contempt for those women who believed in exerting power over men by “managing” them in such a way.

  These women, who asserted they had all the rights they wanted and achieved what they wanted by subtly controlling men behind the scenes, earned her greatest scorn. They were, she said, “the mummies of civilisation,” exhibiting in their complacency “the strongest possible argument against it . . . a woman insensible to such indignities needs some transformation.”64 She wrote an article entirely on the subject called I Have All the Rights I Want in which she savagely exposed the wickedness as well as the folly of women who said such a thing, and she attacked, too, the idea that working for Woman’s Rights was “unfeminine”. “For those who do not understand the real objects of our conventions,” she wrote “. . . I would state that we do not meet to discuss fashions, customs or dress, the rights or duties of man, nor the propriety of the sexes changing positions but simply our own inalienable rights, our duties, our true sphere . . .”65 Any idea that Woman’s Rights supporters were either unfeminine or automatically hated men was nonsense. “I have never been a man hater,”66 she stated emphatically. It was only one of the lies people used to misrepresent the entire movement.

  Elizabeth Cady Stanton had a very clear idea of what might happen to the history of the movement she belonged to. Misrepresentation was only one of the problems. It was more than likely that no accurate account of what had happened would survive. Because of this she sat down in 1880 and embarked on The History of Woman Suffrage with the help of Susan Anthony and Matilda Gage. It was a measure of her confidence that one day suffrage would be granted and, when it was, women would want to know how. She and Susan were determined to provide a record. “My large room with a bay window is the literary workshop,” she wrote. “In the middle is a big library table and there Susan and I sit vis-à-vis, laughing, talking, squabbling day in and day out, buried in illegible manuscripts, old newspapers and reams of yellow sheets. We have the sun pouring in on all sides and a bright wood fire in the grate while a beautiful bouquet of nasturtiums of every colour stands on the table with a dish of grapes and pears.”67 It was a happy scene and happy work not in the least shadowed by the knowledge that during the writing of these three first volumes of the eventual six-volume history there was no concrete evidence that it would remain anything but unfinished. But the job was done because Elizabeth Cady Stanton wanted a fitting memorial for all those who had contributed to getting women the vote. She thought her own sex too modest, too likely to underestimate themselves, too afraid of seeming pretentious and she wanted to cure them. The plan of a gigantic history was a grand one but she was determined to accomplish it. “We are only the stone that started the ripple,” she wrote to Susan at the end of her life, “but they are the ripple that is spreading and will eventually cover the whole pond.”68 The “pond” was the world. It thrilled her to include in her history book a letter from Harriet Martineau written after the 4th annual Woman’s Rights convention in Cleveland. This described how a direct result of the American action had been a letter to the Westminster Review by Harriet Taylor supporting it, which had in turn been the starting point for John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women, that overwhelmingly important handbook of the nineteenth-century women’s movement. There was no doubt that she and Susan had been “the stone” and that their aim was devastatingly sure. Letters (many of them included in the History) came to them from all over Europe acknowledging that they had been the inspiration for other women deciding to act. Theodore Stanton wrote, “To an American . . . European woman’s rights is rather tame; it is like the play of Hamlet with Hamlet left out.” But Europe was moving and all records of this movement were promptly encouraged and included in the History which expanded gradually to include accounts of the international conferences begun in 1878.69

  Although Elizabeth Cady Stanton did not live to see female suffrage granted throughout her own country she did survive long enough to hear that New Zealand had become in 1893 the first entire country to grant it, followed by most of Australia, and Norway in 1901 (although with an age limit). By 1920, when America finally capitulated, a large number of European countries had already enfranchised their female populations. But the response of women to gaining something for which some of them had struggled so long was not what Elizabeth Cady Stanton had expected. It would have puzzled her extremely. She knew she was not an average woman (“Such pine knots as you and I are no standard for judging ordinary women,”70 she once wrote to Susan) but she thought nevertheless that all women, once they had the vote, would awaken to their responsibilities. She expected older women to participate in politics in considerable numbers. Until they were fifty (which she thought “the heyday of a woman’s life”) she acknowledged that most women were too bound up in marriage and motherhood to enter politics, but at, and after, fifty years of age she thought women were able, and would be willing, to come forward and take their place with men. They have not.

  Women form a very small proportion of the elected governing representatives in all Western countries (except Iceland).71 They form an even smaller proportion of those holding cabinet and similar posts. If it is true that a political career proves incompatible with motherhood for all but the exceptional few, that still leaves a puzzle. What about all the Susan Anthonys? What about the Elizabeth Cady Stantons over the age of fifty? Where are they all? But even more significant for feminism, why has the so-called “feminine influence” failed to alter in any substantial, measurable way how we are governed? Elizabeth Cady Stanton was emphatic that, when millions of women voted, the world would be a better place. It is not. Either the feminine influence does not exist (which is perhaps something feminism should be glad about) or it is failing to make itself felt. Either way, things have not turned out as she predicted and hoped.

  It is perfectly possible that so far as feminism is concerned this does not matter. It only seemed to matter. If feminism is fundamentally concerned with making sure no woman is denied self-fulfilment solely because of her sex does it matter that, presented with every opportunity, she chooses to reject some? But then there is the worry which began to appear as woman’s rights were being triumphantly won in every sphere: perhaps this rejection was forced upon women, perhaps the choices secured for them were not choices at all. Even Elizabeth Cady Stanton, with her seven children, had no real choice, not if she wanted to be a wife and mother as she did. The choice was false. The next stage of feminism was to make it real, to give women such control over their own bodies and over their own fertility that choice meant something. If the thought of what the vote would do for women was exciting, the thought of reliable contraception in female hands was stupendous in its implications for feminism.

  BIRTH CONTROL

 
Margaret Sanger

  (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

  Margaret Sanger

  1879–1966

  THE STRONGEST ARGUMENT used by anti-feminists throughout the nineteenth century to keep women in their existing place in society was the biological one. Nature decreed that women should bear and suckle children. This being so women were going against nature if they did not fulfil their natural function. How, it was asked, could women have careers, with all that this entailed, and still be mothers? It was a question the feminists themselves found virtually unanswerable which was why the notion of “choice” had been built into feminism. Women must choose. Either they were mothers or they had careers or they started to have careers after their mothering days were over. For a long time feminists encouraged women to believe that devoting themselves to work, rather than to men or children, was a more worthwhile and self-fulfilling way to spend their lives. If you had the right temperament and talents they even argued it was your duty to choose not to be a wife and mother. Elizabeth Blackwell, Florence Nightingale and Emily Davies were adamant that great happiness could be found in a life of work. But for the vast majority of women the cruelty inherent in the so-called choice available to them made it unacceptable. They found they could not suppress the urge to mate and reproduce and that, once they had done so, any thought of a career was out of the question. The feminists did nothing to help them. The idea that, if women could control their own fecundity, “choice” might have some meaning was not a feminist one in the nineteenth century. Freedom from constant childbearing was not in the forefront of feminist demands, not part of that familiar cry for either protection or justice and, when the first attempts at publicizing efficient contraception began, the feminists were suspicious. Their reaction was to assume men were trying to make the sex act “safe” so that they could make even freer with women’s bodies. The consequences of safe sexual intercourse would be to remove all restraint and that carried frightening moral implications for the future of marriage.

  But, as the nineteenth century progressed, the consequences of not trying to limit the number of children being born became even more terrifying. In England, the birth rate soared and the problem grew. Malthus gained ground with his doctrine on over-population but his suggestions for controlling it – late marriages and abstinence for long periods within it – were not popular. In 1823 Francis Place entered the controversy by denouncing Malthus’ suggestions as out of harmony with human nature. What was needed, he thought, were better contraceptive methods available for everyone. He had handbills printed with simple instructions for the use of a sponge “as large as a green walnut or small apple” inserted into the vagina before intercourse and pulled out afterwards. His chief justification for contraception was economic. People were consuming their own incomes and impoverishing themselves and their children by having too large a family. Prosperity lay in a small family. Place was called a monster “. . . a nasty old man . . . corrupting the youth of both sexes of this country . . . making catamites of the male portion of the youth and of the female PROSTITUTES.”1

  Beastly or not, Francis Place had become the world’s first birth-control campaigner long before the term was coined. He was not, of course, the first to be interested in contraception. Ever since the very earliest societies there had been a preoccupation with controlling pregnancies. All primitive societies show evidence of crude attempts at contraception – there are hundreds of methods documented – but it was not until the days of the Greeks and Romans that definite advances were made. The greatest gynaecologist of antiquity, Soranos of Ephesus (98–138 BC) lists an elaborate number of suppositories and vaginal plugs which destroyed male sperm. These were widely used and were the most efficient form of contraception available until, in the sixteenth century, the rapid spread of syphilis across Europe produced the invention of the linen sheath for the male. Efforts then became concentrated on improving the sheath. The word “condum” first appears in print in 1706 (Dr Condum is believed to have been a physician at Charles II’s court). The materials used for the sheath varied but the principle was the same and it became the most widely used contraceptive in the eighteenth century together with the sponge for women. But in 1840, when rubber was vulcanized, the condom became much more reliable and much more acceptable. In London and other big cities condoms were for sale in the streets but this was not much good to the population at large, nor was it much good to women whose men could not be bothered with cumbersome precautions. It was women who needed a reliable method for themselves. Until they were given one, abortion and infanticide had to be resorted to.

  And they were, by rich and poor alike. Coroners throughout England recorded the dismal details of dead babies and aborted foetuses found in privies, canals and fields. Lady Stanley of Alderney who had nine children in seventeen years showed herself as desperate and as ignorant as the most wretched servant girl when at the age of forty she believed herself once more with child. She wrote to her husband that “a hot bath, a tremendous walk and a great dose have succeeded” but that she felt “not too well.”2 Her husband replied he shared “the same horror” at the thought she might not have managed the miscarriage. Men and women alike wanted to limit their families. There was no doubt at all that the demand for knowledge about efficient contraception came from both and that it came, as it were, from below, that it was not superimposed on society. If proof of this was needed it was found in the colossal sales of any literature whatsoever to do with contraceptive methods. Francis Place’s handbills had initiated a long line of pamphlets and books all of which were snapped up by a public desperate for knowledge. Richard Carlile’s pamphlet What is Love?, later entitled Everywoman’s Book, sold ten thousand copies in 1828 simply because it contained some basic contraceptive advice. It was followed in 1832 by Charles Knowlton’s highly important Fruits of Philosophy first published anonymously in New York (then suppressed). The Daily Telegraph said of Knowlton’s book when it appeared in England the following year, “There is no difference between this vile book and poisoned food” but it was in fact an excellent book and for feminism much more important than any which had gone before, although this was not recognized at the time.

  Knowlton was the first doctor since Soranos to attempt to give contraceptive advice. He wrote his book in answer to all those people in his Massachusetts practice who had begged him to show them how they could prevent pregnancy and he did so conscious that he was providing a service which would alleviate the hardship and suffering he had encountered in the course of his work. Far from being either scandalous or licentious Fruits of Philosophy was a most sober volume, merely a lecture on the workings of the body and the sex act, with advice on how to prevent conception limited to four pages out of the total fifty-four. Knowlton’s approach was humanitarian. “Owing to his ignorance,” he wrote, “a man may not be able to gratify a desire without causing misery (wherefore it would be wrong for him to do it) but with knowledge of means to prevent this misery he may so gratify it that more pleasure than pain will be the result of the act, in which case the act to say the least is justifiable. Now, therefore, it is virtuous, nay, it is the duty of him who has a knowledge of such means to convey it to those who have not; for by doing so he furthers the cause of human happiness.”3 What Knowlton conveyed was not just information about the condom but precise instructions for women to protect themselves. He advocated not only the sponge soaked in a chemical solution which he specified but syringing the vagina after intercourse with a solution of sulphate of zinc, alum, or pearl ash – any salt in fact which would act chemically on semen – or a vegetable astringent of white oak bark or red rose leaves. He advised two applications within five minutes after intercourse and not later than ten. The correct syringe was available at any apothecary’s for one shilling.

  For his contribution to furthering the cause of human and especially female happiness Knowlton was sentenced to three months’ hard labour. While he served them, his book became a best seller in A
merica and when it crossed the Atlantic the first edition sold 125,000 copies in a few weeks. But the authorities everywhere did everything possible to hinder the publication and distribution of contraceptive literature believing that it attacked that bedrock of Victorian society, the institution of marriage. It went on all the same, but underground. In 1855 Charles Drysdale’s Physical, Sexual and Natural Religion had six pages on Preventive Sexual Intercourse giving prominence to the safe period (incorrectly calculated) but stressing the use of the sponge as the best method; but nobody improved on Knowlton. By 1875 the birth rate in England had begun to decline and there was clear support for the view that people were discovering contraception for themselves. This was still frowned on by the medical establishment. When in 1886 Henry Allbutt produced The Wife’s Handbook (price 4 pence) mentioning the Dutch cap, he was struck off the medical register. His book went on to sell 390,000 copies.