Given the ancient and persisting expectation that men would be the heads of families and that many of them would work outside them, families could only play these roles if women devoted themselves especially to them, and the need for such female contributions was a chief reason why nineteenth-century people regarded the existence of a separate female sphere as crucial to personal and social well-being. Children were recognized as the building-blocks of ties between families, and the need to have them available provided one motive for keeping families large, generating pressure to keep women’s biological role as mothers at the center of their social identity. As both physical links between families expected to be headed by men and vehicles for continuity between generations, women also played a large role in animating the personal relations through which family alliances were established, conducting correspondence and setting up visits and meetings. The need for women to perform these functions would diminish as time went on and individuals were able to pursue their goals and ambitions by way of resources provided by public facilities: institutionalized sources of credit, expanded primary and secondary schooling, advanced professional training in university settings, publicly available information about career possibilities. As reliance on families for survival and advancement diminished, so would the need for women to devote themselves to strengthening the ties between them.13
Two recently published collections of French family letters testify both to the crucial importance of family relations to individual well-being during the nineteenth century and to the role women were called on to play in maintaining them. One involved a constellation of relatives that had been built up in just the fashion Kocka describes, so that the couple at the center of the web were distant cousins who bore the same last name before their marriage, and who had multiple blood ties to other family members. This made it easier for them (especially the wife and mother, the chief writer and recipient of the letters) to maintain the weave of relations, keeping up correspondence with both immediate and more distant relatives. Earlier the family’s chief occupation had involved raising and selling horses in Anjou, but from the mid century it was increasingly drawn into urban life, some members in Paris, others in provincial cities, and into the expanding world of professions. The need to operate in unfamiliar situations was one reason for keeping the network solid and active, since it provided personal support that individual members could not yet find in the milieux into which they were moving. The generation that followed would need this kind of sustenance less, as its members established other kinds of connections, to professional colleagues and their families, and more generally to the extra-familial networks to which they gained access in cities. Until late in the nineteenth century, however, individuals relied on the links maintained through family ties for both material support and for useful information on a wide variety of subjects – where to obtain clothes, household supplies, servants (one cousin being able to recommend candidates from among the large supply of unemployed young women in his part of rural Poitou, and who were thought to be good prospects because they were uncorrupted by city life), how best to deal with illnesses of various kinds, where to seek marriage partners. “Thanks to the network one knows where to go for a cure, for a trip, for a vacation; one knows what to buy, to whom to turn for the smallest service.” It was a largely down-to-earth correspondence, with little room for exchanges of intimacies, but people found much psychic support in it all the same, and felt adrift if their letters went unanswered; the mother at the center “insured a continual flow of gifts and aid at a distance, and at home a climate of well-being and warmth such that being deprived of it was felt as a painful separation.”14
A second, slightly earlier French correspondence has been studied and partly published by a descendant of the family, a clan of some significance here because one of its members was Edmond Goblot, author of an often-cited study, La barrière et le niveau, its title referring to the baccalauréat exam that still stands as the chief hurdle middle-class French students have to surmount in order to put themselves at the same level as their fellow bourgeois. Goblot, as noted earlier, coined the term “style of life,” applying it to the complex of cultural and social practices and behaviors that gave the diverse members of the French middle classes a common identity. His father Arsène, the son of a peasant, married the sister of a school friend, thereby entering into an extended and multiply connected Norman clan called Dubois, many of whose male members had lower or mid level positions in the civil service, while some of the women, including Arsène’s wife Augustine before their marriage, ran a boarding-school for girls. It was a solid bourgeois family of the kind not rich enough to qualify for the vote under the July Monarchy. With their help the elder Goblot extended his rather rudimentary education and eventually achieved a good post in the Departmental administration of Maine-et-Loire, where his salary was sufficient to pay back money he had earlier borrowed from his brother-in-law in a failed attempt to set up a business venture. The Dubois–Goblot correspondence shows the family members providing many of the same kinds of help to each other as the Angevin one considered a moment ago, but with much effort going into achieving the education and diplomas necessary for the kinds of careers most of them sought. Both families saw the material and moral solidarity the members afforded each other as especially important in view of the political and religious divisions within French society and the tension they often bred. Having moved to a new city to take up his administrative post, Arsène and his wife held back from establishing social relations there, for fear of being regarded as favorable to one or another of the existing rival coteries. One of their sons later bewailed the painful isolation this brought them, writing that it would have been better to remain in Normandy, even in an inferior position, since there the Dubois connections would have given them a recognized status. “Here we are isolated individuals; people who have a family that is known in the region, even if it isn’t unblemished, have resources and receive consideration that we, numerous and all without any stain, do not have.”15 In such a world, it was difficult to imagine how people could live without the support of families, or without the roles that women played in making it effective.
There was a further reason why the notion that women were destined by nature to occupy a separate sphere seemed unquestionable to many people (even in some degree to feminists) through much of the nineteenth century, namely the sheer weight of biological reproduction in their lives. Given both the absence of effective contraception and the importance of children in family strategies, married women until late in the nineteenth century were fated to give a large portion of their lives to motherhood. In parts of Germany for which statistics can be cited, the average number of children born in educated middle-class households was 6.8, which meant that long years of women’s lives were taken up with the duties of motherhood; one historian estimates that the Berlin cultural polymath Bettina von Arnim spent between thirty and forty years looking after children. The examples cited by Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall show that, among the English middle-class groups they studied, the period during which a woman bore children could often extend to between thirteen and sixteen years, during which time it was not uncommon for her to give birth to as many as eleven babies. In such circumstances, periods of pregnancy and nursing followed quickly on each other, often with very little respite between them. French families may have been slightly smaller, but motherhood was a large and inescapable part of female destiny there too; the protagonist of one Balzac story declared that “a woman without children is a monstrosity. We are made solely to be mothers.” The onus of bearing and rearing children was so great that some historians have not hesitated to see the large size of families as something of a male plot to ensure wifely subordination. Ute Frevert believes that the burdens imposed by the maternal role, “tight-fitting and impossible to cast off,” could have been lightened by more responsible use of contraception. Perhaps, but as Frevert herself admits in regard to the later Weimar period
, preventing pregnancy long remained a very uncertain thing, even among those who knew about available methods. Neither sponges or pessaries nor condoms (made chiefly out of animal skins before rubber became available after the mid century) were reliable.16
One reason families made only limited efforts to prevent conception was that having more children made up for the painfully high rate of deaths in infancy and childhood, as great as 50 percent in the population as a whole; the numbers were no doubt smaller among those able to afford room, air, and hygiene, but there are many examples of middle-class families whose losses reached this scale. Of the seven children born to Jenny and Karl Marx in London, one died at birth, two after slightly more than a year, and a fourth at nine.17 These numbers should serve to remind us that people in the nineteenth century had many fewer defenses against mortality and disease than we have become accustomed to since. As David Newsome observes, they “lived very much closer to pain, disaster and death than the generations that followed them,” and were highly aware of the precariousness of their lives.18 One phenomenon this helps to understand, in the face of the disappointment expressed about it by some historians, is the continuing homage women who themselves had public lives as writers or reformers paid to the general principle of separate spheres, reducing their availability as models of emancipation: in the conditions they knew it was difficult to imagine a world in which biological differences did not translate directly into social ones for the vast majority.19
Assertiveness and instability in the gender system
Despite all these grounds for assigning a distinct set of roles and tasks to women, there is much reason to regard the gender system as already unstable and showing signs of weakness even in the period when it seemed most firmly established. The very idealization accorded to women as wives and mothers created a tension with their subordination to men, helping to fuel demands for equality. Noting that many nineteenth-century feminist critics of separate spheres drew on “the conventional assumptions and discourses of domesticity,” Richard Price describes the Victorian years when the ideology of separate spheres appeared most powerful and uncontested as simultaneously the moment when its underlying instability was becoming uncontainable. The suffragist Millicent Fawcett argued that public life could be much improved if “women’s special experiences as women” could “be brought to bear on legislation”; far from making women more like men the result would be that “the truly womanly qualities in them will grow in strength and power.”20 Although Michelle Perrot does not stress the role played by the special virtues attributed to women in calling the system itself into question, she too notes that the moment when the distinctions were most insistently asserted in France, under the Second Empire in the 1860s, was also the point at which public contestations began to mount, producing a clamorous debate about the need for female education.21
Domestic ideology’s assignment of such special qualities to women was not the only reason for its instability, however. Another was that heightened emphasis on the idea that natural differences between women and men justified assigning separate roles to each was itself in part a response to liberal and Enlightened criticism of traditional assumptions about inequality between the sexes. This connection has been most clearly recognized by Lynn Hunt. In 1790 the Marquis de Condorcet wrote that without equality between the sexes there could be no universal claim to human rights: “Either no individual of the human race has true rights, or all of them have the same ones; and he who votes against the rights of another, whatever his religion, his color, or his sex, has from that moment abjured his own rights.” That the Revolution failed to give reality to such ideas has been regarded by some critics as a sign that liberalism and the Enlightenment mounted no serious challenge to traditional gender relations. Taking issue with these views, Hunt argues that the new grounds for gender division that now began to be asserted were themselves evidence that older and often unexamined premises were losing their force. Late eighteenth-century society (in good part for the reasons we have just given) was in no condition to put such views as Condorcet’s into practice, or to countenance the upheavals that attempts to do so would have brought, so that defenders of male superiority easily had the upper hand. But they could no longer maintain it just as before. Far from merely confirming the traditional proscription of women from public life, “liberal political theory made the exclusion of women much more problematic. It made the exclusion of women into an issue.” Domestic ideology was a response to this new situation, emerging “because political and cultural leaders felt the need to justify … the continuing exclusion of women from politics.” Looked at in this light, explicit arguments for female difference provided a replacement for the presuppositions about female inferiority that were implicit in traditional family relations. But assigning women to the private world of home and family on this basis only delayed the confrontation between this conventional subordination and the implications of the liberal principles that undermined it.22
We can see the tensions this produced at work in an influential German defense of gender inequality, Karl Theodor Welcker’s article on “Relations Between the Sexes” (Geschlechtsverhältnisse) in the widely read Staatslexikon he edited together with Karl R. W. von Rotteck. In an often-cited essay, Karin Hausen notes that until late in the eighteenth century, German writers related differences between women and men primarily to each one’s position in the family, taking the roles assumed there more or less for granted. In the nineteenth century, by contrast, writers such as Welcker provided elaborate justifications for gender roles, based on natural differences of temperament and character between the sexes. His description of the “stronger, bolder, freer” man as the natural founder, nurturer, and protector of the family, driven out into the world by the need to give scope to his creative powers, in contrast to the “weaker, more dependent and more timid” woman who accepted his protection inside the domestic space that was natural to her, provided a stronger justification for the separate positions assigned to men and women than earlier writers felt a need to offer. In recognizing this as a new departure, however, Hausen does not note that Welcker was pushed to it by a troubled sense that the widely supported rejection of inherited privileges in his time and the dismantling of Old Regime despotisms seemed to imply a basic equality between the sexes. Enlightenment criticism led people to recognize that the “voice of Nature is not readily decipherable,” especially since “custom, prejudice and the interests of the stronger party here, as always where despotic and aristocratic relationships were involved, have corrupted the judgment even of the best enquirers.” But he did not see how society could subsist without recognizing different roles for the two sexes, hence he sought to delve deeper into their natural bases, and to determine what social consequences did and did not follow from them. Both the larger role of men outside the family and their superiority inside it were justified by the natural contrast between strength and weakness, adventuresomeness and timidity, but the total exclusion of women from public life was not: what they shared with men gave them the right to take an interest in current debates, write for publication, and form benevolent societies. Reserved to men however was direct participation in making political decisions (politische Willensbildung). Welcker distanced himself from those conservatives who gave no recognition to women’s rights, even as he rejected radical claims that made them equal to men’s. Since this left most of the traditional gender system in place, his discussion made little practical difference, but it testified to a recognition that the position of women in society could no longer simply be assumed; it had become a matter of public debate, and reasons needed to be offered for it.23
That debate was already in progress, and other writers, as Welcker well knew, had taken the liberal principles he espoused in directions that argued for much greater equality. One of these was the late eighteenth-century Prussian official and publicist Theodor von Hippel, who moved from being a defender of traditional gender roles to a supporter of women’s r
ights during the 1790s. His shift seems to have come about partly in response to the French Revolution’s demonstration that human institutions were more malleable than many believed, and that rational criticism could provide a path toward reconstructing them (Kant, whom Hippel knew well in Königsberg, believed that showing people’s capacity to alter their form of life constituted the Revolution’s greatest contribution to human progress), and partly through reading other Enlightened advocates of female rights, notably Condorcet. In the later editions of his book On Marriage and in a treatise On the Civic Improvement of Women, Hippel argued that biological differences between the sexes (whose importance he never denied) did not account for what many took to be the different capacities each exhibited; instead men had benefitted from their participation in civil society, whose challenges and opportunities expanded their understanding and powers of judgment, while “the soul of the woman shrank more and more into the limits of her household.” If women were given the rights to live independent lives and to participate in public activities, their apparent inferiority would disappear – although they might still invest their abilities in characteristically female activities, such as poetry. Hippel’s views had no practical effect in Germany, but they were widely known, and his giving expression to them had just the effect Lynn Hunt notes for liberal thinking in France, rendering the exclusion of women problematic, so that new grounds needed to be found by those who sought to justify it.24
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