Modernity and Bourgeois Life

by Jerrold Seigel

  That views such as Condorcet’s and Hippel’s were responsible for some of the tensions that marked the gender system, even as men’s involvements in more powerful networks outside the family were giving them increased power and making women more dependent on them, is suggested also by the close relationship that can be documented between early feminism and liberalism. One sign of this kinship is that a high proportion of women who became active in early feminist movements came from liberal families, and had fathers, brothers, or husbands who promoted liberal causes. In the United States over half the women whose biographies were examined in a study of feminist origins came from families whose male members were active in anti-slavery or social reform societies. “In France, most feminists were married to, or were the daughters or sisters of republican politicians. In Germany, the left-wing liberals provided the family background of many feminist leaders, while in Hungary the most prominent feminists were generally the wives of nationalist politicians and thus presumably came themselves from nationalist backgrounds. An upbringing in a politically active liberal family would give such women not only an interest in and knowledge of politics, but also a belief in the right of the individual to freedom and self-determination.”25 To be sure, the feminists whose first exposure to politics came from discussions in their liberal families or participation in liberal organizations often found that their attempts to extend claims for individual autonomy to themselves and their sisters were not well received by their male relatives and associates. It was not a full openness of liberals to female emancipation that made liberal milieux a breeding ground for feminist activism, but the tension that developed there between the universality of the ideas advanced and the limited scope given them in actual life. But this is just the point: liberal notions were important in nurturing feminism precisely because they brought principles that implied equal rights to personal development and public participation up against the barriers still posed to them by existing conditions of social life and the attitudes they fostered.26

  Intellectually, the connection is well illustrated by a comment of Jeanne Deroin, who moved to explicitly feminist activism after beginning as a supporter of the Saint-Simonians. She wrote in 1848:

  The reign of brute force has ended; that of morality and intelligence has just begun. The motives that led our fathers to exclude women from all participation in the governance of the State are no longer valid. When every question was decided by the sword, it was natural to believe that women – who could not take part in combat – should not be seated in the assembly of warriors. In those days it was a question of destroying and conquering by the sword; today it is a question of building and of organizing. Women should be called on to take part in the great task of social regeneration that is under way. Why should our country be deprived of the services of its daughters?27

  That conservatives understood this connection between liberal principles and challenges to existing relations between the sexes no less than did liberals is illustrated by the case of Balzac, whose most touching story of rebellion against social constraints makes the female protagonist for whom it is named, “Honorine,” an avatar of liberal self-assertion too. Having unthinkingly accepted marriage at a young age to the aristocratic son of her guardian, Honorine suddenly flees from her husband with the first man who stirs her senses. Deserted by her lover when she becomes pregnant, and left alone by the death of her baby, she seeks to establish an independent life as a maker of artificial flowers, convinced that she has won her right to “freedom” through her devotion to “work.” Balzac associates these terms with the liberal bourgeoisie who invoked them against inherited forms of domination by carefully establishing the chronology of the story so that it coincides with the coming of the 1830 revolution and the July Monarchy (Honorine’s husband was an official under the Restoration). The author also makes clear in how negative a light his conservative and monarchist views cast Honorine’s claims to have won her independence through devotion to productive labor, turning her belief in her own success into a childish fantasy by having it rest on the intricately orchestrated behind-the-scenes support of her husband, who never ceases to love her and want her back (his attempt to accomplish this leads to tragedy for both). Balzac was no friend of either feminism or liberalism; just for this reason he understood that the same modern ideas that challenged traditional forms of authority also undermined the assumed position of women.

  Balzac’s “Honorine” points to another source of instability in the gender system, namely that, despite what ideology called for, numbers of nineteenth-century middle-class women were active in business. In certain occupations, men sought out wives who could serve as partners, either to sell feminine products to customers, or to oversee production that involved typically female tasks such as sewing. This was the case with the French merchant and manufacturer of fashionable apparel Romain Lhopiteau, who, once he was well enough established to consider marrying, looked for a wife who could “share the work of the enterprise (maison) with me.” He had no trouble finding someone who fit the bill. A lace merchant with whom he did business suggested the daughter of some associates; the practical purpose of the union did not prevent the young man (not yet thirty) from being smitten with her at once, finding her “adorable,” “graceful,” and “vivacious.” Nor was she at all averse to the kind of life he proposed; “endowed with a lively intelligence, and a strong, precise mind,” she also brought a dowry that added to the common capital. The marriage, concluded in 1857, was happy but short, since the young woman took sick and died six years later, despite elaborate (and Lhopiteau makes clear, expensive) efforts to save her. Her illness and death were partly responsible for the business falling into difficulties in the 1860s (increased competition and a shifting market contributed too), so that when the widower looked again for a wife who would take over the commercial role played by his first one he had to settle for an orphan with a reputation for intelligence and energy but no dowry. Despite their joint efforts the house was caught in a credit squeeze and went bankrupt; faced with the need to work hard to restore their position and reputation the couple lived frugally, but (at least as he tells the story) happily. The new wife’s kindness to the children of the first one gained her the affection of her husband’s former in-laws, and the birth of a daughter to the new couple, was “I assure you welcomed with joy … and heartily celebrated,” despite their narrow circumstances. In this part of their life the second Mme Lhopiteau became an independent entrepreneur, opening a shop to sell lace and lingerie, while Lhopiteau became a wine merchant, as well as taking a part in the business his wife had begun.28

  The expectations about gender roles operative in this story were not universally shared in the middle classes, but nor were they truly exceptional. David Sabean provides an extensive catalogue of women active in business, largely, but not entirely, at a higher social level than Lhopiteau. “The well-known cases of Bertha Krupp, Sara Warburg, and Charlotte Oppenheim are good examples but there are many lesser-known ones … According to Wolfgang Zorn, it was quite normal for widows in Swabia to take over the functions of their husbands, but it was not always just a matter of stepping into the breach because the role of wives in entrepreneurial activity was, as he notes, frequently important.” (I noted the case of Wilhelm Sattler above.) Moreover, “the kind of family negotiating and network building that such women were used to doing, coupled with ownership or usufructuary rights over property, gave them a solid foundation for entering the world of trade and commerce.”29 Mme Boucicaut, the wife of the founder of the pioneering French department store the Bon Marché, played a role in giving the business the paternalistic cast that defined it; her fictionalized portrait as Mme Hédouin in Zola’s novel Pot Bouille shows her running the business after her husband’s death, while losing neither her respected position in society nor her attractiveness to men as a result. Certain examples of women who did not work have become nearly canonical in the historical literature, among them Bonnie Smith’s
colorful account of the shift from women active in business in northern French textile towns during the first half of the nineteenth century to their development of a separate world centered around household, child-rearing, and good works in the second half. But Smith makes clear that women in this later situation generated a strong sense of their own social place and power, and we must remember that the kind of evolution she describes was by no means a new one in the nineteenth century, since Amanda Vickery shows that similar movements toward greater domesticity for women had occurred at several points in earlier periods, in response to expanding prosperity and the opportunity it provided for women to live less care-worn lives (a chance seized by many men too, when they could afford it).30 Certain of the limits set to women’s lives by nineteenth-century conditions and practices were ones that few people had the courage or means to transgress, but the very decades when new defenses sere offered for them were ones when the gender system’s inner fragility began to show through.

  Toward autonomy

  During the third quarter of the nineteenth century many things combined to counter the sharper division between sex roles that set in after 1750 and to open up new paths and spaces for women. The first, and surely not the least important, was the establishment of organized feminist associations. Until they appeared, feminist activism had been largely a matter of individuals writing or acting on their own, although some of them worked within organizations in which male–female relations became an issue in connection with some other chief focus, such as the French Saint-Simonians or the English followers of Robert Owen. This situation began to change in England during the 1850s, when a group of feminists (quaintly referred to as “the ladies of Langham Place”) established regular meetings explicitly devoted to women’s issues and put out a paper, but the tempo of change picked up both there and on the continent in the next decade, with the founding of the German Allgemeine deutsche Frauenverein in 1865, the French Société pour la revendication des droits de la femme, in 1866, and the English National Society for Women’s Suffrage in 1867. We cannot pause over the history of feminist activism save to note that the movement entered a new and more advanced phase of development in the 1890s, marked by a rapid expansion of the local and national associations, the appearance of many new periodicals, and the convening of a series of international congresses (some in connection with world’s fairs or expositions).31 In the rhythm of its birth and development, organized feminism took shape in connection with the same extension and thickening of networks of communication and action as did modern political parties and pressure groups.

  Especially in the later period socialist and working-class figures put forward their own notions of how to improve the lives of women, but the earlier connection between feminism and liberalism continued to be central to the movement. A strong source of inspiration was John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women, which appeared in 1869. Behind it stood Mill’s relationship with his long-time friend and eventual wife Harriet Taylor, whose own essay on “The Enfranchisement of Women” (written in 1851, partly in response to the American feminist convention held at Seneca Falls, New York, two years earlier) already made many of the arguments her husband would more fully develop after her death in 1858. Drawing on ideas that were much discussed in the Unitarian and Utilitarian circles where the Mills met, both writings mounted a direct attack on the notion of separate spheres, arguing that by excluding women from participation in the wider worlds of society and politics the existing system of gender relations blocked them from developing their intellectual and moral capacities, depriving society of the contributions half of its members could make to its well-being and improvement. The Mills expressly denied the often-repeated claim that women whose lives centered on home and family were able to develop qualities and virtues that provided a salutary influence on men, making them more polite, less selfish, or more morally responsible. On the contrary, the weakness imposed on women gave them a morally damaging taste for subtle forms of domination, teaching them to seek power in personal relations through deception, pretense, and artifice. Given the potent influence of circumstances on human development, the authors insisted, no one in the nineteenth century had a sufficient basis for speaking about what were presumed to be natural differences between the sexes: only if men and women were both allowed to develop their talents and abilities without artificial restraints could any valid inquiry into the influence of biological differences on socially relevant qualities begin.32 Harriet Taylor’s essay remained relatively unknown after its appearance in The Westminster Review, but Mill’s book made a deep and wide impact; published just at the moment when feminist organizations were beginning to spring up in many places it was immediately translated into many languages, guiding the thinking of advocates for women’s rights everywhere, and quickly becoming (as Richard Evans dubs it) “the feminist Bible.”33

  One reason why the campaigns to change opinion mounted by feminist organizations were able to have an impact was that some of the conditions that had long justified the tight association between women and family life were receding. One crucial development was the fall in the birthrate and in family size that became evident from around 1860. The scope of the reduction varied from place to place, but overall the average number of births in middle-class families shrank by almost 50 percent over the century, and the proportion of families with fewer than three children more or less doubled. Reasons for the drop appear to have been many and they are difficult to disentangle; condoms (now able to be made of rubber) and diaphragms were clearly in use among middle-class people by the 1860s, and increasingly so from the 1880s; knowledge about them was spread even by conservative attempts to forestall it, as in the prosecution of Charles Bradlaugh and Annie Besant for publishing a birth-control manual in 1877.34 But social factors were also at work, as evidenced by the motivations that led professional families to reduce their numbers of children. In Britain the phenomenon began to be evident from the 1850s, but picked up speed after 1880, and F. M. L. Thompsonargues persuasively that the need to provide education for children in these sectors of society had much to do with this rhythm. The first phase set in as the political reforms of the 1830s and 1840s closed off traditional paths to government jobs through influence and “corruption,” creating uncertainty and raising the cost of preparing sons for positions. The second corresponded to the general expansion in education that took place all over Europe after 1870, involving not just young people aiming at professional careers but also those who sought the technical training required for managerial positions in the new sectors of industry. The primacy of professional groups in family limitation is equally evident in Germany, where in addition research shows that the birth rate fell faster among “free” professionals such as lawyers or doctors, and “independent” academics without regular appointments than among those in state employment (professors were officially civil servants), who could expect greater occupational security. City-dwellers also reduced family size well before rural people. Jews, who could not be civil servants before 1867, and few of whom became such afterwards, but who clustered in “free” professions and urban activities, show an especially marked and precocious tendency to smaller families. In the rest of the population the fall was slower in business circles, although it gathered speed as technical education took on greater importance. In every country the turn to smaller families was also fostered by the diminishing need for households to produce goods required for their members’ lives. This development had been progressing throughout the century (and in some places earlier), as manufactured clothing and other consumer items became more available, and at prices that allowed them to compete with things produced at home, but it reached a higher stage in the more urbanized fin-de-siècle. As Ute Frevert observes, “the productive energies of entire bevvies of daughters – let alone unmarried sisters, cousins and sisters-in-law – were now superfluous.”35 The fall in family size, like the diminished dependence of individuals on family connections for sur
vival and advancement, was thus a corollary of the evolution that spread modern bourgeois networks and frames of action through society as a whole in the decades before 1914.

  As these changes in family life progressed, they were accompanied by a remarkable expansion of educational opportunities for girls and women. Calls for such expansion were often put forth before 1850, but little was done to implement them before the 1880s. In England a small and gradual expansion in girls’ schools took place in the 1860s, but as F. M. L. Thompson notes “it was not until the 1880s and 1890s that there was anything like a rush of foundations of girls’ high schools and boarding schools.” John Tosh finds in this period an increasing willingness on the part of middle-class fathers to spend money on educating their daughters, partly out of concern that those who did not marry would be unable to support themselves.36 On the continent secondary education was largely in the hands of the state (as it began to be in Britain after 1870), which meant that the rhythm of change depended in part on politics; because the republican politicians who came to power in France at the end of the 1870s were eager to reduce the influence of the Church over female education, new schools for girls were established earlier there than in Germany. Under the Old Regime religious orders provided nearly the whole of the available education for girls; their pensions disappeared with the dissolution of the orders under the Revolution, but returned in hardly altered form afterwards. The instruction they offered was strictly limited to subjects expected to prepare pupils for their later roles as wives and mothers, consisting of reading, writing, sewing, and such “adornments” as music and dancing; the curriculum in schools run by laypeople (such as the one set up by the Dubois family into which Edmond Goblot’s father married) largely copied the model.