The Feminist Promise
Page 1
PRAISE FOR THE FEMINIST PROMISE
“Christine Stansell’s The Feminist Promise is a unique, elegant, learned sweep through more than two centuries of women’s efforts to overcome the most fundamental way that human beings have been wrongly divided into the leaders and the led. It’s full of surprises from the past and guiding lights for the future.”
—Gloria Steinem
“Christine Stansell’s The Feminist Promise is a landmark in women’s history—a remarkable and thoughtful narrative of the many movements and struggles that have shaped the lives of American women (and men) over two centuries and into our own time.”
—Alan Brinkley, Allan Nevins Professor of American History, Columbia University
“It is with an evocative, even poetic, sense of saga that Christine Stansell infuses this epic work, a heart-moving journey over the last three centuries. Drawing distinctions between the ‘mothers’ and the ‘daughters’ of the feminist movement, Stansell gives fresh clarity and nostalgic immediacy to the breakneck pace with which women have changed their lives. This is to feminism the definitive account—the motherlode.”
—Sheila Weller, author of the New York Times bestseller Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon—and the Journey of a Generation
“It’s all here—over two hundred years of history, down to the perplexities of the present day, in which a feminist might be an Afghan teenager fighting for an education or an American lawyer wondering how she ended up as a stay-home mother. The Feminist Promise is women’s history for the twenty-first century—a magnificent and compelling work.”
—Katha Pollitt, author of The Mind-Body Problem
“Never before has the whole scope and breadth of feminism’s democratic promise been so arrestingly and memorably surveyed. Stansell unifies the long history of fractious and unruly generations of feminist endeavor with precise arrows of insight and luminous reflections. Her book is a must for anyone who wants to understand the situation of women in the world today.”
—Nancy F. Cott, Jonathan Trumbull Professor of American History, Harvard University, and author of The Grounding of Modern Feminism
“A landmark book from a brilliant and insightful historian. Stansell brings pioneering feminist thinkers like Mary Wollstonecraft thrillingly alive and places contemporary American women activists in the contexts of two centuries of feminist argument. Assured, ambitious, and stirring, The Feminist Promise delivers the authoritative intellectual history needed to ground and launch a new era of global women’s emancipation.”
—Elaine Showalter, Professor Emeritus of English, Princeton University, and author of A Jury of Her Peers: Celebrating American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx
ALSO BY CHRISTINE STANSELL
American Moderns
City of Women
2011 Modern Library Paperback Edition
Copyright © 2010 by Christine Stansell
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Modern Library, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
MODERN LIBRARY and the TORCHBEARER Design are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Modern Library, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., in 2010.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., and Adrienne Rich for permission to reprint four lines from “Natural Resources” from The Fact of a Doorframe: Selected Poems 1950–2001 by Adrienne Rich, copyright © 2002 by Adrienne Rich. Copyright © 1978 by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the author and W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Stansell, Christine.
The feminist promise: 1792 to the present / Christine Stansell.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-1-58836-916-1
1. Feminism—History. 2. Women’s rights—History.
3. Women—Social conditions—History. I. Title.
HQ1150.S723 2010
305.4209—dc22 2009026662
www.modernlibrary.com
Cover design: Gabrielle Bordwin
Cover art: Nancy Spero, Sky Goddess, 1985 (© The Estate of Nancy Spero)
v3.1
To
Deborah Epstein Nord
Stephanie McCurry
Crystal Feimster
Eileen Kane
Hannah Wilentz
There is no mark on the wall to measure the precise height of women.
—VIRGINIA WOOLF
CONTENTS
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Introduction
CHAPTER I: WILD WISHES
CHAPTER II: BROTHERS AND SISTERS:
WOMEN’S RIGHTS AND THE ABOLITION OF SLAVERY
CHAPTER III: NEW MORAL WORLDS
CHAPTER IV: LOYALTY’S LIMITS: THE CIVIL WAR, EMANCIPATION, AND WOMEN’S BIDS FOR POWER
CHAPTER V: THE POLITICS OF THE MOTHERS
CHAPTER VI: MODERN TIMES: POLITICAL REVIVAL AND WINNING THE VOTE
CHAPTER VII: DEMOCRATIC HOMEMAKING AND ITS DISCONTENTS: FEMINISM IN THE LOST YEARS
CHAPTER VIII: THE REVOLT OF THE DAUGHTERS
CHAPTER IX: POLITICS AS USUAL AND UNUSUAL POLITICS
CHAPTER X: POLITICS AND THE FEMALE BODY
CHAPTER XI: GLOBAL FEMINISM: THE AGE OF REAGAN AND BEYOND
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Notes
About the Author
INTRODUCTION
FEMINISM IS ONE OF THE great and substantial democratic movements, a tradition of thought and action spanning more than two hundred years. Its reach is huge, because it addresses the claims and needs of half the population. At its best, feminism incorporates men as well, to make it a politics of universal aspiration. The fact that feminism’s hard-won achievements—the vote, women’s education, legal contraception—now seem prosaic and humdrum speaks to its phenomenal success in many parts of the world, certainly in the United States. Yet here and abroad, the rights of women are targets of denunciation and violence, testimony to feminism’s continuing urgency and the fundamental, dismaying fact that the battles are far from over.
While “democracy” is ingrained in our sense of prerogatives and rights, democracy has long been an honored ideal—much discussed, worth fighting for, with a history worth reading about. But feminism, democracy’s younger sister, is easily shoved aside, dismissed as a chronicle of complaints that progress long ago made irrelevant. This is too bad, because feminism’s successes, along with its chronic shortfalls, illuminate so much about both democracy’s possibilities and its chronic limitations. There is little we can understand about the character of modern life, modern nations, or modern aspirations—from patterns of global migration to the war in Afghanistan to the latest round of the perennial American debate over work and the family—without taking into account the effects of feminist hopes and conundrums.
What is the feminist promise? At different times, feminism has promised to bring about world peace, end prostitution, and abolish pornography, the sexual double standard, and the nuclear family. Feminists have promised to make women more like men and to teach men to be more like women; and to make sexual difference irrelevant altogether. They have sought a world where there was less sex, more sex, better sex, and better marriages, no marriage, gay marriages. In other words, feminism has encompassed a wide variety of social views and positions, sometimes antagonistic to one another. A Protestant tradition fo
r a good part of its history, feminism promised in the nineteenth century to spread the Christian message by using the world’s women as evangelists; in the twentieth century, it swore to emancipate women from the patriarchal yoke of religion, be it Christian, Jewish, or Muslim. Feminists have embraced women’s traditional loyalties to children and kin as a fundamental value, and they have also heralded individualism as the one basis for true freedom. Like any long-lived and durable political tradition, feminism has always promised more than it could deliver. But it has also produced stunning successes, challenging institutions and presumptions that have been in place for centuries.
Modern feminism dates from 1792, the year the young English writer Mary Wollstonecraft, enthusiastically following the French Revolution from London, took the rights of man into new territory in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. At the time, women’s rights was a preoccupation of ultra-radicals on the margins of politics.* More than two hundred years later, feminism is a staple of public debate and an element of geopolitics, as human rights groups as well as the occasional diplomat fasten on the abrogations of women’s rights as matters of international concern. The Feminist Promise traces this arc from the margins to the center and asks a simple question: How did it happen?
The answers are various and complicated, but one place to begin is with the fundamental contradiction in the natural rights revolutions that Wollstonecraft and her peers lived through in the late eighteenth century. Revolutions in France and North America overturned the centuries-old belief that some were born to rule, others to submit: They toppled the reign of kings and replaced it with an order based on the natural rights of man and government by consent. Thenceforth, and around the world, men who saw themselves as a brotherhood of equals would seize those principles of liberty and representative government to supplant the rule of the father—as embodied in king, emperor, overlord, or dictator. Republican ideology, however, harbored great exceptions: in the United States, chattel slavery, and everywhere the subordination of women to male authority. Women’s exclusion from the political community of deliberating, consenting, liberty-loving men was an unspoken or barely spoken part of the political compact. The tremendous importance given to those male citizens, whose fraternal bonds knit together the revolutionary nation, bequeathed a huge problem to modern democracy—although at the time, it went mostly unnoticed. What about the women, the would-be political sisters? Could they join the fraternity of citizens? Surely they, being human, also had a natural right to liberty and equality?
The feminist tradition has been a long attempt to address these questions. From the beginning, feminists have had to expose injustices and inequalities considered to be perfectly natural. Women’s lack of political and civil rights, particularly in marriage, led the list, followed by the indignities they suffered in sexual relations (including unwanted pregnancy), the psychology of deference ingrained in the task of pleasing men (what we would now call low self-esteem), and labor discrimination. All these perceptions can be found in Wollstonecraft, far less worked out than they would be in Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949), but present nonetheless. The combinations have changed, and the stress has shifted: In the nineteenth century, the absence of political rights and the critique of marriage dominated the women’s movement; in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, it has been injuries of labor (housework and paid work), sexuality, and the psychology of gender relations. But there has also been a remarkable continuity, as if certain problems of gender are lodged in the very foundations of liberal democratic politics.
This is a long and large story, but not a chaotic one: Several themes connect developments widely separated in time. First, I trace the tensions between what one might call the politics of the mothers and the politics of the daughters, orientations of the feminist imagination that have been a perennial feature—from Wollstonecraft, a daughter and mother-hater of the first order, up through today’s postfeminists, uneasy daughters trying to reinvent the maternalist stance. The politics of the mothers, the book argues, lean toward responsibility, propriety, and pragmatic expectations of what can be done; look to increase the admiration and power that accrue to women in their family roles; accept customary limitations on women’s freedom to act like men; acknowledge the comforts and compensations of domestic life; and take patriarchal privileges for granted but work to make men more accountable to wives and children. The politics of the mothers, in short, have sought to enhance women’s power without radically challenging the way things are.
The feminism of the daughters has contempt for the status quo. The approach is utopian, flamboyant, defiant, insisting on claiming men’s prerogatives. It batters on the doors to power and demands dramatic rearrangements in marriage, motherhood, sex, and male psychology. It is animated by imagining a kind of equality that would free women to act in the world exactly as men do.
The categories are more descriptive than analytic, and they are never hard-and-fast. But the divide does help elucidate trends over time and explain conflicts between feminists that have been described as generational but in fact go beyond age demographics to deeper political philosophies: The mothers often achieved tangible results and greater acceptance for feminism, although to the impatient young they seemed pathetically grateful for a few scraps. In volatile moments, when deep-going transformation was possible, it was typically the daughters who stepped to the forefront, endowed with a will to change that outstripped the prescience of mothers who had more to lose. But the book also shows that feminism’s biggest victories have come about when the efforts of mothers and daughters have converged: in the coalition, for example, that finally won the vote in 1920, and in the campaign to legalize abortion that culminated in the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade in 1973. Conversely, when one element or the other monopolizes the field, the result is usually stalemate and quietude.
Second, the book investigates structures of male government in the family as they changed over time. Grounded in British common law, which held that wives were “covered” by their husbands, family government was a relic of the social hierarchy of the ancien régime that passed unnoticed into the legal and political culture of the American republic. Over time, feminists were the main force that brought to light the autocratic arrangements that constrained women from acting as sovereign individuals. Some provisions of family government fell in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—most auspiciously, the winning of suffrage overturned the principle of virtual representation, by which men voted in place of their dependent wives. Still others remained, however, translated into modern idioms and upheld by newly minted rationales. The effects of family government tie together nineteenth-century disabilities, such as married women’s inability to buy and sell property, to twentieth-century problems, such as the notorious difficulties women encounter in prosecuting domestic abuse and marital rape. Across the world, struggles over family government continue, ferocious and increasingly bloody. Writ large in global politics, attempts to impose despotic, atavistic forms of male governance in the name of tradition lie at the center of conflicts that pit feminists and liberal democrats against religious extremists in South Asia, the Middle East, and parts of Africa.
Third, the book follows the uses of universal Woman, the symbol that stands at the very center of feminist bids for power. “She, who is so different from myself, is really like me in fundamental ways, because we are both women”: This is the feminist habit of universalizing extravagantly—making wild, improbable leaps across chasms of class and race, poverty and affluence, leisured lives and lives of toil to draw basic similarities that stem from the shared condition of sex. The penchant for comparisons far afield goes back to the nineteenth century, when feminists filled in the outlines of universal Woman with images of female slaves, prostitutes, and impoverished seamstresses. In the twenty-first century, extravagant universals reach around the world, plucking out Third World sex workers, Cambodian entrepreneurs, and African female farm
ers, among others, to add to the imagined figure of Woman.
Inevitably, the imagined Woman fell short of the actualities of the actual woman it was supposed to describe, and inevitably, the identification between the feminist who spoke and the woman she spoke for turned out to be wishful, once those other women spoke up. Even as feminism consolidated a following, it was always headed for a breakup into component parts, with new groups of women entering the political scene to challenge presumptions of unity. But although the Woman at the heart of feminism has been a fiction like any political fiction (“workers of the world,” “we the people”), it has been a useful fiction, and sometimes a splendid one. Extravagant universalizing created an imaginative space into which otherwise powerless women could project themselves onto an unresponsive political culture. Representatives of a voiceless constituency, they could search out new audiences, recruit female speakers, and assemble evidence for their case (the book stresses that one of the great achievements of feminism has been simply to compile a substantial body of truth about women’s lives).
Fourth, I am interested in the play of the feminist tradition across the political spectrum. Women’s rights originated on the democratic left and feminism’s natural home has always been there, but conservatism has had its own feminist impulses. The defense of women has come from the right as well as from radicals and liberals, and has involved moralistic, repressive, antidemocratic mobilizations against both sexes when they have failed to fit the bill of virtue that feminists issued. In the name of rescuing, protecting, and championing women, feminists have sometimes done their part for racist, colonialist, and nativist politics, as well as for the emancipatory struggles that are their more usual province. At times these different trajectories have converged.