The Feminist Promise

by Christine Stansell

  Thompson’s name was on the cover but he copiously acknowledged his debt to Anna Wheeler. It was Wheeler, he wrote, who fired his thoughts about women into something bold and big. It was impossible for him, as a man, to feel—Thompson italicized the verb—Wheeler’s “lofty indignation.” He knew that his sex limited him; he could write for women and to them, but not with them. So he presented the book’s ideas as if they were “joint property.” It was as if the two of them had managed to create an equitable marriage in which they held ideas in common when, in literal fact, coverture made a marriage of joint property impossible.

  Thompson would have heard Anna Wheeler’s story of her miserable marriage in Ireland—the beatings she endured from the drunken husband, the constant pregnancies, how the man wasted the dowry she’d brought to the marriage. Her firsthand understanding gave an intensity to the Appeal that abstractions about marriage and the family could never confer on their own. Thompson the bachelor stormed with anger at the coercion of marriage, to which women must submit or starve and which threw them legally into a class with children and idiots. What was the way to happiness, given this dire state of things? He hoped for male generosity and sympathy and offered his own. It was—and remains—a vision of what fellow creatures could do for one another, a fraternal renunciation of sexual privilege. If men voluntarily relinquished their power, they could overcome the only two natural obstacles he saw—women’s inferior strength and their destiny as child bearers—and bring about a reign of perfect equality. Then enlightened women could breathe free.

  After 1838, Chartism subsumed the energies of Owenism. The critique of marriage and the family petered out, receding to circles of sexual adventurers and middle-class bohemians. We can see the lingering effects in the South Place circle, a group of radical Unitarians in a breakaway congregation in London, where conjugal arrangements were so unusual they would have meant social death in respectable circles. The flamboyant minister left his wife to live with his onetime foster child; another household consisted of an ex-clergyman, his mistress, her sister, and the sister’s male partner. Harriet Taylor lived with her husband but formed an intimate, apparently nonsexual partnership with John Stuart Mill, whom she would eventually marry when John Taylor died. “Most of these people are very indignant at marriage,” huffed Thomas Carlyle about the men, “and frequently indeed are obliged to divorce their wives, or be divorced.”10

  In part because the radical Unitarians were connected to influential men, elements of their ideas passed into powerful circles. Reforming lawyers and members of Parliament pared down the Owenite attack on conjugal tyranny into the more modest cause of ameliorating the draconian provisions of British marriage law. Exposés of the horrors of coverture appeared routinely in the popular press in the 1840s, and the legal disabilities of married women entered English public awareness more or less permanently: Dickens’s chilling portrait in Dombey and Son, for example, of the beautiful, tormented Edith Granger, imprisoned in a bleak marriage to a wealthy, heartless older man, is an artifact of this discussion.11

  Utopian socialism dissipated and then disappeared, banished by the violent conflict of the revolutions of 1848 and thereafter, by a socialist movement that turned on economic theory. Early socialism’s reputation for connecting disparate things and making odd pairs—love and labor, housework and the overthrow of capitalism, sex and the social good—was nothing but a burden to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who as young radicals in exile on the eve of 1848 struggled to divest their hard-edged, scientific socialism and vision of violent class struggle from the soft pacific models of Saint-Simon, Fourier, and Owen. “Castles in the air,” they called their predecessors’ doctrines.12 Their Communist Manifesto had its own messianic message of a world to win, but it disabused followers of any lingering notion that a new world would come about peacefully and include all classes. No, they preached, real revolution had nothing to do with “harmony” or “small experiments”: It was an earthquake, a cataclysm that should instill fear in those it would dispossess. It was clearly going to be led by men. Feminism’s close association with those utopian hawkers of flimflam dreams and sexual liberation would forever remain a reason that the Marxist left was leery of the woman question, unless it was treated strictly as a problem of the oppressed female proletariat.13

  In America, too, utopian ideas found followers. Owenite cooperative communities came and went; disciples transported to the United States a Fourierist doctrine heavy on economic cooperation, inspiring phalanxes peopled by middle-class idealists and labor radicals from Massachusetts to Iowa. Margaret Fuller visited one outside Boston, Brook Farm, where Bronson Alcott and other Transcendentalists tried to run a farm together. American devotees toned down the theory of passionate attraction, although suspicions always dogged communitarian experiments, their assortment of residents serving as grist for neighbors’ gossip. No matter how straightforwardly economic, they drew sexual rebels, malcontents, and outcasts, including women shunned by polite society because they had left husbands or taken lovers. Nathaniel Hawthorne, for one, picked up the erotic associations of the phalanxes in his portrait of the wayward Zenobia in The Blithedale Romance, his fictional depiction of Brook Farm. At the extreme were John Humphrey Noyes and his followers in the Oneida, New York, phalanx, who did take Fourier’s sexual theories seriously and set up a commune that dictated a strict regimen called “complex marriage.” Everyone shifted heterosexual pairings regularly and practiced rudimentary birth control, their couplings and uncouplings monitored by Noyes himself.14

  The utopian socialist critique of marriage also led to bills for married women’s property rights. Ernestine Rose, a Polish Jewish emigré, absorbed Owenism when she lived in London; when she moved to the United States she helped publicize a bill first introduced in the New York legislature in 1836. Finally passed in 1848, it represented a historic break with coverture, although, given the fact that women actually owned so little property, its main effect was to create an instrument whereby men threatened by creditors could protect their holdings by transferring them to wives.15 Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who lived in Seneca Falls, New York, after 1843, spent her first political efforts after she returned from the World Anti-Slavery Convention in pressing acquaintances in the legislature to pass the bill. Stanton’s father was an eminent jurist, and she remembered sitting in his law office listening to the teary stories of women who came to see him about reclaiming property lost when husbands absconded or died. Her father could offer them no recourse, she recalled with indignation. Stanton and Rose became friends and co-workers in the women’s rights movement that burgeoned after 1850; Stanton would try for the next fifty years to bring about divorce and marriage reform in the United States.16

  Stanton’s turn to themes of marriage and sexuality, however, came later. In the 1840s, the most influential translator of European avant-garde thought and literature, including utopian socialism, was Margaret Fuller, whose book on the situation of the sex, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, was an unexpected popular success in 1844. Fuller, the leading female intellectual in America—really, the only female intellectual—gleaned her material from far and wide: from abolitionist debates about the women question, to be sure, but also from European Owenites and Fourierists.

  Fuller had thought about women’s position for some time. A luminous writer and beloved teacher of adult classes for Boston’s female elite, she was editor of the Transcendentalist journal The Dial from 1840 to 1844, a labor taken on in collaboration with, among others, her friend and interlocutor Ralph Waldo Emerson. Woman in the Nineteenth Century was a work of transition, written after The Dial folded but before Fuller moved to New York City, where she began a different life as a journalist for Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune—again she was practically the only woman in the field. In 1846, she sailed to Europe as the Tribune’s foreign correspondent.

  But in 1844, when Woman in the Nineteenth Century appeared, Europe and the revolution were ahead of her. She was ad
rift, having come to a dead end in Boston, emotionally and professionally, but as yet having found no home elsewhere. Her relationships with family and friends in Boston, especially male friends and even more especially Emerson, were tangled and unsatisfactory. In this time of uncertainty, she turned to a matter that was central to her life as the sole woman of stature in a culture in which women were said to wither outside the home. The book was an expansion of an essay she had written for The Dial. Putting it into book form, tripling the length, and giving it the gravitas of a magnificent title made it an intellectual event. It was as if she were saying that the whole century belonged to women. Woman in the Nineteenth Century invited American women to take up a role in a magnificent historical narrative, to rise to the most daunting challenges of the age: “Let them be sea captains,” she urged magnanimously.

  Although Fuller detested slavery, she had not written about or taken part in antislavery politics. At heart, she disliked the Garrisonians’ self-righteous temper and she believed they were wrong in assuming that recognizing women’s moral equality would inevitably lead to sexual equality. In the book she took up questions she thought were more important and revealing. What was the nature of women’s psychology, apart from their moral character? How best to educate them? How could the trait of female benevolence be reconciled with social ethics that were free of gender? As for rights, how could women acquire enough power to claim them? The writer of a retrospective sketch of Fuller around this time—possibly Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who may have heard her speak in Boston—recalled that she put two profound and simple questions to her female listeners: “ ‘What were we born to do?’ ” and “ ‘How shall we do it?’ ”17 The book was a sustained reflection on these matters.

  Woman in the Nineteenth Century appealed to the inner faculties of imagination and intellect: to the sense of self, not to moral duty. Into a Protestant discourse that turned on moral sovereignty and accountability to God, Fuller injected a language of imaginative exploration inflected with European Romanticism. She praised Fourier’s sexual egalitarianism and applauded his belief that “harmony in action” between people was the corollary of individual freedom. The ideal of Owenite marriage intrigued her for the “aspiration of soul, of energy of mind, seeking clearness and freedom” that it brought into men’s and women’s relations. She cited a prominent Owenite couple, Catharine and Goodwyn Barmby, as partners in a marriage devoted to the common good. Equality in marriage emancipated repressed energies so that a woman “might dignify and unfold her life for her own happiness, and that of society.”18

  The quest for self-realization was a staple of Transcendentalism, but Fuller directed readers down a path that was gender-specific. Women must cease deferring to men, and rather “retire within themselves and explore the groundwork of life til they find their peculiar secret. Then, when they come forth again, renovated and baptized, they will know how to turn all dross to gold, and will be rich and free though they live in a hut, tranquil, if in a crowd.” Garrisonian abolitionists insisted that the soul had no sex; Fuller instructed readers about the marvelous things the sexless soul could do: “Sweet singing shall not be from a passionate impulse, but the lyrical over-flow of a divine rapture.”19

  More than any other writer of her time and, for that matter, more than most since, Fuller stressed that sexual equality would benefit men, too; here again she followed the Owenites and Fourierists. The sexes were interdependent and gender roles were malleable. “I believe that the development of one cannot be effected without that of the other.” Masculinity and femininity were unstable, complementary, and commingling. “Male and female represent the two sides of the great radical dualism.… [T]hey are perpetually passing into one another. Fluid hardens to solid, solid rushes to fluid.”20 Her father’s treasured daughter and a token woman in a man’s world, she could not imagine women’s freedom without men’s. The rushing, overflowing currents of her Romantic faith, despite painful disappointments in her friendships with Emerson and other male intellectuals, buoyed a democratic romance of sisters and brothers: “Improvement in the daughters will best aid in the reformation of the sons of this age,” she believed. Living as she had with the New England eminences of the day, men who in their genteel way preened and pontificated and ordered women around, she was not naïve about their investment in the way things were.21 But if men could tolerate the change, then divine energy would radiate outward: “The sexes should not only correspond to and appreciate, but prophesy to one another.” Men should think of themselves as kindly brothers, encouraging women and recognizing their particular gifts. Like a good brother, they were to call out “ ‘you can do it, if you only think so.’ ”22

  Today Woman in the Nineteenth Century is difficult to read, with its New England mysticism, its scrim of inscrutable references to classical literature, and its preoccupation with an ideal brother figure. Fuller was one of the few nineteenth-century feminists to imagine women in a vibrant relationship with men and to plan for a good time coming that the sexes would spend together. In the next decades, the book did not fit easily into a tradition that marched along the lines of female separatism, with women anointed as the makers of change and men imagined as a surly crowd, trailing behind. Moreover, Fuller’s interest in psychology, love, and pleasurable heterosexual exchanges and her insistence that women go out into the world to find their “gold” rather than burrow into the home was at odds with an American movement whose default mode would be improving women’s sphere rather than leaving domesticity behind.

  Fuller introduced into women’s rights a preoccupation with introspection and imagination that would go into abeyance as an active principle, to surface only much later, when twentieth-century feminists again turned to the psyche as a critical ground of change. Her Romantic celebration of the female self broke open the citizen/individual of liberal democratic discourse to reflections about what the sovereignty of self actually required when women were involved. How to discover that self was—and remains—a problem, given how ideals of selflessness were—and are—instilled in the female sex from a very early age. Fuller understood the need to change laws, education, and marriage, but she was also one of the first feminists to grasp the importance of expressiveness, reflection, and subjective exploration to women’s emancipation. This Romantic current would, in future years, nourish American feminism’s ventures into personal transformation that outstripped the liberal paradigm of women’s rights.

  Given what happened with feminism in the United States, it is interesting to ponder what Fuller might have done had she remained in the country. Instead she sailed for Europe, embarking on an extraordinary journey of cosmopolitan awareness, political consolidation, and sexual awakening that took her to the barricades of the revolutions of 1848. Arriving in London in 1846, she stayed with radical Unitarians, whose unusual ideas were that much more striking because her hosts were not oddballs holding forth in the phalanx parlor but eminent writers, lawyers, and journalists. The women she met—including Harriet Martineau and George Eliot—made bracing company after her years as the standout female among Boston’s brilliant young men. Moving on to Paris, she met George Sand, the female literary celebrity whose openly acknowledged love affairs shocked but also fascinated the public.23

  There too she met the exiled Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz, who believed he spotted in her the incarnation of the Saint-Simonian female messiah. He urged her to take up her eschatological role. Mickiewicz was tender and praiseful, skirting the line between friendship and eros. But unlike Emerson, whose attention to her was also mixed, the poet was capacious in his encouragement and never undercutting. She had written about the rights and freedoms of women, he reminded her, and now she must live out those freedoms: to love and realize her potential in service to the world.24 In short, the stodgy Old World embraced the American woman and offered her sumptuous materials to reinvent herself as the genius she had long thought about. What she saw of women taking cultural leadership and what she took from
the admiration of leading men like Mickiewicz transformed what remained of her life.

  The revolutions of 1848 tore across the Continent from France to Hungary and through every major city, with coalitions of middle-class republicans and radical workers fighting to overturn monarchies and feudal regimes and establish republics. Women joined the forces on the barricades, and here and there, they rose to prominence. In Germany, for instance, Mathilde Anneke was at the forefront of the revolt in Baden. The daughter of a wealthy bourgeois family, she was married off to a nobleman sometime in the early 1840s when she was still a teenager. Shortly thereafter, she so appalled her family by divorcing him that they cast her out. On the eve of 1848, she was a working writer; her “Woman in Conflict with Social Conditions” was an early German tract on the subject. In 1848 she rode into battle beside her second husband, Fritz Anneke, to defend the republican uprising in Baden.

  The most concerted activity was in Paris. Led by Pauline Roland and Jeanne Deroin, both former Saint-Simonians, feminists produced in the headiest days of the revolution a newspaper, La Voix des Femmes, which became the center of women’s independent organizing. The journal published news about the women’s clubs and made the case for political rights, equal education, and women’s inclusion in the republic’s labor cooperatives. A self-proclaimed group of Vésuviennes—a name proclaiming their volcanic energy—published a manifesto calling for the reorganizaiton of family and home life in line with republican principles. Fourier’s and Saint-Simon’s legacy is evident in their belief that the key to the future lay in private life; but they reversed the older association of revolution with free love by calling for mandatory marriage and the equal division of domestic responsibilities. Most likely speaking as disenchanted veterans of liaisons with working-class men, they called others to join them: “Let us force men to share the duties of the hearth and they will no longer be able to arm themselves with ridicule and use it against us.”25