Daughters of the Inquisition

by Christina Crawford

  It was sheer determination that enabled Mary to rise above the loss of employment, the death of beloved friends and the demise of the girls school she founded. But other women in her life saw Mary as a good prospect for success and lent her enough money to continue her literary pursuits until a man, John Hewlett, introduced her to his London publisher. This publisher paid Mary a ten-pound advance to write a book on the education of girls, based on her previous experience at Newton Green. Mary wrote the book but needed more money to survive and took a position as governess to Irish nobility for one year. Once again she was fired. Mary returned to London and to her benefactor, publisher Joseph Johnson who found a place for her to stay and “took up the sort of career a man might pursue. Her employer, Johnson, had published the works of Mary’s dissenting friends and many other celebrated (male) figures. He would become Wordsworth’s first publisher … but was probably most important as the center of a literary and intellectual circle of far-reaching radical significance.”2

  According to her biographers, Mary was unique in earning her keep as a writer. She was an in-house editor for Johnson, writing book reviews, learning French and German to translate other writers. In return Johnson published her original works. After the French Revolution ended, Mary understood that it had bestowed new rights only to men and not to women. At Johnson’s urging, she wrote a pamphlet titled A Vindication of the Rights of Women, in which “Wollstonecraft brought together all the themes that her previous writings had individually stressed: the way we educate our daughters ultimately determines whether they can ever be free and full human beings.”3 Her “Vindication” was a pioneering work. It “proclaimed that unless women are taught to think, not merely to imitate models of behavior, they will never enjoy the rights that men had begun to demand as their natural inheritance.”4 This book made Mary into a celebrity in the literary circles of London.

  In 1792 Mary sailed across the channel and entered Paris by herself. Once there, she entered the prominent salons where Thomas Paine frequented, and she met daring women who had participated in the recent revolution, women who openly lived with lovers as unmarried, women who favored divorce and saw no shame in bearing children out of wedlock. Mary became involved in such an affair with an American by whom she bore a daughter. Unfortunately, the affair did not become a marriage, so a despondent Mary returned with her infant daughter to London and soon attempted suicide by drowning herself in the Thames River. Yet in 1796, Mary was in another affair and pregnant again. This relationship did involve marriage, but Mary died in 1797, one month after the very complicated birth of her second daughter, also named Mary. While her first daughter committed suicide at the age of twenty-two, her second daughter married Percy Bysshe Shelley and wrote the famous novel Frankenstein.

  Mary Wollstonecraft’s personal life was beset with mistakes, financial difficulty, poor choices in men and personal tragedy, similar to the circumstances of many modern women today. But “during her 38 years she continually strove to reshape her life, becoming a ‘new genus,’ an emblem of what she believed: that women’s inferior status was the result of external barriers and not of natural internal deficiencies. When Wollstonecraft was born, the fabric of Western civilization was so thoroughly permeated by misogynistic attitudes that most men and women were not even vaguely aware of the extent to which their culture denigrated women and debased their self-image. In century after century, the perception was fostered that nature had ordained a social order which rightfully dictated male domination and female subordination.”5

  Mary Wollstonecraft never lived to encounter either the women or the social justice movements for which the women fought because her writing encouraged both. Her work embodied in A Vindication of the Rights of Women lived on, long after she left this earth. “Within a hundred years this ground-breaking work went through six English and four American editions and was also reprinted in the Revolution, the feminist newspaper edited by Susan B. Anthony in the 1860’s. Wollstonecraft’s arguments formed the basis of a feminist intellectual tradition wherever feminists gathered to encourage, educate, and support one another. Her ideas lived on in such “daughters” as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Margaret Fuller, Sarah Grimke, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Lucy Stone, Susan B. Anthony, Lucretia Mott, Margaret Sanger, Carrie Chapman Catt and Emmiline Pankhurst. Her story lives on each time a woman refuses to accept a patriarchal notion of her abilities or rights and depends on her own experience and self-knowledge in order to define herself.”6

  In her own words Mary says, “Riches and hereditary honors have made ciphers of women to give consequence to the numerical figure; and idleness has produced a mixture of gallantry and despotism into society, which leads the very men who are the slaves of their mistresses to tyrannize over their sisters, wives and daughters. This is only keeping them in rank and file, it is true. Strengthen the female mind by enlarging it, and there will be an end to blind obedience; but, as blind obedience is ever sought for by power, tyrants and sensualists are in the right when they endeavor to keep women in the dark, because the former only want slaves, and the latter a plaything.”7

  She continues, “Taught from their infancy that beauty is woman’s scepter, the mind shapes itself to the body and, roaming around its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.”8

  And further, regarding women and class issues Mary writes, “The preposterous distinctions of rank, which render civilizations a curse, by dividing the world between voluptuous tyrants and cunning, devious dependents, corrupt, almost equally, every class of people … still there are some loopholes out of which, a man may creep, and dare to think and act for himself, but for a woman it is a herculean task, because she has difficulties peculiar to her sex to overcome, which require almost superhuman powers.”9

  Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and others of the “daughters” in upstate New York had another model to add and from which to draw inspiration, shaping their vision of a renewed self-sovereign woman. Although distant by culture, this model was proximate geographically. It was embodied in the powerful Iroquois Confederation of Six Nations known also as the Iroquois League, which was founded around 1450 before contact with Europeans. Originally, the five nations of the Mohawks, Oneidas, On-ondagas, Cayugas and Senecas, were joined in the 1700’s by the Tuscarora, making the sixth nation.10

  Other than remarkable organization, fierce warriors’ skills and strict neutrality which kept peace throughout a large Northeastern region, why were these native people such a powerful model for feminist women seeking the right to vote?

  The ancestors of the Iroquois lived in upper New York state between 100 and 1300 CE, growing corn and building football field-sized longhouses which were to become their emblem. “The Iroquois determined their kin relations through a female line. In each longhouse, under a single roof, lived the women and children. They all belonged to a single matriarchal clan, presided over by a ‘mother,’ the oldest woman. Iroquois men left home upon marriage to live in the longhouse of their wives. Except for their weapons, clothing, and personal possessions that men brought with them, everything in Iroquois society, including the longhouse itself, belonged to women … the clan mothers appointed and dismissed all consilor-chiefs. Women controlled Iroquois society for practical reasons … these matrilineal clans would become the foundation of a new political institution: the Confederation. This confederation stretched from the Hudson River in New York to Lake Erie. The People of the Longhouse divided this homeland into five strips running from north to south with plenty of water in each territory and governed by its own tribal council. These new symbolic geographic longhouses, each more than two hundred miles long, were to rule the political landscape of upper New York State for centuries.”11

  The power, ingenuity, stability and resilience witnessed by Anthony and Stanton as they made friends with the Iroquois matriarchs opened their eyes to a world filled with new concepts of what womanhood could mean, devoid of the European discrimination into which they had each been
born. Later, the Iroquois Confederation would become the blueprint for the League of Nations after the First World War in Europe and then the United Nations after the Second World War.

  Women of the American West developed independence of idea and equality. The worth of women was recognized in the 1890’s when Wyoming, then Idaho and Utah admitted women to the polling places, thirty years before the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution was passed giving all women the right to vote.

  In the Colonies and across the frontier lands, women in the healing professions who had been trained through apprenticeships, not in college, were widely accepted because of acute shortages of professional physicians who were always men.” In seventeenth century Boston, however, there were two women listed as physicians: Jane Hawkins and Margaret Jones. Both were later denounced as witches. Jane Hawkins was expelled from the city. Margaret Jones was executed.”12

  From 1450 to 1900 woman as healer was primarily a midwife, though professional nursing had been established by both Florence Nightingale and Dr. James Barry (a woman) of the British Hospital system in the late 1800’s. But the Scientific Revolution begun in the sixteenth century left women completely out of their equations.

  Boston Female Medical College was established to give courses in midwifery and by 1853 included a degree in Medicine. By 1856, the courses in midwifery were dropped from the curriculum, and in 1873 the school was merged with Boston University Medical School. Midwifes were on their way to becoming female physicians at a time of rapid social change spurred on by feminism, a new popular health movement and pro-woman, pro-healing religions.13

  While the suffragettes marched and protested, the plight of women remained unequal politically, socially and legally. In order to circumvent the constrictions some women masqueraded as men or wrote works using male pseudonyms, such as George Sand. George Sand, born July 1, 1804, in Paris as Amantine Lucille-Aurore Dupin, became Baronne Dudevant and died at Nohant on June 8, 1876, as George Sand with a most remarkable career as author and legendary woman.14

  Others such as Dr. James Barry (1799–1865) born as a daughter to the sister of artist James Barry carried out a lifelong deception. Through the patronage of her uncle’s friends, some influenced by Mary Wollstonecraft, the young girl entered Edinburgh University in 1809 as James Miranda Stuart Barry, which was a name constructed by using those of her benefactors. Dr. Barry served as Army Surgeon and Inspector General of British Hospitals in foreign theaters of wars until she became ill and her womanhood was discovered. She kept up the masquerade for a lifetime in order to be a doctor and serve others in a profession which would have been impossible for her had she endeavored to exercise those privileges as a female.15

  At the turn of the nineteenth into the twentieth century, there emerged female doctors who attained brilliance before this brief window of opportunity closed to women. Here are their names:

  Harriet Hunt (1805–1875) who was refused entrance to Harvard Medical School resulting in the trustees passing a resolution to bar women, which was enforced as policy until 1946.

  Elizabeth Blackwell (1821–1910) who graduated from Geneva Medical College in 1849 in upstate New York was the first American woman to obtain a medical degree. Soon afterward, the college closed its doors to women. Despite that, her sister Emily (1826–1910) was successful in her application to Rush Medical College in Chicago. However the State Medical Society persuaded the college to cancel her enrollment after one year. Emily concluded her study at Western Reserve in Cleveland.

  Ann Preston (1813–1872) as a frail Quaker woman, she established the first regular women’s college in the world in 1850. It was the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania.

  Maria Zakrzewska (1829–1902) after finishing medical school she founded the New York Infirmary for Women and Children, the first hospital ever run entirely by women. She advocated co-education for women physicians, believing they needed wider horizons and more contact with future male doctors. Not everyone agreed with her.

  Mary Putnam Jacobi (1842–1906) “hoped to improve society at large by feminizing it … concerned that women receive due recognition as equal human beings in every respect, Jacobi believed that women themselves must change before this goal could be realized.”16

  With $500,000 of women’s money, John Hopkins Medical School, soon to become the most prestigious in the country, was opened in 1893 with the assurance that women would be admitted on the same terms as men. As a result, 75 percent of the other medical schools followed suit in the years immediately afterwards. Women were 25–37% of enrollment in regular schools and forty-two percent of graduates in 1900 from Tufts Medical School. In that same year, a survey indicated that 90% of women trained as physicians were working in that capacity.17

  Almost invisibly, this educational golden age of female physicians evaporated. The Journal of American Medical Association complained that “the profession is over-crowded already to the starving point.”18 Co-education had resulted in the closure of the women’s medical colleges. Victorian values subsided which decreased the demand for female physicians by middle and upper class women. The women who fought so hard to win equal education were dead, and younger women had never been trained as radicals to take their place. A combination of corporate greed and old boy networking quietly spelled the end. Johns Hopkins who enrolled women as 33 percent of total graduates in 1896 had reduced that number to 3 percent by 1910. Many colleges who followed that lead no longer published enrollment figures at all, adding to the silent deception. During this same time, the enrollment of blacks and Jews also dropped rapidly. The white men had closed ranks once again, and everyone else lost.

  In the pendulum swing of women’s history, the 1920’s gave women the right to vote, and then both the First and Second World Wars gave women the right to do the work of men. In the 1960’s feminism was revived and federal measures such as affirmative action gave women an equitable base from which to begin their educational and athletic processes again.

  Ella Nelson casts her vote for the first time.

  Courtesy of the George Nelson family, Lubbock, Texas.

  But also in 1960’s a book representative of women’s repression was published, written by a distinguished physician. It was titled The Fear of Being A Woman and written by Joseph C. Rheingold, M.D., Ph.D. The subtitle is A Theory of Maternal Destructiveness. Author Rheingold of Harvard Medical School is both gynecologist and psychiatrist, who says according to the jacket cover that “Maternal destructiveness, or the fear of being a woman, shapes woman’s destiny in all her developmental phases and biological adjustments.” It continues to state that “the mother’s fear of her womanliness, her resulting destructive attitudes and practices, disturb her daughter and infect her daughter’s relationship with her own children.” In the book the author makes clear that this is the result of the woman herself and her own fears, having nothing to do with the behavior of men, but adds that the feminist movement has probably added to the dilemma.19

  Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Susan Faludi in her book Backlash published in 1991 may argue that history is indeed replicating itself before our eyes, but how many women are prepared to recognize it? She contends that since the 1970’s Reagan era we have seen a “powerful counterassault on women’s rights, a backlash.”20 These flare ups are not random and are “triggered by the perception – accurate or not – that women are making great strides.”21 In other words, they are blacklashes in reaction to new progress but fueled by the old misogyny of the New Right.

  Faludi says that “the most recent round of blacklash first surfaced in the late 70’s on the fringes, among the evangelical right. By the early ‘80’s, the fundamentalist ideology had shouldered its way into the White House. By the mid-80’s, as resistance to women’s rights acquired political and social acceptability, it passed into the popular culture. And in every case, the timing coincided with signs that women were believed to be on the verge of a breakthrough.”22

  Susan Faludi says t
hat the “backlash has succeeded in framing virtually the whole issue of women’s rights in its own language.”23 And any movement that controls the language of communication, controls communication itself. This arrow points directly at the New Right, an alliance of Christian preachers and their politicians who have now commandeered the Republican party. But in the 1970’s they were in full mobilization mode after Congress approved the ERA in 1972, and then the Supreme Court legalized abortion in the 1973 Roe vs. Wade decision.

  In 1980, Moral Majority Rev. Jerry Falwell said “The ERA strikes at the foundation of our entire social structure. With all my heart, I want to bury the ERA once and for all in a deep, dark grave.”24

  The New Right ministers saw a global feminist conspiracy, women taking over the world, ruining the family because they were no longer subservient to husbands and toppling the “family values” of America, which simply meant control of women. “Family Values” became one of the first buzz words of the movement spin doctors now call “compassionate conservatism.”

  “When the New Right men entered national politics, they brought their feminist witch hunts with them.” Soon the New Right racked up election victories in Congress, surprising many who were unaware. “An ebullient Paul Weyrich assembled his most trusted advisors at the Heritage Foundation. Their mission: draft a single bill that they could use as a blueprint for the New Right program … they would call it the Family Protection Act … but the bill they eventually introduced to Congress in 1981 had little to do with helping households. In fact, it really had only one objective: dismantling nearly every legal achievement of the women’s movement.”25