The Women's History of the World

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The Women's History of the World Page 26

by Rosalind Miles


  Spencer was not the only man of his time to fear that the price of rescuing women from their ‘natural’ ignorance would be ‘a puny, enfeebled and sickly race’. Yet the creature who was too weak-minded even to be educated out of it, could hardly be deemed fit for anything else. Women’s imputed physical and mental frailty thus became the grounds for refusing her any civil or legal rights, indeed any change from the ‘state of nature’ in which she dwelt. As late as 1907, an English earl blocked a bill to allow women limited and local voting rights in these terms:

  I think they are too hysterical, they are too much disposed to be guided by feeling and not by cold reason, and . . . to refuse any kind of compromise. I do not think women are safe guides in government, they are very unsafe guides . . .12

  The speaker was supported by another of the leading lights of the British aristocracy in the wider terms of naked masculine self-interest: ‘What is to be feared is that if we take away the position which woman has hitherto occupied, which has come to her from no artificial education but from nature, if we transfer her from domestic into political life . . . the homes and happiness of every member of the community will be worsened by the transference.’ Although plainly not overburdened himself with ‘artificial’ or any other kind of education, his lordship was quite clear on the main point at issue: any attempt by women to escape from their enforced inferiority could only damage the fabric of society, and must therefore be resisted.

  Yet for a state of nature, women’s lowly status and civil death took a good deal of social and cultural force to maintain. Along with the revolution of industrialism and the victory of science over common sense and reason, the nineteenth-century law became the third and most openly oppressive of the enemies of female emancipation. Nowhere was this process more blatant than in France, where the Code Napoléon was hailed as the most advanced legal monument of its age; history does not record whether this enthusiasm was in ignorance or in recognition of the fact that this was the most comprehensively repressive package of legislation against women of all time. Under the ancien régime, married women had enjoyed wide freedoms, control over their own property, and an influential place in their community, rights that the Revolution had only widened, by facilitating divorce, for example. Now, in his determination to rebuild the laws of France on a Roman, or rather Corsican, moral base, Napoleon firmly legislated to ensure woman’s total subordination to man, and her slavish obedience to all his wishes.

  There can be no doubt of the personal edge on Napoleon’s legislative blade. ‘Women should stick to knitting,’ he informed the son of Madame de Staël, who, whatever else, was not famous for her skill with the needles. Napoleon’s attitude to women consistently betrayed such narrow, reactionary, crude and sexist views, along with the determination that just as he was to be sole authority in the state, so every male should have total control over his family. Pushing his ‘reforms’ through the council of state Napoleon pronounced, ‘the husband must possess the absolute power and right to say to his wife, “Madam, you shall not go to the theatre, you shall not receive such and such a person; for the children you will bear shall be mine.” ’ Equally, every woman ‘must be made to realize that on leaving the tutelage of her family, she passes under that of her husband’.13

  To this end, the Code Napoléon equipped every husband with extraordinary, unprecedented, indeed despotic powers. He could compel his wife either to reside in or to move to any place he decreed; everything she ever owned or earned became his; in divorce, he kept the children, the house and all the goods, for she had no right in their common property; in adultery, she could be sent to prison for up to two years, while he escaped scot free. Frenchwomen had been better off in the Dark Ages than they were after Napoleon’s Civil Code became law in 1804. Their modern tragedy was to be repeated with a Greek inevitability in countless other corners of the globe as the new model code, along with the metric system, swept most of the civilized world.

  Yet even as the forces of patriarchy were vigorously regrouping, within these very structures of oppression lay the seeds of their eventual defeat. The revolution of industrialization made women’s search for a new identity and purpose both urgent and inescapable; it had also unwittingly put into her hands the means by which to achieve it. The very success of the Industrial Revolution in creating wealth, created also the idle wife as the badge of her husband’s social success. The production of surplus goods and surplus money led inevitably to the production of surplus women. It created, too, a concept entirely new in historical terms, the idea that women should be entirely supported by men. Large numbers of the females of the rising bourgeoisie thus found themselves lodged in a limbo somewhere between china doll and household pet, relegated to the classic ‘little woman’ role still recognizable today. Deprived of work and significance, the idle wife was offered instead the newfangled flummery of Mrs Beeton’s ‘domestic arts’, Emily Post on etiquette, and The Language of Flowers.

  As time went on, however, ‘this strange masculine aberration that required women to be useless’, in the words of historian Amaury de Riencourt, ‘proved to be a mistake of the first order’: ‘the historical record shows that women, one way or another, always have to be at the centre of things and will not for long stand being made idle or put on the shelf.’14 This enforced inactivity gave the ‘lady of leisure’ the time to question her enervating and demoralizing lifestyle, her dependence on her man for money, status and meaning. When this brutally stupid and unnatural way of life was also forced down women’s throats as the highest form of existence any female could hope to attain, the conflict between what life was and what it was supposed to be eventually became unmanageable.

  At the other end of the scale, the working woman had no leisure to question her lot. Wholly subject to her lord and master, she groaned under the newly emerging ‘double burden’, of working full-time by day, and carrying out the full load of all the household chores in whatever time was left at night. But before marriage these women had had the experience, however brief, of being part of a new breed. The transition through industrial organization to capitalism created an entire range of jobs that had never existed before, in banking and finance, in business, and the retail trade, and in the new technologies like telegraphy and typewriting. As stenographers, telephonists, cashiers, secretaries and store assistants, young women in their millions swelled the new army of ‘working girls’. These new experiences inevitably taught them that ‘school French and school music, dancing, flower-painting, needle-work and a diligent use of the back-board, did not necessarily qualify them to undertake remunerative employment,’ as one concerned critic noted.15 In addition, the notion that young women only worked until marriage was being exploded by the experience of social workers like the British reformer Miss Rye, who gave this assessment of the situation of ‘young working girls’ in 1861:

  My office is besieged every day by applicants for work, and there is scarcely a county or city in the United Kingdom that has not sent some anxious enquiries to me. Unfortunately my experience on this point is not singular . . . I may state that at an office similar to those already alluded to, 120 women applied in one day to find that there was literally not one situation for any one of them.16

  In these circumstances, working women were forced to reject the myth of the all-providing ‘bread-winner’, and just as much as the idle wives, to recognize the separation of their lives and interests from those of men. In addition, as single women they tasted the fruit of economic independence only to have it snatched away on marriage – an economic independence that, with women’s wages on average only half of those of men, was in itself a constant humiliating reminder of their relative worthlessness.

  Other factors, too, made it less and less possible for women to take themselves at the prevailing masculine valuation. Women who had survived empire adventures of blood and death, fire and famine, could not swallow the scientists’ new discovery of women’s weakness. Florence Nightingale has come down
to history as ‘the Lady with the Lamp’. In the Crimea, following a ferocious attack on a locked store-room when she needed nursing supplies she was known as ‘the Lady with the Hammer’.17 Amid all the other checks and insults she was subjected to, no one dared to tell her that she was just a martyr to her ‘inferior organization’. Similarly Harriet ‘General’ Tubman, better known for her work on the ‘underground railway’ smuggling black American slaves to freedom from the Deep South of America to the Northern states, commanded an action during the Civil War which liberated more than 750 blacks; this remains the only military campaign in the history of the USA to be planned and led by a woman.18

  Women like these, and the women who thrilled to their exploits, could not live at ease within the shallow and insulting sketch of womanhood still fervently advocated by the men of their time. Their protest was nowhere better expressed than in this outburst from Tubman’s sister-slave and abolitionist Sojourner Truth, speaking at a women’s rights convention in 1851:

  That man over there says women need to be helped into carriages and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages or over puddles, or gives me the best place – and ain’t I a woman?

  Look at this arm! I have ploughed and planted and gathered into barns, and no man could head me – and ain’t I a woman?

  I could work as much and eat as much as a man – when I could get it – and bear the lash as well. And ain’t I a woman?

  I have borne thirteen children, and seen most of ’em sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me – and ain’t I a woman?19

  In the end, though, it was not the scientists but the legislators whose brutal and bungled attempts to shore up the shifting foundations of patriarchal power triggered the onset of women’s revolt. In its essence, the clamour for women’s rights to justice, to personal freedom, to full human status, represented the last wave of the great political upheavals of ‘the century of revolution’. In making their claims, women were only following in the steps of men, who had succeeded almost everywhere in the industrialized world in striking out for a new understanding of social participation. By the very nature of the ideal of democracy, what was granted to one could not legitimately be withheld from another citizen group. This did not mean that the power-holders would not try to do so. As governments were driven to redraft older legislation in line with democratic demands, the opportunity was taken, for the first time in history, of deliberately and categorically denying women each and every one of the rights newly won by men. On both sides of the Atlantic, women were forced to confront the fact that ‘the Rights of Man’ would be interpreted to mean precisely and literally that.

  What made this particularly insulting, to Englishwomen at least, was the knowledge that even as men were winning new rights, of ‘one man, one vote’ for example, women were being subject to restrictions that had never existed before. Previously, there was no legal reason for discrimination against women. The law had never forbidden women to sit in parliament, and for centuries the abbesses of Shaftesbury, Barking, Wilton and St Mary Winchester had certainly done so. As late as the reign of the Stuarts, aristocratic women had held the right to select parliamentary candidates and to decide elections. These women were not disposed to have their political privileges trifled with, as the Countess of Dorset forcibly reminded the court apparatchik who tried to foist upon her a royal nominee: ‘I have been bullied by a Usurper [Cromwell], I have been ill-treated by a Court [the Countess had taken offence at Charles II], but I won’t be dictated to by a subject. Your man shall not stand.’20 However limited in practice to women of the upper classes, these rights were important in principle as breaching the absolute dogma of the male-only right to rule. Now women were to be formally and legally disbarred by acts unprecedented in the history of the ‘Mother of Parliaments’, by which all proposed reforms and benefits accrued only to the male citizen of the species. This it was that sparked at last the birth of the women’s movement.

  The sparks fell on ground that had been ready to take fire for some time. The movement that seemed to spring up out of nowhere in the mid-nineteenth century had in fact taken root before the close of the eighteenth, when women’s voices were at last raised to break the silence of millennia – after endless ages of acquiescence with the idea of male supremacy, women were recognizing this hoary old phallacy for what it was, hunting down each of the verminous practices and customs it had fostered and nailing them to the wall. Among the first to force the revolution in thought that had not yet learned to call itself feminism was Mary Wollstonecraft. In outline, Mary’s story was no more than might have happened to any other poor and friendless girl: employment as the ‘companion to a lady’, an unsuccessful attempt to start a school, travels in France, a love affair with a man who abandoned her with their illegitimate child. But out of this stuff of penny-dreadful romance, Mary Wollstonecraft forged in 1792 one of the most powerful and assured of feminist critiques, her Vindication of the Rights of Women.

  Mary’s starting point was her uncontrollable anger at the ‘baneful lurking gangrene’ of ‘the tyranny of man over woman’.21 From this she traced all the social evils she had suffered herself, the lack of education, the denial of fulfilling work, and the sexual double standard that rewarded a man for being ‘a luxurious monster or fastidious sensualist’, while making a whore of a woman for one indiscretion. She saw existing relations between men and women as damaging and exploitive – ‘man taking her body, her mind is left to rust’ – and scornfully rejected the conventional ideal of female behaviour: ‘How grossly do they insult us who thus advise us only to render ourselves gentle, domestic brutes!’ With its trenchant demands for education, for work and for equal companionship with males, the Vindication both articulated some of the enduring concerns of feminism, and threw down the gauntlet in a way that could not be ignored: for after its dramatic exposé of the vicious stupidity and perverted childishness in which women fretfully languished, few could continue with the fiction that the ‘members of the fair sex’ were happy with the lot enjoined on them by God and man.

  The unfair sex, of course, could not be expected to be happy with this wholesale attack upon its power and prerogative, not to mention its manners, morals and mental darkness. No man is a tyrant to himself, and when Mary Wollstonecraft lifted this stone, there was a violent, often hysterical reaction to what she found under there. To the women, there was a great deal of amusement to be had from ‘men who cry “Scandal!” before even examining the question’, in the dry summary of one of Wollstonecraft’s French disciples, Flora Tristan. Tristan’s own life reads like a handbook of feminist struggle: precipitated into childhood poverty when her father died, she made a brief, unhappy marriage whose consequences darkened the whole of her adult life. Under the Code Napoléon she was unable to obtain a divorce, or any access to her children. When she published her autobiography, Pérégrinations d’un Paria, her husband tried to murder her. Harassed by the police as an undesirable, she met a premature death in 1844 at only forty-one. As a socialist, Tristan wholeheartedly endorsed Wollstonecraft’s demands for education and the right to work. Her additional contribution was her insistence upon ‘the right to juridical equality between men and women’ as ‘the only means of achieving the unity of humanity’.22 To man, who had always seen himself as humanity and felt himself to be perfectly unified, this suggestion was incomprehensible.

  Yet just as women were learning to separate their interests from those of men, so were some men beginning to distinguish themselves from the rest of their sex by their refusal to maintain privileges only enjoyed at women’s expense. In 1825 the socialist philosopher William Thomson, inspired by the otherwise-forgotten freethinker Mrs Wheeler, published his Appeal of one-half the human race, Women, against the pretentions of the other half, Men . . . This extraordinary, almost prophetic document made an explicit connection between sexual and racial oppression – women were �
��involuntary breeding machines and household slaves’, reduced by the tyranny of men to ‘the condition of negroes in the West Indies’.

  This theme of the slavery of married life is the book’s insistent note. ‘Home is the prison house of the wife,’ Thomson wrote. ‘The husband paints it as the abode of calm bliss, but takes care to find out of doors for his own use a species of bliss not quite so calm . . . The house is his house with everything in it, and of all fixtures the most abjectly his is his breeding machine, the wife.’ Only by the granting of political equality could women be set free. Thomson ended with a rallying-cry for votes for women designed to find an echo in every female breast throughout the world:

  Women of England, awake! Women, in whatever country ye breathe degraded – Awake. Awake to the contemplation of the happiness that awaits you when all your faculties of mind and body shall be fully cultivated and developed . . . As your bondage has chained down Man to the ignorance and vices of despotism, so will your liberation reward him with knowledge, with freedom and with happiness.23

  Thomson paid for his support for the women’s cause in the ridicule and ostracism of his society. Forty years later, in 1869, John Stuart Mill tried again with a wide-ranging and coolly logical essay exposing for what it was The Subjection of Women. Yet, for all the support of sympathetic fellow-travellers, the barde for freedom, for justice, for full human status, was one that women had to fight for themselves. In another epochal historical departure, the women’s rights movement became the first in history to have been planned and executed by women. The strength, dignity and justice of their demands was echoed in these leaders, and their extraordinary personal qualities as much as their political activities were responsible for the success of the cause. It was an international saga of inspiration and tenacity. In England, as the Home Secretary was informed, women were ready to die for Mrs Pankhurst; her apocryphal advice to a frightened young suffragette, ‘Pray to God, my dear – She will hear you!’ sums up her unselfconscious messianic power. Others drew their strength from the sublime simplicity of the cause: ‘Men, their rights and nothing more: women, their rights and nothing less’, in Susan B. Anthony’s familiar phrase.

 

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