The Women's History of the World

by Rosalind Miles

  On the floor is the woman. With her are one or two dirty old women, their hands begrimed with dirt, their heads alive with vermin . . . the patient has been in labour for three days, and they cannot get the child out. On inspection, we find the vulva swollen and torn. They tell us, yes, it is a bad case, and they have had to use both feet and hands in their efforts to deliver her . . . Chloroform is given, and the child extracted with forceps. We are sure to find holly-hock roots which have been pushed up inside the mother, sometimes string and a dirty rag containing quince seeds in the uterus itself . . . Do not think it is only the poor who suffer like this. I can show you the homes of many Indian men with university degrees whose wives are confined on filthy rags and attended by these bazaar dhais . . .16

  With great clarity, Vaughan saw that the root cause of this suffering, infection and death lay not with the dhais who ministered to the women, but in the attitudes of the husbands. In the post-industrial countries the same analysis was beginning to be made as Western women, apparently living under so much more advanced conditions, still found themselves trapped and punished by the views and expectations of masculine society. With the courage that had seen them through the suffrage struggle, and as part of that sweeping programme of demands for their human rights, women in the West set about assuming the final responsibility for their own sexual existence. To achieve this, they faced another mammoth task – no less than that of reforming the attitudes of men who had never questioned their right to use women in this way – the task of remaking sexuality, female and male.

  For women could never be their own mistresses while men still considered themselves lords and owners of the bodies in question. During the nineteenth century a pageant of violent unrest, disorder and revolution had come and gone without disturbing in the majority of masculine minds notions of women as sexual chattels that stretched back to the Dark Ages and beyond. During his tour of the North of England in 1844, Friedrich Engels noted that in every mill and factory that he visited it was ‘a matter of course’ that ‘factory servitude, like any other, and to an even greater degree, confers the jus primae noctis upon the master.’ The consent of his ‘girls’ was extracted in the time-dishonoured manner: ‘the threat of discharge suffices to overcome resistance in nine cases out of ten.’ The master, in short, ‘made his mill his harem’; his power was such that he was ‘sovereign over the person and charms of his employees’, their absolute ruler.17

  Nor was this simply a matter of a few ‘unfortunate’ mill girls. As feminists began to look around, their senses sharpened to oppression by their fight for other freedoms, they saw that they lived in a society that was no more than ‘a system of sex-slavery for women’. This had come about through men’s insistence on women’s reproductive functions, Christabel Pankhurst wrote, and the ‘doctrine that woman is sex, and beyond that nothing’. Men liked to dress this up as the idea that women were born to achieve a respected role as mothers, but that was eye-wash: ‘What a man who says that really means, is that women are created primarily for the sex gratification of men, and secondarily, for the bearing of children if he happens to want them, but of no more children than he wants.’18

  These radical views were by no means confined to the iconoclastic wing of the women’s rights movement inhabited by the Pankhursts and their supporters. Moderates in the Ladies’ National Association inspired by the social reformer Josephine Butler came out wholeheartedly against the sexual abuse of a whole class of women as prostitutes. The exercise of man’s ‘free right’ of sexuality was in reality gross exploitation, they argued, creating a false division of women into the ‘pure’ and the ‘fallen’ and thereby destroying the ‘sisterhood of women’. Butler herself was at pains to stress that ‘pure’, respectable woman was not in fact any less exploited than her ‘frail’ sister; it was simply that her body had been designated for a different sexual purpose, as a ‘conduit’ for the transmission of property by inheritance, not for sexual pleasure.

  For attacking ‘the licentiousness of men’, ‘the galling tyranny of the strong over the weak’, Butler was branded ‘no better than a prostitute’ by outraged males scrambling to defend themselves against the idea that they ever had anything to do with such creatures. But women had at last got the bit between their teeth. From America came a characteristic blast from Elizabeth Cady Stanton:

  Man in his lust has regulated this whole question of sexual intercourse. Long enough! Let the mother of mankind, whose prerogative it is to set bounds to his indulgence, rouse up and give this matter a thorough fearless examination.19

  Unlike her colleagues Lucy Stone and Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton had a very active concept of the relations between men and women as a sex war. Although deeply concerned with women’s hope of full citizenship and right to the vote, she felt a passionate personal anger against the man-made laws and customs that gave men rights of ownership and control over women’s bodies. In England, the campaigning ‘Miss Swiney of Cheltenham’ shared Stanton’s sense of furious rage coupled with a clear perception that women’s exploitation was neither natural nor coincidental, but part of a full-blown sexual system:

  For, consider what man-rule, man-made religion, man’s moral code has implied to woman. She has seen her female child, Nature’s highest development in organic evolution, ruthlessly murdered as superfluous. She has seen her son, the ‘defective variation’ biologically, the outcome of malnutrition and adverse conditions, and thereby imperfect, placed over her as master, Lord and tyrant! . . . Church and State, religion, law, prejudice, custom, tradition, greed, lust, hatred, injustice, selfishness, ignorance and arrogance have all conspired against her under the sexual rule of the human male!20

  Not everyone agreed with Swiney, particularly in her outright declaration of women’s unassailable superiority. But in spite of themselves many women thrilled to the fine feminist fury of her attacks on men – the usurping lords of creation were no more than a eugenic disaster, their brains small and weak, their bodies ‘lustful and diseased’, their sperm a ‘cheesy mess’ of ‘virulent poison’. Emboldened by the freedom Swiney took to call a sperm a sperm, women everywhere began to ‘give this matter’ the ‘thorough fearless examination’ that Elizabeth Cady Stanton had called for.

  The prevalence of prostitution now became a major concern of feminists; the more so as every fresh legislative onslaught on the problem throughout the nineteenth century invariably resulted in the women being made to suffer more, without taking any account of their exploiters and raison d’être, men. Different countries had differing agendas: France was slow to respond to all campaigns against child prostitution, since most of the demand for the young victims of the ‘white slave trade’ that so tortured English reformers originated there; meanwhile French campaigners were striving in vain to arouse the nation’s conscience to the plight of women regularly beaten through the streets by the police for public amusement: ‘filthy with dust or mud, their skirts and blouses in ribbons, they are kicked, punched, and dragged by the hair . . .’21 In England, official violence against prostitutes took the form of regularly enforced, brutal and degrading internal examinations for venereal disease, under the Contagious Diseases Acts which solemnly assumed that only females could harbour or transmit sexual infection. But national differences were harmonized by the underlying mission of all the reformers to withdraw from men the sexual droit that every one, seigneur or not, seemed to feel entitled to claim. And as the struggle took shape, two major themes emerged, both of which were to change the way that women were able to live their lives in the twentieth century.

  The first of these derived from what is arguably the most basic physical right of all: the right to refuse. Before the Industrial Revolution, there were few creatures more pitied and despised than the ‘old maid’. She was generally assumed to be dying for a man and worthless without one; should any come her way he would be accepted sight unseen; and the idea that any woman would choose this state of single misery over wedded blis
s would have been a pure anachronism. By offering single women a purpose in life and the work to accomplish it, the women’s movement of the nineteenth century raised their sights and their self-esteem. In the varied programmes of law reform, suffrage, education for girls, temperance, abolitionism and the rest, unmarried women found the exultation of personal achievement and with it the confidence to question the notion that marriage was all-in-all. After her heroic stint in the Crimea, Florence Nightingale became the world’s most famous spinster. Her refusal to marry was a plain statement of the value she placed on her autonomy, her individuality and the integrity of her body. She also made her rejection of marriage quite explicit with her pronouncement that ‘women must sacrifice all their life if they accepted that [a marriage proposal from a man] . . . behind his destiny woman must annihilate herself.’22

  The newly awakened spinster, therefore, did not need men. But that did not mean that she wanted to live in an unawakened, virgin or celibate state. Along with the sexual right to refuse, comes the right to choose. Free to choose to please themselves, many women made the obvious choice of another woman. In addition to the shocks it had already suffered, conventional morality now had to take on board the full-blown reality of lesbian love. By the nineteenth century, this was hardly a historical novelty. In the past, though, like so much else of women’s private, domestic activity, it had simply been largely invisible to ‘real’, i.e. male, society. Those men who were familiar with lesbian practices as a known feature of their society generally regarded them with self-flattering complacence: the Abbé de Brantôme, writing of the ladies at the court of Henri II in the seventeenth century, defended sex between women as ‘nothing but an apprenticeship for the greater love of men’, and acceptable to husbands as there could be no risk of ‘horns’ involved.

  The self-indulgent attitude of a sophisticated courtier was hardly that of the Church, however. Although the Bible contains only one reference to lesbianism (in the proscriptions of Paul, where else?) Christianity developed a rabid loathing of this ‘unnatural vice’, for which death was made the penalty. As late as 1721 in Europe, a German woman, Catharina Margaretha Linck, was burned at the stake for attempting to pass as a man, and marrying another woman. This case illustrates the true nature of the patriarchal outrage, however, which emerges equally clearly from all other comparable examples. Linck’s offence was not to have made love to her ‘wife’, but to have usurped male attire to do so. Similarly, within the Church itself, nuns or laywomen caught using ‘sodomitical devices’ (dildoes), that is, usurping the male member, could expect no mercy. In the minds of churchmen, fathers and husbands, women kissing, fondling, sharing a bed and masturbating each other to orgasm did not seem so terrible, because it consorted with their own ideas of women’s sexuality, and even fed their phallocentric fantasies, as the ‘two lesbians and one man’ scenario, familiar to pornography from the classical period, continues to do even today.

  With the emergence of women who had made the conscious political decision to separate themselves from the mainstream of their contemporary society, the question of women’s love had to be seen in a new light. When in 1892 a young Tennessee woman, Alice Mitchell, murdered her lover, Freda Ward, ‘to make sure that no one else could get her’, respectable Americans could no longer maintain that such behaviour only happened in the Old World, and then only in French pornography. European lesbians, moreover, were now gathering and finding, as early as 1900, the beginnings of gay pride, like this turn-of-the-century German scientist:

  Take this courage, my sisters, and show that you have as much right to live as the ‘normal’ world! Defy this world, and they will tolerate you, they will acknowledge you, and they will even envy you.23

  Her confidence was premature. With little experience and with a perverted, phallo-flattering understanding of lesbian women, both Europe and America had freely tolerated women’s ‘romantic friendships’, ‘sentimental attachments’, ‘the love of kindred spirits’, even the ‘Boston marriage’. When women no longer disguised the true, sexual base of these unions, the reaction was immediate. For if two clitorises could manage happily without even one penis, the assumption of phallic supremacy was cut off at the root. Suddenly men were forced to face the idea that a finger, a tongue, a woman, could do better than their sacred organ. Taken with the economic and political equality women were seeking, they could even dispense with men altogether.

  This was Armageddon. Women fighting their way out of the closet found the door not just slammed in their faces, but the opening bricked up. In the Britain of 1928, the writer Radclyffe Hall published her passionate plea for tolerance, The Well of Loneliness. Christened Marguerite but always known as John, Radclyffe Hall has come under fire from later lesbian feminists because of her predominantly negative view of what she saw in the psycho-babble of her time, as a ‘sexual inversion’: i am one of those whom God has marked on the forehead,’ her heroine declares to her lover. ‘Like Cain I am marked and blemished.’ But the lesbian protagonist speaks for all her sisters in an unforgettable final cry, ‘Acknowledge us, oh God, before the whole world. Give us also the right to our existence!’24 The cry went unheard. In a savage and protracted prosecution, Radclyffe Hall was ruined both socially and financially as her man-made society demonstrated that it only had to perceive any challenge to its authority to fall upon it with all the fury at its command.

  It cannot be said, though, that the patriarchs were giving too much attention to the unfamiliar sound of lesbian demands for tolerance and acceptance. They had another battle on their hands in every industrialized society of the world, and no neck so red but it felt the wind of change. From the mid-century, men had had to see their sexual rights chipped away, one by one, as prostitution, child sex, and violence against women had all come under the scathing scrutiny of feminists. Now all the battles over sexuality, the struggle by women to break or even to lessen men’s power over female bodies, came to a head in the fight for contraception. Modern ‘birth control’, as it was called in Margaret Sanger’s phrase, became the symbol and centre of the campaign for physical emancipation, as the vote was of the clamour for citizenship. Both triggered the same reactions of fury, paranoia and resentment, both called for the same conviction and tenacity in their campaigners. Of the two, though, the question of birth control had the power to touch each individual most intimately, in the heart of their private space; for a couple who could honestly feel that votes for women would make little difference to their existence could hardly hold the same view of something which threatened to change everyone’s sex life, for better or for worse, for ever.

  What made the new techniques different from all the old historical potions and devices was that, for the first time, they would work. Notions of the cervical and penile barrier, cap or sheath, had been around for as long as humanity; now, for the first time, the technology was available to produce a reliable, inexpensive reality of what had formerly been a fantasy. The key development was the vulcanization of rubber in the 1840s, making possible the modern condom, and humanizing and disseminating the invention of the German physician Wilde, of caps of iron and silver. With the patenting of the douche syringe in the 1870s, which had the added advantage that it could be purchased by women as if for personal hygiene with no intention of interfering with ‘nature’s way’, then the rout of the sperm was well and truly in hand.

  In this, however, science moved faster than the opinion of the public it was to benefit. From the first stirrings of the discussion in modern times, when the reformer Francis Place had sung the praises of ‘a piece of sponge, about an inch square, placed in the vagina prior to coition and afterwards withdrawn by means of a double twisted thread’, the reaction was hysterical. Medical men on both sides of the Atlantic, trapped as they were in their own parallel struggle to make their profession respectable, drew back in horror from this ‘vile perversion of nature’. Sex for its own sake, with the deliberate intention to avoid conception, was no more than ‘conjuga
l onanism’, and every ‘choked germ’ constituted ‘indirect infanticide’. ‘But like all crimes, it is not and it cannot be practised with impunity,’ thundered the Jeremiah of the British Medical Association, Dr C. H. F. Routh:

  . . . chronic metritis . . . leucorrhoea . . . menorrhagia . . . and haematocele . . . hysteralgia and hyperaesthesia . . . cancer in an aggravated form . . . ovarian dropsy . . . absolute sterility, mania leading to suicide and the most repulsive nymphomania are induced thereby . . .25

  Nor was this chronic logorrhoea all that the reformers had to fear. In 1877 the British campaigner Annie Besant was sentenced to prison; she escaped gaol, but lost custody of her daughter as an ‘unfit’ mother. Ten years later, a British doctor, H. A. Allbutt, was struck off the professional register for writing about birth control in The Wife’s Handbook. But beneath the fury of the aroused patriarchs, the tide was on the turn. In 1882, Aletta Jacobs, Holland’s first woman doctor, opened the world’s first birth control clinic. The next generation of women campaigning for this issue, Marie Stopes in Britain and Margaret Sanger in the USA, found the worst force of the opposition spent and the victory in sight. The decisive link between sex and reproduction had been broken. To Sanger and Stopes, who had entered the struggle with the same aim, but different motives, the future was assured. Sanger saw the hopeless poverty and physical suffering of the over-breeding mother lifted from her shoulders, while Stopes waited to welcome the women whom contraception would liberate into the paradise of ‘married love’. Both, however, saw women as the victors. At the height of the camp-battle, Sanger had named her campaign journal, the Woman Rebel. The revolution was over, its objectives achieved. The ‘woman rebel’ would now only have to live and learn to exploit the advantages of her new situation.