The Women's Movements in the United States and Britain from the 1790s to the 1920s

Christine Bolt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317867289
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

This book presents a study of the development of the feminist movement in Britain and America during the 19th century. Acknowledging the similar social conditions in both countries during that period, the author suggests that a real sense of distinctiveness did exist between British and American feminists. American feminists were inspired by their own perception of the superiority of their social circumstances, for example, whereas British feminists found their cause complicated by traditional considerations of class. Christine Bolt aims to show that the story of the American and British women's movement is one of national distinctiveness within an international cause. This book should be of interest to students and teachers of American and British political history and women's studies.

1

The setting for the women’s movements

From the eighteenth century to the 1820s

Perhaps the most important single fact to grasp about modern feminism is that its roots go much deeper than was once supposed. Feminist literature was published in both Britain and America long before the emergence of an organised feminist movement in the 1840s and 1850s. On the assumption that any social protest arises out of a mixture of resentment and sensed opportunity, it will be the purpose of this chapter to establish the historical and immediate context out of which literary feminism and female activism emerged in the late eighteenth century.

I. Women in a traditional world

(i) The economy

By the middle of the eighteenth century, on each side of the Atlantic, most women spent their days in a multitude of largely but not exclusively home-based economic activities, the burden of which was eased, for the prosperous few, by servants or slaves.¹ It has been argued that a number of benefits flowed to and from women as a result of this economic system. The differences between married and unmarried women were less marked than they would become in the nineteenth century, even if the situation of the unmarried was frequently unenviable, and in England they appear to have been more numerous than they would be in that century.² Female productive capacity was great and – excluding slaves – at the total disposal of the family, while men were more concerned with domestic affairs than they would be in the Victorian period.³ In the American colonies – where capitalism and industrialisation developed more slowly than in the mother country, prosperity was initially more widespread, class divisions were less pronounced, involvement in the market economy was less common, and female labour was more prized as a scarce resource – feminist tracts did not proliferate as they did in Restoration England.⁴ But on both sides of the Atlantic, it is maintained, women enjoyed an economic status which, though it was distinctive from and subordinate to that of men, did not rigidly separate the sexes or stress the undesirability of females working outside the home, when such work was essential to many poor women, especially widows.⁵

The most obvious danger in explaining the position of women primarily with reference to a particular type of economy is that one presents a misleadingly narrow, rather static picture of woman’s lot, and may even be in danger of summoning up a mythic golden age of female freedom,⁶ as did some nineteenth-century feminists anxious to encourage their friends and shame their foes (see above, p. 8). In fact, the material circumstances of British and American women alike were affected by changes or fluctuations over time in the economy and in the fortunes of individual families, besides being influenced by their geographical, urban or rural location, as one would expect. And in the area of the economy, at least, the colonies, as they matured and diversified, became more similar to the mother country. Hence, if there were no absolute British equivalents of the slave and frontier economies of the New World, in which poor white and black women found themselves working alongside men and facing exceptionally severe physical demands, by the eighteenth century women in Britain and America laboured hard in home manufacture and agriculture; Scottish and Welsh women, particularly, were assumed to be capable of performing ‘equally with men’.⁷ In both countries, moreover, the position of women was moulded by patriarchal attitudes, the law governing domestic relations, religion, education and politics, as well as by economics.

(ii) Domesticity

Patriarchal attitudes were perhaps the most important of these different factors, since they shaped all the others. In Britain, to instruct women how to behave in their supposedly natural sphere, a considerable literature had developed since the sixteenth century which itemised and celebrated a range of ‘feminine’ attributes: modesty, quietness, passivity, piety, generosity, chastity, domesticity, timidity, vanity and ignorance. And so that her generally superior moral character should work to the advantage of herself and others, while her weaknesses remained unexploited, it was argued that a woman should ideally be attached to a man, children and a home, providing there a refuge from the world’s cares and a training ground for the young. The gender construct of domesticity – which we associate with the nineteenth century, and against which Victorian feminists rebelled – was proclaimed in a less urgently elaborated form by both sexes in eighteenth-century England.⁸

In the American colonies, a comparable situation prevailed. Thus, whereas neither men nor women felt it necessary to formulate a ’systematic defense’ of the female sphere,⁹ they were as ready as their British counterparts to identify the dimensions of femininity, and it is Norton’s contention that the traits agreed on gave women a sense of inferiority to men.¹⁰ The colonies’ rather more relaxed approach to the ‘woman question’ may relate to the fact that they had not yet produced a notable feminist literature, whereas in Britain, in the middle years of the eighteenth century, a number of articles appeared arguing against women’s alleged inferiority. Bringing to mind the late-seventeenth-century English defences of female capacities, these publications stressed the restrictions on women’s education, the oppressive impact upon them of customary expectations, the rationality they shared with men and, contrarily, their moral superiority to men.¹¹

The problem with the last point was that it might easily be turned into a defence of the status quo: many men, after all, were willing chivalrously to accept women’s moral superiority as long as their virtues were safely exercised in the home. There was, furthermore, a risk that women who refuted men’s ideas would be represented as being simply anti-men. Admittedly, suspicion of men was a feature of some feminist writing from the seventeenth century onwards, but the points made by Constance Rover with reference to Victorian feminists seem relevant to their precursors:¹² that they were not generally man-haters, and that no word was coined to express the feminine equivalent of misogyny because it was not needed. Why women should have been less vocal against men than vice versa has not really been explained. However, it seems probable that their moderation sprang from an awareness of their dependence on men to procure change in the public sphere and their more limited experience of acrimonious debate. Perhaps it is also proof of women’s desire to exercise the moral strength which they claimed.

It might be supposed that another reason for the absence of feminist tracts in the colonies was the better treatment of women before the law. Unfortunately, the situation in England is clearer than it is in America. There is no dispute that female disabilities sprang from the British common-law doctrine of coverture, whereby the married woman’s legal existence was absorbed within that of her husband so long as the marriage endured. Femes coverts could not control their property or wages, sue or be sued, draft wills, buy or sell property, or make contracts, and although there were some English boroughs which, since medieval times, had permitted wives to trade on their own account, these concessions slowly fell into disuse, while the practice of allowing women whose interests had been protected in pre-nuptial contracts to seek redress in the equity courts was available only to women of means.¹³ There is disagreement about how far British legal precedent was modified in the New World.

On the one hand, according to Kerber, Thompson, Richard B. Morris and Mary Beard, the alteration was considerable, and they have paid particular attention to colonial willingness to ignore primogeniture and entail to the benefit of women; to respect for dower rights (widows’ portions); to wives’ right to be consulted before the sale of real estate that might affect dower provision; and to the greater frequency of ante-nuptial agreements to protect a woman’s property rights.¹⁴ According to Marilynn Salmon and Norton, on the other hand, coverture was not substantially amended in practice, since most women were not seriously consulted about real-estate disposal, and the majority did not secure pre-nuptial contracts, whether from optimism, negligence or ignorance.¹⁵ Yet Salmon and others concede that many of the colonies passed feme sole trader laws which permitted married women to run businesses in the absence of their husbands, and all the colonies save Connecticut and Massachusetts accepted the possibility of married women having a separate estate.¹⁶ These were significant concessions, but it seems fair to say that they did not make a profound difference to women’s self-esteem and patriarchal attitudes in the New World.

Nor was it usually possible, on either side of the Atlantic, to seek a way out of an unsatisfactory marriage through divorce, though the colonies operated in a rather more generous fashion than the mother country. In England, absolute divorce [a vinculo matrimonii] was unobtainable in the eighteenth century except by a special Act of Parliament granted on Christian grounds, after which the Church was willing to remarry either of the affected parties. It was, furthermore, so expensive as to remain an aristocratic privilege and so discreditable as to be widely avoided. Divorces a mensa et thoro (separation from bed and board) might be granted by the ecclesiastical courts for adultery or cruelty, but such judicial separations were unsatisfactory because they seldom allowed remarriage. Taking the colonies as a whole, absolute divorces and divorce a mensa et thoro were also rare, so that couples were driven, as in England, to agreed separations or desertion to remedy a hopeless marriage.¹⁷ In either case, women were left in precarious control of their earnings and might be deprived of any children of the union. But we should note that, as ever, there was considerable variation between colony and colony. Accordingly, South Carolina declined to permit divorce; New York and Virginia seldom granted full divorce, and then as an ecclesiastical matter, even if their legislatures might allow legal separations; whereas in the New England colonies civil divorce was obtainable and statutes governing it were ‘part of the legal code’, although New Englanders were subject to widely differing laws on the matter.¹⁸ Still more important than New England’s departure from English legal practice was the increase in divorce petitions during the eighteenth century: a small indication of women’s growing literacy and assertiveness, and of their greater dissatisfaction with their situation when they were deserted (desertion being the main ground on which divorce was requested).¹⁹

We should not, however, conclude from this survey of the legal difficulties of eighteenth-century women that marriage was, for them, a near-unavoidable oppression. Indeed, a considerable fraction of women in Britain and America never married.²⁰ Yet as we have already suggested, single women were at a severe disadvantage in societies dominated by the family; while for those who did marry, there were both accepted pleasures and some signs of improving prospects by the last quarter of the century. The early marriage and extraordinary fertility of seventeenth-century colonial women, which bore witness to America’s healthy environment, plentiful land and need for an augmented labour force, had then given place to the late marriage pattern of Western Europe and a decline in family size.²¹ Since every family was likely to lose children through stillbirth, miscarriage and fatal illness, while the female death rate in childbirth was high, this reduction in fertility lessened the harrowing risks and disappointments of motherhood, which women were expected to bear with resignation.²²

Women on both sides of the Atlantic might also draw comfort from being attended by other women during pregnancy, childbirth and sickness, and from intimate friendships with women to whom, if they wished, they could complain about domestic routines and expect to find a sympathetic hearing.²³ Moreover, there are clear indications that middle-class men and women were beginning to expect more from marriage than they had in the early modern period. The Puritan emphasis upon marriage as a spiritual and emotional, as well as a material, union had slowly given rise to an appreciation of mutuality and affection in this crucial relationship. As a result, there is the first evidence of a challenge to the right of parents to determine whom and when their children should marry, and to make sure that girl children especially wed in birth order.²⁴ The extent of such changes outside the middle class should not be exaggerated at this stage: they would become much more pronounced by the nineteenth century, for whatever their aspirations, the poor in England and America were often unable to afford the new ideal of companionable, conjugal marriage, continuing to rely, as they had always done, upon the sustenance of their kin, peer groups and communities.²⁵ The rich, for their part, were reluctantly influenced by changing concepts of marriage before the nineteenth century, retaining their concern to avert romantic misalliances which might destroy approved ties, contracted with a view to maximising and mobilising wealth and power.²⁶

In England, Lord Hardwicke’s Marriage Act of 1753 was specifically designed ‘for the better preventing [of] Clandestine Marriages’, and the expensive licences it required from individuals wishing to wed privately blatantly favoured the affluent: less fortunate couples had to wait for public banns to be called on three successive Sundays in one of the Anglican churches which in future were to be the only valid venues for marriage. (Jews and Quakers managed to get their ceremonies exempted from the Act, and Scotland continued to be governed by an altogether less exacting matrimonial law²⁷ – hence the popularity of Gretna Green!) It is interesting to find that one of the complaints against the Act was that it unduly increased the power of parents, whose consent to the marriage of children under twenty-one was meticulously to be required after 1753. Upper-and middle-class views about the importance of respectability were also favoured over working-class mores by the legislation’s ending of recognition for betrothal rites, which before 1753 had been an important prelude to matrimony, sometimes accompanied by sexual intimacy and pregnancy.²⁸

For women in the colonies and Britain alike, children were one of the constant pleasures of matrimony, with strong mother-daughter bonds enduring long after the end of infancy, at which point male children came increasingly under the influence of their fathers.²⁹ But in England, from the 1740s, formal attention had been paid to women’s traditional duties in literature which advised them on how to nurse and rear their children.³⁰ There were no equivalen...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The setting for the women's movements: From the eighteenth century to the 1820s
• 2 The forces that shaped the women's movements: 1820s–1850s
• 3 The women's movements take off: 1840s–1860s
• 4 The women's movements, 1870s–1880s: Consolidation and diversification
• 5 The women's movements in maturity: The 1890s to 1914
• 6 The War, the vote, and after: Doldrums and new departures
• Afterword
• Notes
• Index