Feminism in America

A History

William L. O'Neill

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351519960
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Feminism & Feminist Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

William L. O'Neill's lively history of American women's struggle for equality is written with style and a keen sense for the variety of possible interpretations of 150 years of the feminist movement, from its earliest stirring in the 1830's to the latest developments in the 1980s.

O'Neill's most controversial thesis is that the feminist movements of the past have largely failed, and for reasons that remains of deep concern; the movements have never come to grips with the fact that marriage and the family are the chief obstacles to women's emancipation. O'Neill also holds that the sexual revolution of the 1920s, far from liberating women, actually undermined their role in American life.

O'Neill treats seriously the ideas of the great feminist leaders and their organizations. His was the first book to deal directly with the failure of feminism as a social force in American society; to tie together the scattered people and events in the history of American women; and to examine seriously feminist experience in the twentieth century. Since the women's agenda is hardly complete, the women's movement remains active, often militantly so. In this new revised edition, O'Neill interprets and illumines not only the history of feminism, but aspects of feminism that still trouble us today.

O'Neill's book was widely heralded upon its initial publication. Elizabeth Janeway, writing for Saturday Review, calls it "a truly intelligent discussion...an extraordinary perceptive analysis." Carl Degler, in the Magazine of History calls A History of American Feminism "the most challenging and exciting book on the subject of women to appear in years." And Lionel Tiger, writing for the New Republic, says that "O'Neill has turned his mastery of a wide range of historical sources into a lively, engaging, and almost faultlessly sensible book."

1

the origins of American feminism

We know very little about the causes of social change, a process always easier to describe than explain, and this is especially true where our domestic institutions are concerned. For a long time scholars believed that the Victorian family (always known to its critics as the patriarchal family) was of ancient lineage predating the Christian era. But now, thanks especially to Philippe Aries’ pioneering work Centuries of Childhood, it appears that the modern conjugal family emerged quite recently. If so, the origins of feminism are easier to understand.¹ When it was thought that the conjugal family, with its emphasis on privacy and domesticity, and its preoccupation with the training of children, went far back in time, it was difficult to explain why women suddenly began to press against its limitations in the 1830’s. If in truth women had been abused for centuries, why did they wait so long before rebelling? Generally, Americans advanced two arguments in explanation—one economic and the other ideological. The economic argument was most concisely expressed by Walter Lippmann who observed in 1914 that “the mere withdrawal of industries from the home has drawn millions of women out of the home, and left millions idle within it.” ² The industrial revolution forced women to alter their styles of life and inevitably brought them into conflict with customs and institutions based on obsolete economic factors. Alternatively, it was often argued that women were belatedly responding to the libertarian ideologies fostered by the French and American revolutions, that they were demanding equal rights denied them by prejudices, superstitions, and tyrannies incompatible with the enlightened social and political ideals of the nineteenth century.

There is something to be said for both these contentions, but they leave much untold. The industrial revolution is a catchall often used to explain everything for which we do not have a better answer. The sociologist William J. Goode points out that there is nothing in the industrial process itself which determines how families will be organized, and that industrialism has shown itself compatible with a variety of family systems.³ Similarly, knowing that libertarianism is infectious does not help us appreciate why specific groups make certain responses at particular times. Why, for example, did women wait for more than half a century after the American Revolution before asking that the Declaration of Independence be applied to them as well as to men?

If we assume, however, that the conjugal family system with its great demands upon women was a fairly recent development and became general only in the nineteenth century, then the feminist response becomes explicable. In completing the transformation of the family from a loosely organized, if indispensable, adjunct of Western society into a strictly defined nuclear unit at the very center of social life, the Victorians laid a burden on women which many of them could or would not bear. The Victorians had attempted, moreover, to compensate women for their increased domestic and pedagogic responsibilities by enveloping them in a mystique which asserted their higher status while at the same time guaranteeing their actual inferiority. Hence the endless polemics on the moral purity and spiritual genius of woman which found their highest expression in the home, but which had to be safeguarded at all costs from the corrupting effects of the man-made world beyond the domestic circle. Unfortunately for the Victorians, this rationale was ultimately self-defeating, as William R. Taylor and Christopher Lasch have suggested.

The cult of women and the Home contained contradictions that tended to undermine the very things they were supposed to safeguard. Implicit in the myth was a repudiation not only of heterosexuality but of domesticity itself. It was her purity, contrasted with the coarseness of men, that made woman the head of the Home (though not of the family) and the guardian of public morality. But the same purity made intercourse between men and women at last almost literally impossible and drove women to retreat almost exclusively into the society of their own sex, to abandon the very Home which it was their appointed mission to preserve.⁴

The libertarian rhetoric of the early feminists masked, therefore, separatist and sororital impulses which affected vast numbers. Discontented women first expressed themselves, as Taylor and Lasch point out, in literary pursuits and church work. By the end of the nineteenth century these small shoots had flowered into great national organizations like the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), and the General Federation of Women’s Clubs (GFWC), which took millions of women outside the home.

Feminism is, then, perhaps best understood as one reaction to the great pressures that accompanied the emergence of the nuclear family. It was not a rebellion born of ancient slavery but part of a collective response to the sexual awareness deliberately inspired by Victorian society in an attempt to foster what the twentieth century would consider an oppressive domesticity. The Victorians taught women to think of themselves as a special class. Having become conscious of their unique sexual identity, however—a consciousness heightened by the common experiences forced upon them by the cult of purity—they could no longer accept uncritically those role definitions drawn up for them by the alien male. Victorian society created The Woman, where before there had been only women. Yet the alternatives were even less agreeable. The worst thing about the situation of women in the nineteenth century was, as Ronald V. Sampson has pointed out, that because they were denied liberty they sought power, and, especially, power over their children.

The Victorian family as depicted by [Samuel] Butler is essentially an unholy alliance between an overbearing but petty patriarch and a vain adulatory consort for the purpose of deceiving their offspring as to the real nature of their parents and of a society composed of them and their like.⁵

Every society learns to endure a certain discrepancy between its professed aims and its real ones—ideology and actuality never correspond exactly. But every so often, for reasons no one really knows, the gap becomes too great to be papered over with pious assurances. If the chasm is wide enough it may lead to rebellion or civil war, as was the case when slavery could no longer be reconciled with republican principles; if the distance is not so great, less drastic responses become possible. Feminism exploited one such weak point. It was disquieting because its very existence was a contradiction in terms for the Victorians, who believed they had accorded women a higher and more honorable estate than had any previous generation. That so many women failed to agree with them called into question the whole system of values which revolved around the home and the chaste Mother-Priestess who made it possible. In this very special sense, therefore, feminism was a radical movement. On the face of it, equal rights for women was not a demand likely to compromise the essential Victorian institutions. In fact, it threatened to do so because the Victorians had given the nuclear family a transcendent significance all out of proportion to its functional value. In the process they created a social problem which threatened to undo a patiently constructed domestic system and, what was worse, by its very existence undermined the animating principles of the Victorian ethos.

It is hard for us now to appreciate the strength and courage of the early feminists who set themselves against the network of ideas, prejudices, and almost religious emotionalism that simultaneously degraded and elevated women—“the cult of true womanhood,” as one historian calls it, which made central virtues of piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity. Almost the only form of activity permitted women was religious work, because it did not take them away from their true “sphere.” “From her home woman performed her great task of bringing men back to God.” ⁶ Woman, it was believed, was morally and spiritually superior to man because of her highly developed intuition, refined sensibilities, and especially because of her life-giving maternal powers which defied man’s comprehension. But woman was also physically weaker than man, inferior to him in cognitive ability, and wholly unsuited to the rough world outside the home. This was just as well, because women were largely responsible for The Family—the principal adornment of Christian civilization and the bedrock upon which society rested.⁷

While the Victorian conception of women as wan, ethereal, spiritualized creatures bore little relation to the real world where women operated machines, worked the fields, hand-washed clothing, and toiled over great kitchen stoves, it was endorsed by both science and religion. Physicians, clergymen, and journalists churned out a stream of polemical literature in support of this thesis. Even fashion conspired to the same end, for the bustles and hoops, the corsets and trailing skirts in which women were encased throughout much of the nineteenth century seemed designed to prevent all but the desperate from entering the vigorous world of men. The weight of metal, cloth, and bone which women were expected to bear as a matter of course should itself have disproved the notion that they were peculiarly delicate creatures, but, of course, it did not. Feminine delicacy was considered visible evidence of their superior sensibilities, the “finer clay” of which they were made. Women who were not delicate by nature became so by design. In the end, the fashion was self-defeating, for it aroused fears that women would become incapable of discharging their essential functions. The Civil War helped wake middle-class women from “their dream of a lady-like uselessness,” and when Vassar College was founded its trustees put physical education at the head of their list of objectives.⁸

The cult of delicacy was an extreme and transient expression of an enduring conviction that feminists had to deal with if they were to win equality. They could not admit that the differences between the sexes were so marked as to make women inherently and eternally inferior; neither could they escape the fact that women everywhere were subordinate to men. Moreover, the weight of opinion against them was so great that it was hard for even the most talented women to free themselves of the invidious assumptions that kept them in their place. Margaret Fuller, who pressed with exceptional vigor against the binding conventions of her day, consistently fell back on transcendental cliches like “the especial genius of Woman I believe to be electrical in movement, intuitive in function, spiritual in tendency,” thereby denigrating her own intellectual capacities while struggling for recognition as a social philosopher.⁹ Of course, her career belied her words, for throughout her life she attacked (with little apparent success) a whole range of important topics. At bottom she must have felt that intuition was not entirely a substitute for reason. Although Miss Fuller was the most intellectually ambitious American woman of her generation, she was certainly not alone, for the acute Englishwoman Harriet Martineau observed at the end of the 1830’s that “in my progress through the country I met with a greater variety and extent of female pedantry than the experience of a lifetime in Europe would afford.” But, she hastened to add, pedantry was not to be despised in an oppressed class, as it “indicates the first struggle of intellect with its restraints; and it is therefore a hopeful symptom.” ¹

. . . . . . .

Underneath the cheerful cant (which was to grow rather than diminish with time) about women’s superior morality and intuitive genius, we can sense the first uncertain efforts of intelligent American women to find their true selves. The most alert feminists did not accept the prevailing sentiments as final, or worry about their inherent nature. They took the inferiority of women as an existential reality and concerned themselves with bringing women to an awareness of it. The great suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, in a characteristic letter to her colleague Lucy Stone in 1856, asked why woman put up with her degraded state, and answered herself by saying:

She patiently bears all this because in her blindness she sees no way of escape. Her bondage, though it differs from that of the negro slave, frets and chafes her just the same. She too sighs and groans in her chains; and lives but in the hope of better things to come. She looks to heaven; whilst the more philosophical slave sets out for Canada.²

Feminists were willing to concede that social disabilities had produced an inferior woman, but they did not see this as a good reason for perpetuating the order responsible for her condition. In 1878 Joslyn Gage, corresponding secretary of the National Woman’s Suffrage Association, told a committee of the New York Senate that the argument that women should not be given their freedom until they had become fit for it reminded her of Macauley’s statement that “if men [or women] are to wait for liberty till they have become good and wise in slavery, they may indeed wait forever.” ³

The parallel with slavery which the early feminists drew again and again was, on the face of it, strained and unreal. Yet, even though feeling enslaved is clearly not the same as being enslaved, there were real similarities between the women’s rights and anti-slavery movements. Not only were women, and usually the same women, active in both causes, but the causes themselves were in many respects alike. Both aimed at removing unconscionable handicaps imposed by law and custom on specific groups in American society. Harriet Martineau summed up the whole case for woman suffrage in these words: “One of the fundamental principles announced in the Declaration of Independence is, that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. How can the political condition of women be reconciled with this?”⁴ But while efforts to extend the rights and opportunities already enjoyed by white males to the rest of society were consistent with the essential premises of the American system, and therefore conservative, such attempts violated conventions and beliefs which, however much they compromised the spirit of the Constitution, were venerated equally with it. Thus, both abolitionists and feminists found themselves in the ironic but characteristically American position of those who put themselves outside the national consensus by a too literal rendering of its sacred texts.

If women were not slaves, to be at once patronized and discriminated against was bad enough. “While woman’s intellect is confined; her morals crushed, her health ruined, her weaknesses encouraged, and her strength punished, she is told that her lot is cast in the paradise of women: and there is no country in the world where there is so much boasting of the ‘chivalrous’ treatment she enjoys.” In brief, “indulgence is given her as a substitute for justice.” ⁵ Since most Americans seemed ignorant of womankind’s degr...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• FOREWORD TO THE TRANSACTION EDITION
• PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• 1 THE ORIGINS OF AMERICAN FEMINISM
• 2 THE DEMAND FOR EQUAL SUFFRAGE
• 3 THE STRUCTURE OF SOCIAL FEMINISM
• 4 TEN WHO LED THE WOMAN MOVEMENT
• 5 FEMINISM IN THE PROGRESSIVE ERA
• 6 THE WOMAN MOVEMENT AND THE WAR
• 7 THE RETURN TO NORMALCY
• 8 THE POST-SUFFRAGE ERA
• 9 TO THE FEMININE MYSTIQUE AND BEYOND
• INDEX