Transitions

New Australian feminisms

Barbara Caine, Rosemary Pringle

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000248241
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica delle scienze sociali

Gender relations are in a period of transition. In this collection, some of Australia's leading writers and talented young scholars offer a systematic overview of the ways in which recent feminist analysis is shaping women's studies. They reflect on questions of power, difference, social structures, methodology and culture. They ask how feminism has changed in the past few years, and whether concepts like 'patriarchy' and 'oppression' are still relevant.Contributors include: Ien Ang, Julie Ewington, Jill Matthews, Susan Sheridan, Sophie Watson and Anna Yeatman.'All the liveliest feminist debates - postmodernist, deconstructionist, post-Marxist - are represented here. The scope is broad and the subject matter multidisciplinary. This book is new Australian feminism at its newest and best.' - Michele Barrett, Professor of Sociology, City University, London

1 Women's studies, feminist traditions and the problem of history*

* I would like to thank Elizabeth Grosz and Rosemary Pringle for their comments on earlier versions of this paper.

Barbara Caine

The current moment in feminist thought and scholarship is very much one of reflection and revision, as ideas, beliefs and approaches which were accepted orthodoxies even a few years ago are subjected to critical analysis and discussion. New approaches to reading, especially the idea of reading against the grain, along with the many forms of deconstruction which are associated with poststructuralism, have provided a variety of critical vantage points from which to reconsider not only accepted deas about the nature of women's oppression, but also the very categories of 'women' and 'oppression' (see Chapter 4).

I want to extend this critical revision to feminism itself and more particularly to the history of feminism, in order to contrast current concerns about stressing the multiplicity of feminisms with an earlier sense of feminism as both a more limited and in some sense an exclusionary term. I want to suggest that there is perhaps some merit in limiting the term and its claims. At the same time, I want to consider the ways in which contemporary interest in multiple readings and in resistance offers new ways of looking at a feminist past. My material is drawn mainly from English feminism, but the general argument applies equally to Australia, Europe and the United States.

In the past decade or so, the meaning of the term 'feminism' and the need to recognise the existence of many different feminisms have become the subject of intensive discussion within the general field of women's studies. This discussion has focused primarily on the question of difference, as the need both to recognise the ways in which ethnicity, socioeconomic position, religion and sexuality differentiate and divide women, and to give different groups of women an adequate voice, has become a major theoretical and political concern of feminist scholarship.

For many contemporary scholars, the central issue in this debate is the need to interrogate or reject any essential idea of 'women' as the basis of feminism. Denise Riley has explored the changing and unstable meanings of the term 'women' within feminism over many decades (Riley 1988: 67-95), and other theorists have argued that it is not only possible but positively advantageous to feminism to be freed from any essential notion of women and of a female identity. Judith Butler, for example, argues that the inability of feminists to totalise or summarise 'women' and the constant rifts over the meaning of the term ought to be safeguarded and prized, 'confirmed as the ungrounded ground of feminist theory' (Butler 1992: 16).

While it is acutely aware of the instability of meaning attached to the category 'women', much of the current discussion about feminism seems implicitly to contrast contemporary concerns relating to difference and the existence of many feminisms with earlier periods in which the meaning of the term 'feminism' was stable and uncontested. Historians of feminism, on the other hand, might prefer to suggest that the meaning of 'feminism' is as unstable as that of 'women', having been fiercely contested since its introduction a century ago, and that it too requires investigation.

Indeed, from an historical perspective, the most noticeable feature of the extensive contemporary discussion about the meaning of the term 'women' and about the need to establish a form of feminism which does not require any specific sense of female identity has been the insistence on retaining the term 'feminism' regardless of the ever-increasing range of scholarly approaches and political commitments to which it might refer. Even a very brief survey of the recent history of 'feminism' reveals both how central the term is in current politics and scholarship dealing with gender and women's oppression and how new its widespread acceptance is. By contrast, even the 1970s generation, which was most active in the women's movement and in establishing women's studies, had profound difficulties with the term and often sought to reject it.

The meaning of 'feminism' has, in fact, been fiercely contested ever since the term was introduced in the mid-1890s. The early debate on this issue is all the more interesting because of its focus not only on what feminism meant, but on whether the term was useful: whether it served to assist consideration of women's oppression or to designate contrasting approaches to the emancipation of women. Just as the meaning of feminism is constantly contested, so too is the nature of feminism's history. Interest in this field is increasing rapidly among historians and literary scholars, but so is debate over its borders, subject matter and central concerns (Offen 1988: 119-157; Cott 1987). These questions are made more difficult and more urgent because any attempt to survey the history of feminism, either within one country or internationally, needs to come to terms with internal disagreement, fragmentation, and rupture. Ironically, histories of feminism thus accord well with the current historiographical emphasis on discontinuity. At the same time, however, historians have to recognise that the frequent rejection of the term 'feminism'—and of any sense of connection with earlier feminists—by women who have embraced the notion of female emancipation indicates that women often find it hard to establish trans-generational links or to set themselves up as legitimating or authoritative figures for each other or for future generations.

The historiography of feminism is hampered by this lack of a functioning feminist tradition. Most forms of political and social thought, and their accompanying political and social reform movements including liberalism and socialism, have developed around certain dominating and legitimating figures and texts, and their ideas and beliefs have been transmitted from one generation to the next (Caine 1994: 25-44). Feminism, by contrast, has never had such a tradition: few of those who have protested about women's oppression in any given generation have known about predecessors—and even those who did rarely acknowledged them.

In some respects, one can trace this lack of tradition to the very oppression and subordination about which feminists were protesting. As women, feminists have lacked the financial and institutional resources to establish schools of thought or formal ways of transmitting their ideas. Because few either received inheritances of any size or were able to earn the sums required to establish colleges or even journals, feminism lacked the institutional framework which allowed groups like the early political economists or the philosophical radicals to become powerful and influential. Even in the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when there was an organised women's movement, financing journals—like financing women's colleges—was a major problem.

More significantly, feminist writers, activists and theorists have lacked the power and prestige which would induce members of later generations to seek connection with them to enhance their own status. The differences between feminism and other major late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century social, political and philosophical movements, like that of political economy, are instructive here. Few nineteenth-century political economists ever wrote without invoking the Great Tradition stretching through Adam Smith and Ricardo to John Stuart Mill. By contrast, although Mary Wollstonecraft was widely recognised even in the nineteenth century as 'the founding figure' of Anglo-American feminism, she was rarely written about. Very few nineteenth-century feminists demonstrated a sense of connection with her (McGuinn 1978: 188-205). Whereas the prominent male philosophers and ideologues of her day were constantly discussed and referred to by those who knew about them and their ideas, Wollstonecraft was not.

As is so often the case in women's history, this silence requires careful interpretation (Allen 1987). While the lack of detailed discussion of Wollstonecraft might suggest that she was unknown, the form of the few references to her which do survive suggest rather that she was carefully and consciously avoided. On those few occasions when she was referred to, she was simultaneously acknowledged and rejected. Thus, for example, the prominent feminist Harriet Martineau, writing in the 1830s and '40s, recognised Wollstonecraft's role as the pioneer feminist—and in the same sentence repudiated her. Martineau was not, she insisted in her autobiography, in any way influenced by Wollstonecraft. On the contrary, she regarded her as unfit to champion her sex. 'Mary Wollstonecraft was, with all her powers, a poor victim of passion, with no control over her own peace, and no calmness or content except when the needs of her individual nature were satisfied' (Martineau 1788: 399-400).

Martineau's disparagement of Wollstonecraft suggests that her mam concern was not with Wollstonecraft's writings but rather with her life. In finding Wollstonecraft's conduct not only reprehensible but damaging for feminism, Martineau was reflecting a common contemporary view. Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman was quite well received by progressive groups when it was first published in 1792. But her reputation was destroyed shortly after her death in 1796, when her distraught husband, William Godwin, published his Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and laid bare her private life. In this work, Godwin stressed her emotional nature and experiences, detailing her attachment to the painter Henry Fuseli and her affair with an American adventurer, Gilbert Imlay, in the course of which she had a child, and after which she twice attempted suicide. He also made clear the unconventional nature of his relationship with Wollstonecraft. They had married only when she was already pregnant and even then the couple had retained separate homes to ensure their independence. Godwin's book triggered widespread condemnation of Wollstonecraft, especially by social and political conservatives who were delighted to be able to point to the unhappy consequences of her unconventional life and her rejection of women's traditional sphere.

While the claim to a connection with Adam Smith or Malthus or Mill automatically conferred legitimacy and importance on male writers, Wollstonecraft lacked the capacity to confer legitimacy on her followers. Whereas questions of private morality had no effect on the public reputation of men, for a woman the merest hint of immorality was enough to erase recognition of her writings. Thus Victorian feminists could continue their adulation of John Stuart Mill despite the fact that he lived with the woman he loved, Harriet Taylor, for some years before he was able to marry her. But they could not contemplate the public acknowledgment of Wollstonecraft.

Although Wollstonecraft was not able to found a tradition and was largely absent from public feminist discussion and debate, privately she seems to have been powerfully present in the feminist imaginary. The first periodical of the English women's movement, The English Woman's Journal, for example, never published a single discussion of Wollstonecraft. In 1858, however, its editor, Bessie Parkes, wrote to her close friend and fellow feminist activist Barbara Bodichon to say that she had received a letter from Mary Shelley, who she was surprised to learn was still alive. She described her simply as 'Mary's daughter, his wife', as if Wollstonecraft's first name alone sufficed to identify her—and as if she was frequently discussed by the two women.¹ Their public silence and private interest add to the impression that knowledge of the details of her personal life was widespread. Indeed, it would not be an exaggeration to say that although Mary Wollstonecraft was not publicly referred to, she haunted nineteenth-century feminism, as a shadowy and disreputable presence powerfully suggesting the close connection between personal and sexual revolt and feminist commitment—a connection which most nineteenth-century feminists sought to deny. While no Victorian feminist would claim direct connection with Wollstonecraft, nineteenth-century feminism is in many ways incomprehensible without her. Indeed, especially in the mid-nineteenth cen tury—when feminism was attempting most strongly to maintain its respectability—there was a marked similarity in the rhythm of discussion of Wollstonecraft, on the one hand, and problems of sexual morality and behaviour, on the other. Somehow Wollstonecraft seemed to come up or be indirectly referred to whenever an issue of sexual mores or conduct arose. Thus while Wollstonecraft did not found a tradition, she functioned as a powerful symbol of the sexually subversive nature of feminism and of the connection between personal rebellion against the oppression of women and the demand for women's rights.

Ironically, the first broad revival of interest in Wollstonecraft occurred in the 1880s and '90s, when changing ideas about sexual morality enabled a number of writers to show her life as a justifiable rejection of convention and a tragic struggle for freedom and authenticity of feeling—and when the term 'feminism' was first introduced. But although the term's introduction suggests the emergence of a coherent identity and outlook, in fact it arose at a time of extensive and divisive debate about the meaning of women's emancipation and the nature and identities of the women for whom emancipation was sought.

Nancy Cott has explored in detail the introduction and adoption of the term 'feminism' in the United States, in the period around 1911-12. She describes how it was embraced particularly by young and progressive intellectuals and college graduates, who welcomed it as a sign of their modernism and their revolt against formalism: it was a way of indicating their intention to transform ideas of femininity by rejecting the notion of womanly submission and nurturance and demanding not only an end to discrimination, but also the sexual and social freedom which would allow them to live their lives to the full (Cott 1987: 37-41).

Cott stresses the ways in which feminism served both to broaden and to question the suffrage campaign, with its stress on personal life and sexual freedom rather than on political rights based on a notion of womanly duty. But the contrast between these two terms sees to me to warrant more attention than she gives them, pointing as they do to a major underlying conflict which became more and more important in women's movements in the early twentieth century.

This is particularly so in England. There, as in the United States, the introduction of the term 'feminism' was a very significant development, suggesting a shift beyond concerns about women's rights towards questions of private life and identity, on the one hand, and cultural ideas and values on the other. But while the introduction of the term apparently brought to the fore a new sense of a feminist identity, there was no unanimity as to what that identity was. On the contrary, the term 'feminist', like its contemporary 'new woman', signalled the breakdown of a consensus about the nature of womanhood which allowed for an unprecedented range and diversity of views, not only about feminism's strategies and goals, but about who women were and what their emancipation meant (Caine 1992: 239-67). The enormous energy that went into defining and debating the meaning of the terms 'new woman', 'feminist', and 'suffragette' during the 1890s and the early twentieth century served not so much to centralise feminist ideas as to exhibit their range, diversity and complexity.

In view of the central place which the militant suffragettes hold in the contemporary feminist imaginary, it is surprising that many of those who first described themselves as feminists sought in so doing to distinguish and differentiate themselves from the suffragettes. The writer Cicely Hamilton, for example, one of the first to label herself a feminist, explained that her 'personal revolt was feminist rather than suffragist; what I rebelled at chiefly was the dependence implied in the idea of "destined" marriage, "destined" motherhood—the identification of success with marriage, of failure with spinsterhood, the artificial concentration of the hopes of girlhood on sexual attraction and maternity'. (Hamilton 1935: 65). Like Dora Marsden, she contrasted herself with the suffragettes, whose primary concern, in her view, was with the external and public world of national politics rather than with the familial and domestic world which circumscribed the lives of women. Indeed, she went so far as to argue that the suffragettes were not part of the wider feminist movement because they 'merely ask for a trifling political adjustment—the vote! rather than fighting for the full humanity and the economic, social and sexual freedom of women' (Marsden 1912: 285).

This question of the suffragettes' position in relation to the general history of feminism is a very important one—and one which serves well to highlight the complexities of both feminist traditions and the politics of naming as it concerns women's emancipation. For many, the idea of feminism has little meaning unless one includes the suffragettes. Their actions, as many historians have argued, served to dramatise both the brutality and the fundamentally sexual nature of male domination— and the complex ways in which women could resist it. Martha Vicinus has shown how militancy offered women a new kind of freedom and expression—and the capacity to engage in suffering and self-sacrifice of a potentially transforming kind (Vicinus 1985).

The tactic of the hunger strike, originated not by the Pankhursts but spontaneously by a number of their followers, provides one of our primary images of the 'meaning' of the suffrage movement—and endows that movement with a complex series of associations with women's vulnerability, purity, spirituality and self-denial which contrast starkly with both institutional and individual masculine violence and power (Tickner 1987: 100-104). There is also a continuing fascination with the suffragettes, particularly the charismatic Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst, and with their capacity to represent sexual oppression in such powerful ways as to show that the fight against masculine privilege might be a fight to the death (Holton 1990: 7-32).

For all this, it remains significant that the Pankhursts and the suffragettes never referred to themselves as feminists, choosing rather to appropriate the term first applied to them flippantly in The Daily Mail. Perhaps they hoped that their militant campaigning would defeat this attempt to diminish their importance by reworking the term's meaning. What was important for them was the novelty of the word suffragette and the fact that it, like the word 'militant', served to differentiate them from the more moderate suffrage campaign begun in the later nineteenth century by the moderate and 'constitutionalist' group, the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies. Far from seeking any connection with earlier fighters for women's emancipation, the suffragettes sought to show that they were a powerful new group, unhampered by earlier traditions or by ideas about how women should campaign. They saw the struggles of the nineteenth-century women's movement for better education, legal reform of marriage and political rights not...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 Women's studies, feminist traditions and the problem of history
• 2 Feminism and method
• 3 Knowing women: The limits of feminist psychology
• 4 Interlocking oppressions
• 5 I'm a feminist but . . . 'Other' women and postnational feminism
• 6 Dancing modernity
• 7 Reading the Women's Weekly: Feminism, femininity and popular culture
• 8 Number magic: The trouble with women, art and representation
• 9 Keys to the musical body
• 10 Writing/Eroticism/Transgression: Gertrude Stein and the experience of the other
• 11 Of spanners and cyborgs: 'De-homogenising feminist thinking on technology
• 12 Reclaiming social policy
• 13 Beyond patriarchy and capitalism: Reflections on political subjectivity
• 14 Rethinking prostitution
• 15 Destabilising patriarchy
• Notes
• References
• Index