The Feminists

Women's Emancipation Movements in Europe, America and Australasia 1840-1920

Richard J. Evans

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136226304
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire sociale

Originally published in 1977, this book brings together what is known about liberal feminist and socialist movements for the emancipation of women all over the world in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It deals not only with Britain and the United States but also with Australia, New Zealand, France, Germany, Russia, Austria-Hungary and the Scandinavian countries. The chapters trace the origins, development, and eventual collapse of these movements in relation to the changing social formations and political structures of Europe, America and Australasia in the era of bourgeois liberalism.

The first part of the book discusses the origins of feminist movements and advances a model or 'ideal type' description of their development. The second part then takes a number of case studies of individual feminist movements to illustrate the main varieties of organised feminism and the differences from country to country. The third part looks at socialist women's movements and includes a study of the Socialist Women's International. A final part touches on the reason for the eclipse of women's emancipation movements in the half-century following the end of the First World War, before a general conclusion pulls together some of the arguments advanced in earlier chapters and attempts a comparison between these feminist movements of 1840-1920 and the Women's Liberation Movement.

1 Philosophers and Organisers

Reason, Religion and Revolution

Women have always protested against their oppression in some way, and individual writers and thinkers throughout the ages have often devoted their attention to women's plight; but it was only in the nineteenth century that women began themselves to combine in organisa tions expressly created in order to fight for the emancipation of the female sex as a whole. The origins of this historically novel development lay in a conjuncture of historical forces operating at three different levels — intellectual, economic and social, and political. These three levels were of course interrelated, but it is convenient for the purpose of analysis to separate them from one another. In order to grasp the nature of the social, economic and political developments which lay behind the emergence of organised feminism, it is first necessary to understand what feminists themselves wanted, and how they justified their demands.

The ideological origins of feminism,¹ with which this first part of the opening chapter is concerned, must be sought in the first place in the eighteenth-century intellectual 'Enlightenment'.² The thinkers of the Enlightenment rejected the view that revelation from God was the source of all knowledge. Truth, they argued, could only be found out by free and reasoned enquiry. All obstacles to the discovery of truth, including censorship, should be dismantled. Truth, once discovered, should be applied, and traditional institutions and vested interests which impeded its application should be removed. The triumph of reason was assured, since all human beings were fundamentally rational creatures, and once they were educated, they would perceive the truths revealed by rational enquiry and naturally proceed to implement them. In the face of reason, no received wisdom was sacrosanct. The intellectual ferment of the Enlightenment was expressed in an almost infinite range of theorising and empirical investigation. The curiosity of Enlightenment thinkers was all-embracing.³ It was natural that one of the many subjects they touched on should be a topic which had exercised the minds of previous thinkers throughout the ages: the nature and role of women.

Many of the leading philosophers of the late eighteenth century devoted at least some attention to the question of women, marriage and the family. Few, however, did so specifically, and none devoted an entire work to the subject. Those who did were generally on the fringes of the movement. The German writer Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel is a good example. Mayor of the East Prussian town of Königsberg and a friend of the philosopher Immanuel Kant, Hippel produced a book which besides being regarded as the beginning of the literary debate on women's place in society in Germany, also has a more general interest and significance: On the Civil Improvement of Women (1794). It is a rambling, discursive and somewhat eccentric piece of work, but some of the ideas it contains are important. Hippel argued that women's abilities were the same as men's, but 'they are not simply neglected, they are deliberately suppressed'. Women were coddled into laziness and educated to be ignorant:

'Reason' is a gift which Nature has vouchsafed to all human beings to the same extent. The most basic principles of Natural Law, in the implementation of which compulsion may be used without fear of contradiction, is the law 'oppose anything that endangers the full development of all human beings'. This principle resides in the highest material law of morality, 'develop every human being to the fulfilment of its potential'.

Hippel saw his age as the era of female equality. 'For a series of centuries, Europe bore only one face: despotism and slavery, ignorance and barbarism ruled everywhere.' Now, however, Enlightenment had at last triumphed. Why should not women be capable of being raised to that rank which belongs to them as human beings after such a long suppression?'⁴

All the themes that Hippel introduced were to recur in feminist propaganda. His own writing was limited in several respects. For example, though he believed women capable of full and equal participation in politics and justice, argued for coeducation, and urged the employment of female physicians, he also thought that women were naturally more peaceful and generous than men, and used this as an additional reason for placing them on juries and in offices of state. He did not seem to sense the contradiction between his belief in the equal abilities and differing natures of the male and female sex. This was a contradiction that was to recur with great regularity in feminist writing. Hippel was attacked and derided by his contemporaries. Nevertheless, his book was an important one, above all for its enunciation of the principle that women should be allowed to develop their abilities and personalities without hindrance.

Hippel was writing in 1794, at a time when the French Revolution had already reached its most radical point. He was a strong critic of the Revolution, because, as he said, it ignored half the nation — the female half. But he did recognise that many women were 'growing weary of the chains which the law paints for them in such a favourable light'⁵ and in fact the French Revolution provided an important additional impetus to that of the Enlightenment in the development of feminist ideology. In France, the place of women in society had long been discussed by writers concerned with the morality of marriage, the reform of the law or the restrictive nature of nobility.⁶ The leading French writers of the Enlightenment had also considered the question, though usually only in passing; Rousseau was anti-feminist, while Montesquieu, Diderot and Voltaire were sympathetic to women's claims and Condorcet — to whom, incidentally, the German von Hippel's debt was particularly great — was enthusiastically on the side of feminism.⁷ The debate was taken up by a host of lesser writers. By 1789 there was a respectable body of literature advocating equal education, equal access to jobs and equal political rights for women, justifying these claims on the grounds that all human beings were equally endowed with reason. These ideas found some political expression in the Revolution which broke out with the calling of the Estates General, the old French Parliament, occasioned by the total collapse of royal finances in 1789. No fewer than thirty-three of the cahiers de doléances, grievance lists drawn up by constituents and electors, urged greater educational opportunities for women.⁸ In the Estates General itself, and the various constituent and legislative assemblies which followed it, there were always a number of deputies influenced by Enlightenment writings in favour of women's rights, and some of them expressed their views quite forcefully.

More important, perhaps, in the political ferment of the years 1789-93, in Paris and the major provincial cities, women themselves began to organise in the struggle for their rights. They formed women's political clubs, and exerted strong pressure on some of the leading men's political clubs which formed the equivalent of political parties in the Revolution. The leading figures in this movement included Etta Palm, a woman of Dutch origin who petitioned the Assembly and spoke before it in 1791 in favour of equal rights in education, politics, law and employment, and tried to form a national movement of women's clubs; Anne Tervagne, who called herself Theroigne de Mericourt and who also tried to form a women's club; and Marie Gouze (known as 'Qlympe de Gouges'). The last-named of the three, Olympe de Gouges, drafted a Declaration of the Rights of Women, modelled on the basic document of the Revolution, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. But feminism in the French Revolution did not last long. Olympe de Gouges was executed as a royalist in 1793; Theroigne de Mericourt was beaten up by Jacobin women in the same year and ended her days in a lunatic asylum; and the women's clubs were dissolved by the Convention, at the instigation of the Jacobins, in 1793, after the most prominent of them, the Citoyennes Républicaines Revolutionnaires, had moved to the far left and involved itself with the ultra-radical Jacques Roux and the enragés.⁹

The feminists in the French Revolution were really a marginal phenomenon. Most of them seem to have been minor writers, intellectuals or journalists with no solid political backing. The leading figures of the Revolution were indifferent to women's rights.¹⁰ The legislation of the Revolution ignored women almost completely. The mass of women who participated in the great bread riots and street battles of the Revolution had no time to think of the theories of Enlightenment feminism; they were too busy simply trying to feed themselves and their families.¹¹ Feminism remained a predominantly literary phenomenon in France for many decades. It continued in the Revolution to concentrate on the theory of education and the conquest of equality of educational opportunity.¹² The most famous feminist polemic to owe its inspiration to the Revolution, Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), is really an educational tract.¹³ The ideas in Wollstonecraft's work are still those of the Enlightenment; indeed, in many respects they are identical with those of Hippel or the Revolutionary women's clubs. Women, argued Wollstonecraft, were endowed with Reason: therefore man's predominance was arbitrary. As civilisation progressed, Reason advanced. 'As sound politics diffuse liberty, mankind, including woman, will become more wise and virtuous.' Women were kept in unnatural subjection; the spread of Reason and the reform of education would bring them to the full realisation of their innate rationality. This would then result in an immeasurable improvement in the state of mankind as a whole, as women became 'truly useful members of society'.

The limitations of these ideas were as clear as their more bold and original features. The rationalist assumptions of all these writers would soon be shown to rest on false premises. Only a minority of women were capable of responding to the call; few could read at this period, fewer still could afford books. The optimism which lay behind all the tracts we have looked at reflected a faith in human progress which was eventually to be belied. But the Enlightenment did assemble a whole battery of intellectual weapons to be wielded in the feminist cause: ideas of reason, progress, natural law, the fulfilment of the individual, the beneficent power of education and the social utility of freedom from restrictions and equality of rights. The French Revolution, in which for the first time women actually tried to band together to fight for their rights, showed that social groups - above all, the middle classes, to whom the feminists belonged - did possess the power to shake off legal and institutional restraints and achieve equality of status. All this, however, was insufficient to bring about feminism on a permanently effective basis. More was needed, and in the intellectual heritage of feminism, the Enlightenment and the French Revolution constituted only two among a number of different elements. Even where their influence can be discerned, it was sometimes more in an indirect than in a direct way.

Equally important in the development and inspiration of feminism as the Enlightenment or the French Revolution was the social ideology of liberal Protestantism, The Protestant religion was founded on the belief that the individual, not the priest nor the Church, was responsible for his own salvation. Like the rationalist individualism of the Enlightenment, the religious individualism of the Protestant faith was, in theory at least, equally applicable to both sexes. In practice, of course, the leading figures of the major Protestant churches in the Reformation era believed firmly in the inferiority of women. Martin Luther thought that women should stay at home and keep house. They were not fit for the priesthood: 'Female government has never done any good.' John Calvin agreed with Luther that woman's submission to man was ordained by God. His disciple, John Knox, published a notorious tract against women rulers entitled The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women'. Nevertheless, their belief in the priesthood of all believers did explicitly include women. All human beings were held by them to be equally capable of direct contact with God, without distinction of sex; and Luther and the Calvinists went to some lengths to demonstrate the falseness of the Catholic belief that women were unclean and agents of the Devil.¹⁴

More than this, the Protestant Reformation quickly - spawned a whole brood of extremist religious sects whose doctrines went even further than those of Luther and Calvin, attacking conventional marriage and advocating free love and the complete independence of the female sex. Women often took a prominent role in this sectarian activity, above all in the seventeenth century. Many of the leading sectarian preachers of the English Civil War were women, and the Quakers, Ranters and other libertarian religious groups were notorious among contemporaries for the freedom of expression they gave to women.¹⁵ This was perhaps not of any great or lasting importance in the development of feminism. What was crucial was the general principle that lay behind these radical manifestations, a principle shared in essence by the official Protestant Churches, however reluctant they might be to accept its consequences. The Protestant belief in the right of every man and woman to work individually for his or her own salvation was to provide an indispensable reassurance, often indeed a genuine inspiration, to many, if not most, of the feminist campaigners of the nineteenth century.

The rationalism of the Enlightenment and the moral imperatives of Protestantism came together in the nineteenth century and fused in the creed of liberalism. The liberals saw the world as composed of a mass of individual atoms, all competing with one another for their own individual benefit. Competition, free and unrestricted, would benefit society as well, because the most just and the most virtuous would come out on top, and use their power beneficently, while the evil and indolent would inevitably get their just deserts. Only if the interference of the state were reduced to a minimum, all artificialities of status between individuals abolished, all outmoded hierarchical institutions removed and all barriers to the free competition of individuals swept away, would a truly just and equitable society come into being. Liberalism wanted society governed in the interests of the people through institutions accountable to them. Reasonable behaviour, fairness and morality, essential in a society where formal restraints on competition had been abolished, could not however simply be taken for granted as the rationalists of the Enlightenment took them for granted. Education was to be moral as well as rational; reasonable behaviour was to be based on self-discipline and inculcated by religion and conscience as well as by persuasion. There were many expressions of these views in the early nineteenth century, and not a few attempts to apply them to women. The liberal creed was a durable one, and by mid-century it had been subjected to a good deal of elaboration and discussion. But its fundame...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Preface
• Copyright
• Abbreviations
• Contents
• Dedication
• 1. Philosophers and Organisers
• 2. Moderates and Radicals
• 3. Socialists and Revolutionaries
• 4. Militants and Conservatives
• Conclusion
• Appendix: International Feminist Movements
• A Note on Further Reading
• Index