Perspectives on Feminist Political Thought in European History

From the Middle Ages to the Present

Tjitske Akkerman, Siep Stuurman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136189715
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Spanning six centuries of political thought in European history, this book puts the ideas of thinkers from Christine de Pizan to Simone de Beauvoir in the broader contexts of their time. This intriguing collection of essays shows that feminism is not a varient of modern radical discourse but a mode of analysing the issues of authority, power and virtue that have been at the heart of European political thought from the middle ages.

1 Introduction

Feminism in European history

Tjitske Akkerman and Siep Stuurman

What are women? What are they? Are they serpents, wolves, lions, dragons, vipers or devouring beasts and enemies of the human race…. But by God! if they are your mothers, your sisters, your daughters, your wives and your companions; they are yourselves and you yourselves are them.

Christine de Pizan

In these flaming words Christine de Pizan decried the prevailing vilification of the female sex. The passage is from an open letter she circulated at the French court in 1401.¹

Six centuries and the barrier of cultural otherness stand between us and Christine de Pizan. Nevertheless we cannot fail to recognize a feminist voice here. Pizan's text might figure in an anthology, side by side with, let us say, Marie de Gournay, Frangois Poulain de la Barre, Gabrielle Suchon, Mary Astell, Olympe de Gouges, Mary WoUstonecraft, Harriet Taylor, John Stuart Mill, Simone de Beauvoir and Kate Millet. At the same time, however, numerous passages in Christine de Pizan's work are not immediately accessible to us. They evoke a mental universe and an intellectual context so different from ours that it cannot be readily located within the orbit of feminist discourse as we at present understand it. Christine de Pizan, then, appears to us as both a familiar and an enigmatic figure, a companion in arms from an alien and distant world, voicing feminist concerns in the forgotten allegorical language of courtly love.

We are facing a dilemma that is unavoidable in any attempt to reconstruct the history of a discourse. In order to trace the intellectual, cultural and political lineages of what we today call feminism, we have to know what we are looking for. The assertion that we recognize a feminist voice in Christine de Pizan necessarily implies that we have embarked on our historical inquiry with some preliminary notion of ‘feminism’. On the other hand, we cannot take it for granted that there is one, unambiguous ‘history of feminism’ that develops along a continuous, evolutionary track from the Middle Ages until the present day. A historical investigation must take into account ruptures as well as continuities in the history of a discourse. In the history of feminist ideas this is especially important since feminism has not been one of the major, canonized European intellectual traditions. In the case of feminism, the study of silence and forgetting must be an integral part of any historical account that aspires to be more than a collation of great examples and outstanding texts.

The term ‘feminism’ has been frequently restricted to the women's movements of the late nineteenth century and the contemporary period. When we look at the history of the word, such a restricted use is indeed correct. The word ‘feminism’ became common towards the end of the nineteenth century, and this conceptual innovation was part of a larger transformation of the European language of politics. From the early nineteenth century onwards, the emergence of the various ‘Isms’, such as nationalism, liberalism and socialism, coincided with the emergence of modern mass politics, the idea of social change and the expectation of a future better world. The Isms were essentially ‘concepts of movement’.² In this context, feminism came to be defined as the political articulation of the collective organization of women. In this book, however, the term feminism is used in a much broader sense. That is not to say that we are following the older historiographical tradition stemming from the beginning of the twentieth century, in which feminism was used rather indiscriminately for a variety of ideas, as likely to be found in classical antiquity or ancient Gaul as in the Middle Ages or the nineteenth century. We propose to steer a middle course, limiting feminism to modern European history from late medieval times up to the present day, but not confining it to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

In contemporary women's history, terms like ‘Renaissance feminism’, ‘seventeenth-century feminism’ or ‘Enlightenment feminism’ have become almost commonplace. The new historical research of the past decades has convincingly demonstrated that the early-modern history of feminism is not one of isolated examples or lone precursors of a history that ‘really’ begins only in the nineteenth century. There are, of course, important differences between the nineteenth century and earlier periods, but we feel that a neat dichotomy between a ‘history’ and a ‘prehistory’ of feminism is no longer warranted. Hence, our account of European feminism spans the entire modern era, from late medieval times until the present day. Such a long-term historical perspective will enable us to discuss the relation between feminist thought and the making of modernity without a priori reducing feminism to a belated effect of Enlightenment egalitarianism.

We propose a provisional periodization containing six major subperiods or ‘waves’. The modern history of European feminism, from c. 1400 to the year 2000, might be subdivided as follows:

1 Late-medieval and Renaissance feminism (1400–1600)

2 Rationalist feminism (1600–1700)

3 Enlightenment feminism (1700–1800)

4 Utopian feminism (1820–50)

5 Liberal feminism (1860–1920)

6 Contemporary feminism (1960–?)

This periodization is tentative and hypothetical. It could hardly be otherwise. There is, as yet, no firm empirical grounding for a more precise assessment of the importance of feminist activities in the various periods. Virtually no quantitative research on feminist publishing has been done, and our six periods cannot be more than impressionistic historical constructs. Moreover, there is the complex issue of geographical coverage. All of the chapters discussing the early-modern period have a lot of material on France and French texts. It is important to keep in mind that books published in French were frequently reissued in other European countries, and, more generally, that French culture in early-modern Europe was an international elite phenomenon. By the seventeenth century Paris, that ‘magazine of people and things’, as John Locke once termed it, had become in many ways the cultural capital of Europe. Brita Rang's contribution refers to Latin texts, which also point to an international audience, but in addition she demonstrates the importance of German-speaking feminist voices from the sixteenth century onwards. The major omission in our treatment of the early-modern period is obviously Italy on which we would have liked to include a chapter. The chapters dealing with the eighteenth century chiefly focus on Britain and France, following most general historical treatments of the Enlightenment. Although the preeminent roles of France and Britain in the Enlightenment cannot be denied, the broader geographical spread of Enlightenment feminism largely remains to be explored. In this volume Karen Offen provides us with a number of fascinating glimpses of Scandinavian, German and Dutch sources.

In the course of the nineteenth century, feminism became a European-wide phenomenon: Utopian feminism was, so far as we can see, mainly centred in Britain and France, but after 1850 no clear geographical centres can be discerned except for the greater vigour of feminism in the Protestant nations. Finally, contemporary feminism is an international movement that has left virtually no country untouched.

The contributions in this volume cannot claim any encyclopedic or ‘complete’ coverage. Other students of feminism will wish to highlight other geographical areas, other periods or episodes. With these caveats in mind we feel that it is worth our while to identify and discuss the historical links that are assumed in a growing body of recent and ongoing research. In such an investigation, we need a working definition of feminism that does not prejudice the issue either way. It must be sufficiently broad to be applicable to different historical periods and at the same time sufficiently specific to discriminate between feminist, non-feminist and anti-feminist utterances. Drawing on, but also slightly amending, Nancy Cott's working definition of feminism, we distinguish three core components in feminist discourse:

1 Criticism of misogyny and male supremacy

2 The conviction that women's condition is not an immutable fact of nature and can be changed for the better

3 A sense of gender group identity, the conscious will to speak ‘on behalf of women’, or ‘to defend the female sex’, usually aiming to enlarge the sphere of action open to women³

As borderline cases, we include texts and forms of behaviour that do not explicitly take a stand against male supremacy but nevertheless transgress the dominant codes of femininity.

We are, of course, aware of the fact that historical reality is always more messy and less clear cut than any definition. Feminist identities are not always to be found ready-made. There are many moments in history in which a sense of gender group identity is fragile, barely visible or on the verge of dissolving. Often a conscious collective identity only emerges when groups have first been identified and labelled by opponents: the term ‘feminism’, for instance, migrated to England when newspapers began to use it depreciatingly to refer to unwanted continental doctrines.⁴ We understand gender group identity as a continuing process of making and unmaking. That implies that our definition cannot be used as a neat, quasi-geometrical standard. Recalling a famous observation in Pascal's Pensées, we need not primarily esprit de géornetrie, but rather an esprit de finesse in order to appreciate the often subtle distinctions between feminists and non-feminists. As blurred borders and hybrid identities are fairly common in history, definitions will never dispel all or any doubts about identifying feminists and feminisms.

Our definition covers an enormous variety of theoretical and narrative genres, from allegorical poetry to philosophical treatises and political speeches. Written texts are the main sources used in this book, and our definition is more easily applicable to texts than to visual material. However, as Inge Boer and Martha Vicinus make clear in their contributions, images are often at the centre of cultural struggles about dominant codes of femininity. Even if their meaning is more difficult to pin down, images ought not to be regarded as second-rate sources. The twentieth century has often been called the age of images: representations of womanhood have never before changed so fast or exhibited such dazzling variety.⁵ As Martha Vicinus shows in chapter 11, an actress like Sarah Bernhardt was a leading example not only for the growing coterie of fin-de-siècle Paris lesbians, but also for young suffragists. Photographs of suffragists from the period 1903–13 show them dressed in tweed suits, sturdy boots and neat bow ties. A cigarette or cigar, sword or walking stick, or at the very least a tie, were appropriated as symbols for a shorthand masculinity. Likewise, contemporary feminism has exploited the full range of the semiotic arsenal of (post)modern society, from crossdressing and billboards to movies and virtual images. For all that, the importance of iconographic material for the study of earlier historical periods must not be underestimated. We only need to think of the role of engravings and paintings in the representations of femininity. Nicole Pellegrin and Joan DeJean have stressed the importance of the image as a source of the discourses of gender in ancien régime Europe.⁶ In this volume, Inge Boer reminds us of the important role of paintings and dress codes in the elite culture of eighteenth-century France.

By its very nature, feminist discourse is reflexive and ‘theoretical’ as well as action-oriented and therefore ‘practical’. Women who wrote ‘in defence of the female sex’ fashioned a public language and constructed a collective identity that might be imagined as well as real and usually was both imagined and real although the balance between an imagined female community and a ‘real’ movement has undergone important changes in the course of modern history. Especially in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the line between feminist thought and a feminist movement has not always been an easy one to draw. But even in the early-modern period many authors assumed some sort of sympathetic audience, a feminine Republic of Letters that was never taken for granted but always sought after and sometimes passionately desired. The feminist texts discussed in this book were in most cases not self-contained, isolated treatises but rather members of ‘families of texts’ actively drawing on and presupposing each other. Such series of interrelated texts, like those of the enduring Renaissance controversy on the status of women (usually known as the Querelle des femmes), clearly represent more than a number of isolated literary utterances.

FEMINISM AND THE HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT

Another question that should be addressed is whether it is worth trying to conceive an integral history of European feminism, now that the results of several decades of women's history have brought to the fore a sometimes overwhelming complexity of detail and a welter of subtle differences between groups of women, cultures and nations, and periods. The impressive, multi-volume Histoire des Femmes/History of Women project has brought together and synthesized the results of an enormous amount of contemporary research, but it discusses feminist authors and ideas within particular periods and geographical areas, without, however, presenting an overall account of the development of European feminism. One reason for presenting such an overall account is that specialized studies of individual feminists and feminisms tend to draw on more or less implicit presuppositions about what went before or what came after. Arguments about feminism ‘now’ and feminism ‘then’ are often used rather routinely, as if there actually is an agreed upon overall history of European, or even ‘Western’ feminism. It is one of the aims of this book to inquire into the possible contours of such an overall history.

The reconstruction of a long-term history of feminist thought both enables and compels us to consider its relationship to other fields of intellectual...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: feminism in European history
• 2 The languages of late-medieval feminism
• 3 A ‘learned wave’: women of letters and science from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment
• 4 L'égalité des sexes qui ne se conteste plus en France: feminism in the seventeenth century
• 5 Reclaiming the European Enlightenment for feminism: or prologomena to any future history of eighteenth-century Europe
• 6 Culture as a gendered battleground: the patronage of Madame de Pompadour
• 7 A woman's struggle for a language of enlightenment and virtue: Mary Wollstonecraft and Enlightenment ‘feminism’
• 8 French utopians: the word and the act
• 9 Equality and difference: utopian feminism in Britain
• 10 Liberalism and feminism in late nineteenth-century Britain
• 11 Feminists and sex: how to find lesbians at the turn of the century
• 12 Beauvoir's philosophy as the hidden paradigm of contemporary feminism
• 13 Contemporary feminism between individualism and community
• Guide to further reading
• Index