Jones G.S., Claeys G. The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Political Thought

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Lucy Delap

Republican ideas and the language of the Enlightenment continued,

however, to structure the woman question. The English writer Mary Woll-

stonecraft (1759–97), a visitor to France shortly after the 1789 Revolution,

offered a different register in which to situate the post-revolutionary ‘woman

question’. Her writings were based within the radical dissenting circles of

Joseph Johnson, Richard Price and William Godwin. In Britain, there were

few popular spaces in which women’s rights might be debated, and par-

ticipation in radical circles was limited to very small numbers of women

writers such as Mary Hays and Elizabeth Inchbald, often writing ﬁction and

drama.

These writers were committed to the moral progress of humanity

through the use of reason. In 1792, Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication of the

Rights of Woman, a political and educational reform tract which denounced

sentimental appeals to the passions and sympathies of women, and stressed

their individual rational will, to be sustained and developed through the

discipline of education. Wollstonecraft made what has been read as a key

‘feminist’ insight, in her linkage between private relationships and public

power. She argued that ‘sensibility’ and social mores formed the basis of a

systemic and tyrannical ‘sexual aristocracy’ (Shanley 1998). Wollstonecraft

aimed her work on gender against that of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who had

famously portrayed women as naturally frivolous and weak, and destined for

the virtuous life only in domesticity, in

Emile (1762). They did, however,

share a critical position towards the women they saw around them, leading

some scholars to attribute to Wollstonecraft a ‘feminist misogyny’ (Gubar

1994). But though Wollstonecraft accepted that women were currently con-

stituted as corrupt and ignorant, in abstract terms, she held that women’s

virtue was identical to men’s. It lay in the exercise of reason and the control

of the passions, leading to an ‘authenticity of self ’ equally open to both

sexes (Taylor 2003). This was the divine capacity that humans had been

granted by the Creator, and Wollstonecraft situated the ‘woman question’

as one of how women could cultivate virtues for religious motives. But she

stressed that women could not be expected to become virtuous until they

had been given their ‘natural rights’ – independence and individuality. She

concluded ‘take away natural rights, and duties become null’. In her unﬁn-

ished novel, The Wrongs of Woman (1797), Wollstonecraft spoke against the

despotism of marriage, and the sexual hypocrisy of her society. Her ‘female

revolution in manners’ was intended to change the public world through

5 Clark 1995 offers a broader account of how gender was addressed and constructed within British

radical and plebeian culture.

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The ‘woman question’ and the origins of feminism

giving women equal civic status and the possibility of work, though she saw

them as primarily domestic. The woman question for Wollstonecraft was

understood to relate to ‘gentlewomen’, since ‘the most respectable women

are the most oppressed’. Her novels, however, revealed more sympathy with

the condition of working-class women, and she claimed to be speaking ‘for

the improvement and emancipation of the whole sex’. Wollstonecraft’s ‘rev-

olution’ was not constructed as furthering the greater good of the state or

republic, but was for the individual self-development of women. ‘Speaking

of women at large, their ﬁrst duty is to themselves as rational creatures, and

the next, in point of importance, as citizens, is that which includes so many,

of a mother’ (Wollstonecraft 1993,pp.227, 230, 262, 226).

1 The passionate languages of utopian socialism

Mary Wollstonecraft agreed with her husband William Godwin that sex-

ual freedom should not be celebrated as a part of feminine emancipation,

but was detrimental to this project. Nor did she recommend passionate

love as the basis of marriage, prefer ring ‘rational fellowship’ and friendship

(Wollstonecraft 1993,p.231). But only a few years later, a diverse range of

what are retrospectively read as socialist writers were to make quite differ-

ent arguments that would dominate the ‘woman question’ for the following

four decades. Ironically, while free sexual union was discussed, the trend in

the nineteenth century was towards more formalised marriages, with fewer

of the separations, pragmatic trial marriages and other kinds of temporary

relationships that had marked early nineteenth-century matrimonial cul-

ture (Taylor 1983,pp.193–4). But while marriage became more formalised

and free sexuality more constrained, some new languages developed which

enabled ‘advanced’ discussion of sexual matters. ‘Socialism’ in its early forms

was one such language. Robert Owen (1771–1858), a textile manufacturer

who advocated factory reform and gave his own workers ‘model’ work-

ing conditions, became inﬂuenced by William Godwin. Owen turned his

industrial fortune towards social experimentation in Britain and America

from the late 1810s. He became a critic of capitalism, not just as an eco-

nomic mode but in its emotional and psychological effects, and advocated

‘co-operation’ as an alternative principle of living. At the heart of his

thought was a commitment to sexual equality, which he believed could be

achieved by an appeal to benevolence and rationality. Owen’s ideas con-

cerning the ideal organisation of society appeared in an early form in 1813

in A New View of Society and were developed over the next twenty years

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Lucy Delap

(Owen 1991, 1993). His key insight was that human character was not

predominantly self-given, but externally imposed by social circumstances.

He could therefore agree with his contemporaries that women’s nature was

narrow, vicious, artiﬁcial and deceptive, but argued like Wollstonecraft that

this was not innate but a result of ‘immoral’ social institutions. The com-

petitiveness, individualism and artiﬁciality Owen diagnosed as characteristic

of early nineteenth-century society were seen as r uling out social harmony,

and could only be transcended in communal living. The main institutions

and systems of society that for Owen reproduced and transmitted ‘immoral’

values were the family and marriage system, religion and private prop-

erty. He regarded ‘single-family arrangements’ as inevitably competitive

and individualistic. Women, especially in their role as mothers, were central

to Owen’s vision of the ‘New Moral World’. Marriage was seen as ‘a pure

unadulterated system of moral evil’ which perpetuated the property system

and effectively made women into prostitutes. Owen preferred to emphasise

the ‘natural’ expression of sexual love outside of conventional marriage.

But despite his extraordinary commitment to sexual equality, Owen did

not radically challenge the sexual division of labour. Barbara Taylor’s exten-

sive study of the involvement of women in his socialist utopia reveals their

frustration at their lack of voice and labour-exploitation in the Owenite

communities (Taylor 1983), as do similar studies of American Owenite

women (Kolmerton 1990). Women in the communities Owen inspired and

ﬁnanced in Britain and the United States were given a certain range of jobs

to perform outside of the domestic sphere, intended to emancipate them

from the roles of wives and mothers (Owen 1993, i,p.150). But crucially

Owen did not ask men to share in domestic tasks, thus leaving women with

a double burden which exhausted them. Moreover, sexual libertarianism

often rebounded against the more vulnerable women Owenites.

Owenism was, like other utopian socialisms, never a mass movement,

but it did offer one of the ﬁrst practical experiments in alternative ways of

living, and was therefore very inﬂuential for how the woman question might

be understood. It also offered an intellectual framework that others might

develop, and some Owenites did express more far-reaching commitments

to sexual equality than did Owen himself. Perhaps as inﬂuential as Owen

was the career of Fanny Wright (1795–1852) a literary woman born in

Scotland, and strongly inﬂuenced by the moral philosophy of the Scottish

Enlightenment. Wright’s writings and unconventional personal life gave her

a prominence in cultural and political affairs. She supported a ﬂamboyant

version of Enlightenment rationalism, and expressed this in support for

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The ‘woman question’ and the origins of feminism

dress reform, communal living and a desire for free sexual unions. Inspired

by American republicanism, her travels in the United States from 1815

onwards gave her a transatlantic inﬂuence and her writings and activism

in both countries became, like Owen’s, a conduit between Britain and the

United States. She had met Robert Owen at his New Harmony community

in 1824, and became inﬂuenced by Owenite socialism, founding her own

Tennessee community for freed slaves at Nashoba in 1825. The free sexual

union basis on which the community was founded caused scandal and

internal conﬂict, and Nashoba was dissolved in ﬁve years. Despite her

antagonism towards marriage, Wright became unhappily married to another

Owenite activist. She spent her ﬁnal years in legal wrangles over her lack

of control of her property and earnings, also attracting immense notoriety

for her ‘unwomanly’ public lecturing (Taylor 1983,pp.65–8).

Wright

saw women’s emancipation as a component of a wider social change, and

showed little interest in women such as Lucretia Mott, who was becoming

an inﬂuential leader of the newly active ‘middle-class’ women’s movement.

Unlike Mott, Wright was a religious sceptic, and based her reforms on an

Enlightenment belief in human plasticity. She therefore stressed the need

for education based on the inherent moral equality of all. In practice, she

felt this could best be expressed through communal living, though in broad

terms, the experiments she and others made with this were not successful.

Despite its centrality in the early decades of the nineteenth century, there

was a turning away from reformed domestic living arrangements in the

‘woman question’ of later decades.

In France, the sexual liberation promoted by Robert Owen and Fanny

Wright was voiced in quite different terms. The late eighteenth-century

writer Charles Th

emin had declared in his De la Condition des Femmes

dans les R

epubliques that sexual liber ty would grow stronger as republican

government grew more advanced. He did not, however, think that women

should take on a political role as voters, and his work indicates the limits of

what has been called ‘republican feminism’. The context of the Napoleonic

Code Civil,from1803, was in any case extremely inhospitable to women’s

liberty. Women became legally classed as minors and deprived of prop-

erty rights; divorce was curtailed and the sexual double standard was given

6 See also Eckhardt 1984. Free unions and the legal status of married women continued to be fore-

grounded within the ‘woman question’ debates, within the personal lives of individuals such as Flora

Tristan and Emma Martin, or reﬂected in the declaration of renunciation of his ‘marital rights’ made

by John Stuart Mill on his marriage to Harriet Taylor. On the important issue of nineteenth-century

marriage and property rights, see Holcombe 1983; Phillips 1991; Shanley 1989.

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Lucy Delap

legislative standing. Perhaps because of this climate, the major text of the

‘woman question’ from this period adopted a new mode of discourse, pas-

sionate and visionary rather than rights-based. The work of Charles Fourier

(1772–1837) looked to sexual liberty as a major part of the solution of the

‘woman question’ as well as all social questions. Like so many writers of his

century, Fourier sought to outline a holistic ‘social science’ which would

provide the key to the ordering of human affairs.

He completed his major

work, Th

eorie des Quatre Mouvements (Theory of the Four Movements)in1808,

though his ideas did not attract an organised movement until the 1830s

(Fourier 1996). Nonetheless his work provides an early refutation of the

republicanism of Th

emin, as well as a rejection of the sexual equality

claimed by revolutionary women such as de Gouges. Instead, Fourier out-

lined an intensely original ‘socialist’ conception of how social harmony

could be achieved, through domestic reorganisation rather than revolution.

He placed women’s condition as the index of social progress – which Bee

Wilson identiﬁes as a restatement of an eighteenth-century clich

e rather

than a novel discovery on his part (Wilson 2002). Fourier indicated by this

statement his belief that women displayed the chief evils of the current state

of society (‘civilisation’), as well as being its chief victims and therefore the

most likely agents of change.

Fourier regarded permanent mar riage and commerce as the great evils of

civilisation, and as having the greatest impact upon women. He called for

a wholesale reversal of the values of ‘civilisation’, to be achieved through a

recognition of the ‘scientiﬁc laws’ of ‘passionate attraction’ which Fourier

believed to govern human nature. His ‘discovery’ led him to postulate

810 different personality types, and he argued for all kinds of individuals,

male and female, to be represented in all human activities, and for each

individual to be free to undertake many different pursuits. He held that

men and women did not form two groups with contrasting features –

instead, humans were to be grouped by a much more complex, non-

gendered formula. Fourier abandoned the discourse of natural rights that

had predominated in late eighteenth-century calls for women’s freedom. His

solution was communal living in phalanst

eres, or in ‘Harmony’, in which

each, whatever age or inclination, could express and fulﬁl their diverse

passions, in both work and sexuality. Passions were God-given, and therefore

could not be immoral or evil, in Fourier’s theodicy. Women’s sexual partners

7 My account of Fourier’s thought draws heavily upon the recent work of Wilson 2002,andIam

indebted to her. See also Beecher 1986; Goldstein 1991.

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The ‘woman question’ and the origins of feminism

might include husband, co-parent, favourite, or ‘plain lover’. Men and

women (and children forming a ‘third sex’) were not to be understood

as complementary and interdependent, but as rivals and individuals. Most

importantly, and most unusually, he viewed women as potentially non-

maternal (Wilson 2002,p.146). This was a major shift in the ‘woman

question’ discourse, but due to Fourier’s relative isolation, did not become an

acceptable part of nineteenth-century political discourse, and most writers,

whether for or against women’s emancipation, continued to class them

as essentially actual or potential mothers. Through their passions, Fourier

believed that women could become the motors of change from ‘civilisation’

to ‘Harmony’ – though he did not clarify what would cause this historical

transition. Furthermore, he did not consistently view women as the agents

of change, sometimes preferring a rich fondateur, or the intervention of

workers, to achieve ‘Harmony’.

Fourier’s followers attempted to downplay the radicalism of his ideas

about gender, preferring to portray him as a kind of political economist.

His ideas about sexual emancipation were reworked by his follower Victor

Consid

erant, to represent a moderate claim for the validity of divorce and

voluntary union in marriage. Fourier’s most explicit work, the Nouvelle

Monde Amoureuse (1818) remained unpublished until 1967, and thus the full

impact of his ideas was limited in nineteenth-century debates. In contrast,

the follower s of Henri de Saint-Simon (1760–1825), the constructor of an

industrial utopia, made women’s emancipation, including sexual emanci-

pation, more central to their doctrine than it had been for Saint-Simon

himself. Drawing on Fourierist ideas, the Saint-Simonians of the 1820s

gathered around Prosper Enfantin, and proclaimed that the regeneration

of humanity would depend on the emancipation of women, particularly

on the substitution of ‘moral marriage’ or free union for legal marriage.

Equality did not mean similarity in function, and Enfantin articulated a

conception of God as Father and Mother, representing reason and senti-

ment. While sentiment was celebrated as the higher value and women were

to participate in all public ofﬁces, the sexual dualisms of their time remained

intact, as well as the hierarchical str ucture of the movement, which tended

to marginalise women. Nonetheless, Saint-Simonian support for commu-

nal living and a romantic, erotic politics did introduce a number of French

women to a language and a movement that foregrounded issues of gender

(including Flora Tristan, Jeanne Deroin and Suzanne Voilquin), and the

Saint-Simonians were also inﬂuential in Britain, through the patronage of

Anna Wheeler and Rober t Owen (Forget 2001;Taylor1983,p.46).

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Lucy Delap

Though originally secular, the Saint-Simonians came to organise them-

selves as a church in 1829, and adopted from the millenarian groups pre-

ceding them in the 1780s the belief in la femme messie – the female messiah.

Fourier condemned this abstract female, preferring his ‘actual’ women, with

their bodily desires. As Claire Moses has argued, the belief in the female

messiah did not empower actual women Saint-Simonians, who became pro-

gressively more excluded from the movement (Moses 1984,pp.56–63). The

followers of Enfantin became absorbed in the Attente de la Femme and the

transnational search for her, and became an increasingly passive and intro-

spective movement. Some of the less prominent Saint-Simonian women

responded by developing a separatist voice, founding their own women-run

newspaper and gradually moving away from the Saint-Simonian identity.

This newspaper, originally La Femme Libre, but after much experimentation

with title, La Tribune des Femmes, was published from 1832–4, and became

an important site at which working- and lower middle-class women could

articulate their views on gender and sexuality. The lack of consensus on

a title and subtitle (La Femme Nouvelle, La Femme de l’Avenir, Affranchisse-

ment des Femmes, Apostalat des Femmes were all in play) suggests that in the

1830s there was as yet no clear language in France with which to articulate

what later became known as feministe or

eclairiste claims.

The discourse of

the ‘woman question’ still tended to f all into either mystical or reactionary

terms, and more progressive writers struggled to articulate their ideas; the

1789 Revolution had left an ambiguous legacy and did not provide an

accepted language of ‘women’s rights’, though it continued to inspire indi-

vidual women such as Flora Tristan, who addressed French workers as ‘sons

of ’89’.

Flora Tristan (1803–44) was one of the women on the periphery of the

Saint-Simonian movement who went on to call for much wider roles for

women than Enfantin had been willing to consider (Dijkstra 1992;Gordon

and Cross 1996,pp.19–27; Moses 1984,pp.107–16). Tristan, an illegitimate

working woman herself, was motivated by the need to improve working-

class conditions, particularly for women, through ‘association’. Campaign-

ing between 1835 and 1844, she stressed women’s rights to work, and called

for a liberalisation of marriage and divorce laws. She had suffered within

an unhappy marriage, and the Napoleonic civil code gave her husband

the authority to determine his wife and children’s location, full custody

8 The late nineteenth-century adoption of les

eclaireures as an alternative, more avant-garde term to

‘feministes’ or ‘new women’ is discussed in Roberts 2002.

330

The ‘woman question’ and the origins of feminism

of the children, and to take their earnings. The destruction of marriage

was not, however, Tristan’s aim, and an egalitarian, intellectually satisfying

heterosexual union remained her ideal. Tristan became an inﬂuential writer

and lecturer, travelling widely and commenting on social affairs in Britain

and Peru. She became associated with Fourier, Owen and some British

Chartists, though like many of the ‘utopian’ writers of her period, she was

not interested in formal political questions of the organisation of the state. In

her 1843 l’Union Ouvri

ere she outlined an autonomous politics of working-

class solidarity that could be extended to the women’s struggle, but did not

easily ﬁnd a language that could express women’s interests while addressing

‘workers’, despite her insistence that women be included in that category.

As the Chartists had experienced in Britain, the 1840s in France witnessed

an increasingly formalised and male-dominated movement of workers and

producer co-operatives, and it became harder to insert women’s claims into

this milieu (Moses 1984,p.109;Rogers2000). Tristan’s political and organ-

isational isolation meant that she did not construct a movement around her

claims. From 1835, more repressive laws made it even harder to articulate

a language or organise around women’s or workers rights in France, until

the revolutions of 1848 allowed for fresh developments within the woman

question. Tristan’s attempt to construct a socialism into which sexual equal-

ity was built did not carry much resonance and the traditionalist version

of socialism of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–65) or Ferdinand Lassalle

(1825–64) was to become the dominant European socialist mode in the

later decades of the nineteenth century. Lassalle, a leading socialist politician

in Germany, opposed women’s suffrage, and urged male workers to strike

against the entry of women into industr y. The First International, a loose

coalition of socialist and Marxist activists operating from 1864 to 1876,did

not fully oppose women’s paid work, but did call for protective legislation

that would in some cases exclude them from the workplace. While women’s

trade unions were allowed to afﬁliate, they were not actively supported; nor

did the Second International (1889–1914) offer any deeper commitment to

women workers. German socialists continued to recruit women as wives of

workers rather than workers in their own right for the closing decades of

the nineteenth century (Evans 1977,pp.156–70).

Proudhon’s Qu’est-ce que la Propri

e? (What is Property?) was written in

1840, and declared that between the sexes there could be no real compan-

ionship. Proudhon envisaged a ‘mutualist’ socialism of small, independent

family-based production, in which men directed the workshop and thus

their wives’ labour. He rejected Fourierist and Saint-Simonian versions of

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Lucy Delap

socialism, and constructed a radical position that was based on women’s

return to domesticity. This call was popular amongst French working-class

socialists, as more and more women came to work outside the home in the

industrialising 1850s, and ideals of domesticity seemed threatened. Though

Proudhon’s misogyny became so overt that he lost credibility as a writer

on the ‘woman question’, he nonetheless created a space within left-wing

socialism for a highly reactionary gender politics, a space that was later to be

inhabited by Ernest Belfort Bax (1854–1918), a prominent British socialist

activist within the Social Democratic Federation (Andrews 2006; Moses

1984,pp.152–8; Offen 2000,pp.128–9).

In Britain, the construction of ‘social sciences’, and the intimate relation

of this to the ‘woman question’ was advanced most forcefully by William

Thompson (1775–1833), in his Appeal of One Half of the Human Race, Women,

Against the Pretensions of the Other Half, Men, to Retain Them in Political and

Thence in Civil and Domestic, Slavery, published in 1825. Thompson wrote

his Appeal as an answer to James Mill’s 1825 Government, in which Mill

asserted that women, having the same interests as their male relatives, did

not need political rights. Thompson was appalled that so central a ﬁgure

in the radical utilitarian movement could hold such a view. Inspired by

his conversations with Anna Wheeler (1785–1848),

and by his knowledge

of Robert Owen’s theories of social co-operation, Thompson offered a

view of women as entirely equal contractors to men, in marriage and in

political rights. Thompson argued that Mill, having assumed that all holders

of unconstrained power would use it to their own advantage, could not

then make an exception to this rule of half the human race. To assume that

all women could count on an identity of interests between themselves and

their husbands or fathers would undermine the entire utilitarian case for

democratic self-government. In any case, some women spinsters and widows

were not under the protection of men and Thompson believed they should

be enfranchised and given equal civic status. Moreover, it was corrupting for

both wives and husbands to assume shared interests. By gaining equal civil

and political rights, all women would gain an ‘expansion of the mind, of

the intellectual powers, and of the sympathies of benevolence’ (Thompson

1997,p.178).

Such calls for self-development were to become a crucial part of the

unfolding nineteenth-century woman question. Thompson held that equal

9 Anna Wheeler maintained and mediated contacts between (among others) Robert Owen, William

Thompson and Charles Fourier (McFadden 1996,pp.204–14).

332

The ‘woman question’ and the origins of feminism

civil rights alone could not achieve this personal development, since women

were permanently disadvantaged in terms of strength and reproduction. He

therefore argued for a radical change in social organisation. Like Fourier,

Owen and the Saint-Simonians, he used his intervention into the woman

question to make a much broader claim – that co-operation must replace

competition as the basis for all social organisation. Women, disabled by their

physical reproductive capacities, would always suffer in any competitive

society. Instead, Thompson advocated the equal distribution of wealth and

property held in common as a precondition to women’s full equality. And

under such conditions, Thompson predicted that masculinity would be

as altered as femininity: In a co-operative world, ‘Man, like woman, if

he wish to be beloved, must learn the art of pleasing, of benevolence, of

deserving love.’ But he was not such a utopian as to dismiss gains in the

contemporary, competitive world. He advised women in sweeping terms:

‘Until the association of men and women in large numbers for mutual bene-

ﬁt shall supersede . . . individual competition, assert everywhere your right

as human beings to equal individual liberty, to equal laws, political, civil, and

criminal,toequalmorals,toequaleducation...’Undertheseconditions,

Thompson assumed that women would still ‘become the respectable and

respected mothers and instructors of men...’ (Thompson 1997,pp.205,

207). Women were the agents of change in Thompson’s resolution of the

woman question, but still within quite conventional roles. As for how

change would come about, Thompson called on women to simply reﬂect

on their situation – such reﬂection would inevitably lead to women’s refusal

to act as the chattels of men, and ‘the collective voices of your sex raised

against oppression will ultimately make men themselves your advocates

and debtors’. Though Thompson assumed that sexual inequality had its

origins in the biological differences between the two sexes, he still portrayed

all male oppression as remediable by better education and reﬂection. To

men, Thompson advised: ‘Be rational human beings, not mere male sexual

creatures! Cast aside the ferocious brute of your nature. Give up the pleasures

of the brute, those of mere lust and command, for the pleasures of the

rational being’ (Thompson 1997,pp.208, 146–7).

Nonetheless, the Appeal contained some quite explicit discussion of sexual

pleasure. Thompson (1997,p.101) had written that ‘Woman can demand

no enjoyment from man as a matter of right: she must beg it, like any of

her children, or like any slave, as a favour.’ He sought instead ‘esteem and

conﬁdence between equals, heightened by the glow of sexual attachment’.

But under current conditions, women could not even admit to their sexual

333