Jones G.S., Claeys G. The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Political Thought
Подождите немного. Документ загружается.
Lucy Delap
feelings. While she must serve as ‘the obedient instrument of man’s sensual
gratification, she is not permitted even to wish for any gratification for
herself. She must have no desires: she must always yield, must submit as a
matter of duty, not repose upon her equal for the sake of happiness: she
must blush to own that she joys in his generous caresses, were such by
chance ever given’ (Thompson 1997,pp.101–2). But as Barbara Taylor
points out, women socialists and radicals were often less convinced of the
regenerative and positive power of sexual passion than their male comrades.
Anna Wheeler herself had written to Robert Owen’s newspaper, The Crisis,
in 1833, noting that women’s love for men was a sign of her ‘vicious and
slavish training’, and needed to be rationalised ‘by the invigorating influence
of a co-operating reason’ (quoted in Taylor 1983,p.47). Wheeler’s emphasis
on reason over passion was more characteristic of women writers on the
woman question than Owen, Fourier or Thompson’s preference for erotic
liberation.
2 Mid-century debates: liberalism and sexual difference
Thompson’s Appeal had been written in the absence of a sustained commit-
ment to women’s rights within the utilitarian movement, and in the face
of James Mill’s clear opposition to women’s suffrage. His work influenced
what has been regarded as the ‘manifesto’ of the Victorian and Edwardian
women’s movements, John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women, published
in 1869 after the founding of the first women’s suffrage society in 1866 in
which Mill and his stepdaughter Helen Taylor were politically dominant
(Rendall 1985). Mill’s book had a profound international impact; it was
immediately reprinted in the United States and translated into nearly every
European language. Mill’s argument was based on his commitment to indi-
viduality and self-development for women, only possible, he argued, within
conditions of egalitarian relationships. Marriage, in particular, was the focus
of his arguments for reform, and he believed it should become an equal
and voluntar y relationship, without legal intervention, as he stated in his
own voluntary ‘marriage contract’ renouncing his ‘rights’ when he wedded
Harriet Taylor in 1851 (Mill and Mill 1970,pp.45–6). A new model of
marriage would benefit individual women, but also (in utilitarian terms)
society as a whole – the corrupting influence of belief in male superiority
would be removed, and women would be able to absorb a wider, more
public-spirited and disinterested morality. Mill placed moral regeneration,
which was so important to other ‘woman question’ writers, as a secondary
334
The ‘woman question’ and the origins of feminism
goal, achievable only when equality and justice prevailed in sexual relation-
ships, and when women had voting rights and access to all public offices.
Mill’s argument came to supplant older, more popular radical arguments
that had initially motivated claims for women’s suffrage, about the repre-
sentation of ‘the people’, and the struggle against ‘the aristocracy’. Instead,
the ideal woman voter became portrayed as rational and respectable, paying
rates and taxes, in similar terms to the breadwinning working man. This
argument was successful in gaining women the vote at the municipal and
School Board levels around 1869 in Britain.
Unlike Thompson, Mill and his collaborators (wife and stepdaughter
Harriet and Helen Taylor Mill), all emphasised the need for passion to be
subjected to the powers of reason. None were positive about the powers
of sexual attraction as a force for social and personal change. Previous
societies had been based upon the dominance of the physically stronger, Mill
believed. This principle survived still in gender relationships, but only as a
relic of former times: ‘The principle of the modern movement in morals and
politics is that conduct and conduct alone entitles to respect: that not what
men are but what they do constitutes their claim to deference . . . It is totally
outof keeping with modern values to have ascribed statuses...individual
choice is our model now’ (Mill and Mill 1970,p.58). Mill’s work has
been read as a classic statement of nineteenth-century liberalism, but in
fact on the topic of women’s rights, he was isolated amongst his liberal
contemporaries (Griffin 2011). Mill argued that ‘woman’s nature’, so often
used as an argument for restricting their political rights, was eminently
artificial: ‘What women are is what we have required them to be.’ He
therefore left open the question of women’s essential qualities, and laid
a large stress on their unexplored capacities. Nonetheless, he did believe
that women were best employed as household managers, and he did not
comment on the necessity of paid work for most working-class women, nor
the nature of the work, paid or unpaid, they might do and how this might
conflict with equality in public roles. Given the context of the debates over
the Factory Acts and the ‘protection’ they offered to women workers, as
well as the stress on opening up new fields of employment to women in
the women’s movement of the 1860s, this was a curious omission (Rendall
1985,pp.287, 290). His text was more useful to those who came to address
women’s entry to suffrage and public offices, and did not help to resolve the
very significant splits that developed within the women’s movement over the
questions of employment (Malone 1998;Lewiset al. 1995). The ‘suitability’
of women’s employment, and whether they should be given a free labour
335
Lucy Delap
market or a state-regulated one, were perhaps the most contentious of the
‘women questions’ of this period – Mill’s text was perhaps only able to
become a ‘bible’ of the movement because it did not address these points
in any depth.
Despite the boldness of William Thompson and John Stuart Mill’s state-
ments of egalitarian sexual relationships, in Britain and the United States
of the 1830s and onwards, public opinion on women’s status and roles had
become shaped more by a sense of ‘woman’s mission’, ‘sphere’ or special
influence, which persisted into the 1880s (Helsinger et al. 1983,p.xvi).
Though in the 1830s women’s suffrage was raised by Chartists and other
radicals, and was discussed at American women’s rights conventions in the
1840s, it was divisive and controversial and did not yet inspire an organised
movement. Instead, the early nineteenth-century evangelical revival had
encouraged women in Britain and America to take on philanthropic work,
in prisons, schools, temperance and abolition. Abolitionist women drew up
petitions, raised funds and lectured in public – and this work has long been
seen as setting in motion the conditions that led to an organised ‘women’s
movement’ later in the centur y, though recent scholarship has emphasised
the lack of any predetermined transition from philanthropy, to abolition,
to ‘feminism’ (Billington and Billington 1987;Hewitt2010; Mathers 2002;
Melder 1977). The language of evangelism, and the opposition they encoun-
tered in their abolition work, gave women such as Lucretia Mott and the
Grimk
´
e sisters the ability to articulate an egalitarian politics of gender, as
in Sarah Grimk
´
e’s Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of
Wom en (Grimk
´
e 1988 [1838]; Lerner and Grimk
´
e 1998). But evangelism
could also work to contain and restrict women’s freedoms. The ambiguity
of this discourse is demonstrated in a British text, Sarah Lewis’ highly influ-
ential book Woman’s Mission, first published in 1839. Lewis had drawn on
Rousseau’s ideas about women’s education, via the intermediary of Louis
Aim
´
e Martin’s book, De l’
´
Education des M
`
eres de Famille, ou la Civilisation du
Genre Humain par les Femmes (1834) (Helsinger et al. 1983,p.4;Lewis1839).
Like the work of Martin, Woman’s Mission argues against women’s political
rights, and advises women to confine their influence to the domestic realm,
rather than philanthropic work in the ‘public sphere’. Nonetheless, Lewis
believed that women were morally superior, and had a role to play as moral
and spiritual regenerators. Maternal love was the bedrock of women’s influ-
ence, and the highest expression of Christian principles. The expression of
this love in the home represented ‘an inexhaustible field of effort, an inex-
haustible source of happiness; and here women are the undoubted agents,
336
The ‘woman question’ and the origins of feminism
and they complain of having no scope for exertion!’ Lewis concluded: ‘Till
the philosophy of domestic happiness has undergone a thorough reforma-
tion, let not women seek to invade the sphere of the other sex’ (Lewis 1839,
p. 121). Lewis and Martin were expressing ideas that were highly influen-
tial (if less clear when put into practice) in nineteenth-century Britain, the
United States and France, that the two sexes were not rivals, nor situated
in a hierarchical relationship within the common sphere of humanity, as
eighteenth-century writers had stressed, but reigned supreme in separate
spheres (Clark 1995,p.2). It was polemically declared that women’s only
political role was to influence their male relatives to adopt values of duty
and self-devotion. While this belief in ‘woman’s mission’ ran counter to the
egalitarian values articulated by Fanny Wright, Flora Tristan or John Stuart
Mill, the idea of ‘woman’s influence’ was one that some within the women’s
movement found strategically useful, or ideologically appealing. As Karen
Offen has argued of European debates, ‘complementarity of the sexes was
central to feminist perspectives during this period. Most feminists accepted
some type of sexual division of labour in society. What they rejected was
the assertive gendering of the public/private division of spheres as male
and female’ (Offen 2000,p.102). French Saint-Simonian women of the
1830s, for example, emphasised maternity as the unique capacity which
united women and framed their contribution as ‘mother-educator’ to the
state and civil society. ‘Maternity’ had a diverse political valency; in German
cities, it was idealised in the active women’s kindergarten movement, and
more broadly, the ‘mother-educator’ became associated with the reviving or
sustaining of national languages and religious cultures (M. A. Taylor 1991).
Arguments about the regenerative force of women, or mothers, could
take many forms, and historians have recently stressed that it was not only
egalitarian doctrines that provided the impetus for thinking about the status
of women or prompted activism. In Britain, Caroline Norton (1808–77)
conducted an immensely influential campaign for child custody rights for
women from the late 1830s, drawing agency from concepts of maternal
duty and love (Poovey 1988). Writers such as John Ruskin in Britain drew
on Lewis’ idea of separate domains in his ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’ (1865),
a popular essay by a writer whose influence extended across the Anglo-
American world. Like so many Victorians, Ruskin saw women as a major
vehicle for social change, though he appeared to be arguing for the limitation
of their aspirations and role to one of a harmonious helpmate to men –
‘a guiding, not a determining, function’ (Ruskin n.d. [1865], p. 58). He
adopted a paternalistic approach to the woman question, seeing women as
337
Lucy Delap
essentially pure and childlike. Nonetheless, Ruskin extended Sarah Lewis’
idea of women’s mission to the concept of their ‘queenly power’ that must
be also exercised outside of the home (Mclloyd 1995). He therefore sought
women’s education and an expansion of their philanthropic mission – to
propagate domestic values throughout society. It is not easy to place his ideas
politically – they can be read as simultaneously reforming and conservative,
though conservatives such as Anthony Trollope read him as a dangerous
radical. He offers an example of why ‘feminist’ is so unhelpful an identity for
this period, since his ideas gave women compelling arguments for expansion
of their ‘sphere’, as a reviewer writing in the women-run Langham Place
Victoria Magazine recognised, while also drawing on a socially conservative
understanding of the essential nature of femininity.
10
The work of Margaret Fuller (1810–50) in the United States gives an
example of the displacement of egalitarianism from the heart of the ‘woman
question’ and substitution of other goals – in her case (as in Ruskin’s), the
goal of moral and spiritual regeneration of humans through the agency of
women. Fuller was active within the Boston Transcendentalist movement,
edited its journal, The Dial, and became a well-known critic, salon hostess
and writer on the woman question. In 1845 she published Woman in the
Nineteenth Century, an extension of an earlier journal article in The Dial.In
this text she stressed the self-dependence and cultivation of the inner intel-
lectual life needed by women, though she later became more interested in
social questions and was active in the Italian revolutions of 1848.
11
The ram-
bling and eclectic Woman in the Nineteenth Century emphasised the stunting
of ‘woman’ as currently socialised, and envisaged a heroic and intellectually
expansive future for women. Fuller was less interested in legal or social
equalities, and offered a more utopian contribution to the woman question.
She imagined a future state in which men might express maternal love
and care for children, while women were open to intellectual genius and
physical enterprise. Influenced by Fourier’s conception of non-gendered
diversity in occupation, she famously wrote ‘if you ask me what offices
[women] may fill, I reply – any. I do not care what case you put; let them
be sea-captains, if you will.’ Nonetheless, like Thompson and Mill, she did
expect most to become mothers, and to be attracted to domestic duties,
though she argued that ‘a being of infinite scope must not be treated with
10 ‘Mr Ruskin on Books and Women’, Victoria Magazine, 6 (1865), pp. 131–3, quoted at length in
Helsinger et al. 1983,pp.99–101.
11 On women’s role in the European revolutions of 1848 and the repression of the counter-revolution,
see Offen 2000,pp.108–20.
338
The ‘woman question’ and the origins of feminism
an exclusive view to any one relation’. All human powers must be perfected
as ends in themselves, not as means to the satisfaction or companionship of
others, and Fuller therefore regarded ‘old maids’ on a par with mothers, in
epitomising her ideal of self-dependence and as potential agents of the new
order (Fuller 1971,pp.174, 34, 96, 97).
Fuller did not direct her writing towards what were to become the
established campaigns of the women’s movement in the second half of the
nineteenth century – the campaigns around women’s education, professional
opportunities and political rights. Instead, she was interested in encouraging
women to explore their dual ‘Minerva’ and ‘Muse’ creative qualities. These
represented a mingling of masculine and feminine energies, expressed in all
humans; ideally neither would dominate, though historical circumstances
required women to explore their neglected ‘active’ Minerva side before they
could gain true balance. As Otto Weininger was to argue in Vienna in the
next century, Fuller believed that ultimately, ‘there is no wholly masculine
man, no purely feminine woman . . . ’ But this was not a commitment to
androgyny; were women free, Fuller predicted, they would ‘develop the
strength and beauty of Woman; they would never wish to be men, or man-
like’ (Fuller 1971,p.116). Despite her later experiences in Europe, her vision
in 1845 was of the United States as the place where women’s freedom could
be achieved, sustaining a Jeffersonian belief in America’s special mission:
‘here is a less encumbered field and freer air than anywhere else’ (Fuller
1971,p.108). Women in America, less convention- and tradition-bound
than elsewhere, were to be the agents of regeneration of male society.
This would occur, initially, through their withdrawal from male society
and freedom to ‘find their peculiar secret’ through establishing a personal
relationship with God – ‘I wish woman to live, first for God’s sake’, she wrote
(Fuller 1971,p.176). Though Fuller remained critical of how the Christian
Church had treated women, her religious commitment was as influential
on her own work as the egalitarian claims being made for women by
Fuller’s contemporaries. Her work reflects the way in which Protestant and
Dissenting sects had provided intellectual communities and spaces in which
to speak for many of the influential and politically active American women
(Bartlett 1994).
In contrast to the counter-revolutionary oppression in Europe in the
1850s, the late 1840sand1850s in the United States witnessed an upsurge
of interest in the woman question, prompted by the new political space
made available through women’s rights conventions. The 1848 Seneca Falls
and the 1850 Worcester conventions explicitly addressed the issue of how to
339
Lucy Delap
represent sexual difference in a democracy. The ‘Declaration of Sentiments’
drawn up by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and presented at Seneca Falls in 1848
has been seen as a founding treatise of the organised women’s movement,
modelled explicitly on the American Declaration of Independence and
admired in Britain and continental Europe. This document and the resolu-
tions of the convention claimed for women the right to divorce, to freedom
of employment, to speak and preach in public, and to vote. The suffrage
issue was divisive for the convention, and was by no means the keystone that
it was to become in later years. Temperance and abolition were regarded
as intimately linked to the cause of the antebellum women’s movement,
which was also (as in Britain) sustained by Unitarian and Quaker networks.
Women’s rights to keep their maiden names, and their citizenship rights on
marriage became points of activist refor m, as did the linkage of taxation
to representation. Instead reform of marriage was initially seen, as Paulina
Wright Davis put it, as ‘the starting point of all the reforms the world
needs’ (Rendall 1985,p.303). Divorce, however, was not yet acceptable to
all within the women’s movement, and this became increasingly controver-
sial in the years prior to the Civil War. Nonetheless, at the mid-century,
the women’s movement seemed preoccupied with questions of the state of
marriage – the ownership of property by married women, their custody of
infants and right to work.
3 ‘Redundant women’ and social democracy
Demographic, economic and cultural changes led to a shift in focus towards
the second half of the century. The existence and visibility of growing
numbers of single women in the nineteenth century, and particularly the
single middle-class woman living on her own earnings, outside of the frame-
work of masculine authority, became an important ‘woman question’ in its
own right, famously articulated by W. R. Greg’s article ‘Why are Women
Redundant?’ in the British National Review (Greg 1862; Vicinus 1985,pp.3–
6). The physical, social and moral consequences of the autonomy of these
women was debated across Europe and the United States, and contributed
to the sense of sexual crisis that dominated the final decades of the century,
as the ‘new woman’ was invented in literature and political polemic (Evans
1977,pp.26–7;Faure1986;Richardson2003; Roberts 2002; Showalter
1992). While women’s employment became central to the woman question
in Europe, population issues also became important. Population occupied
an especially prominent place in imperial Germany, where the Frauenfrage
340
The ‘woman question’ and the origins of feminism
(‘woman question’) became dominated by concern over the female popu-
lation surplus (the Frauen
¨
uberschuss) in the later decades of the nineteenth
century, and thus by the figure of the alte Jungfer or ‘old maid’ (Dollard
2000). This perceived population crisis across Europe, as single women
became more visible amongst the urban middle classes, led to oppor tunities
to restate and rethink women’s place in German society – with proposals
ranging from the commitment of ‘surplus’ women to religious institu-
tions, to wider professional opportunities for them. However, the German
women’s movement, hampered by the oppressive (anti-socialist) association
laws that were only repealed in 1890, and limited by the widespread social
acceptance of women’s kulturaufgabe as limited to patriotic work within the
home and family, did not gain institutional or political momentum. It was
fatally split between the socialist activists of the Sozialdemokratische Partei
Deutschlands (SPD) and the B
¨
urgerliche Frauenbewegung, the philanthropic-
minded women of the middle classes who looked to outline a wider public
role for themselves, along the lines that Ruskin had suggested in ‘Of Queens’
Gardens’.
The SPD hosted its own versions of the ‘woman question’, as part of a
flourishing debate within European Marxism. In earlier texts by Marx and
Engels such as the Paris Manuscripts and The Holy Family, women served as
symbolic factors rather than active agents, with their status showing the stage
of historical development of society. The focus on production in Marxist
writing left reproductive relations insignificant to historical materialism, and
Marx made little attempt to explain why the initial state of patriarchy had
come about. August Bebel (1840–1913) had developed the Marxist analysis
of the woman question more substantially, making a firm commitment to
women’s rights in his 1879 Die Frau und der Sozialismus (Woman and Social-
ism), a book that later socialists such as Alexandra Kollontai described as
the ‘woman’s bible’ (Bebel 1879; Coole 1993,p.161).
12
Bebel offered a
more visionary picture of future transformations of gender relations, and
was relatively warm to the goals of the ‘women’s movement’ – suffrage and
professional advancement for women. While he retained the primacy of
12 Kollontai, a Soviet revolutionary, was shaped by the influence of the Russian nihilists and populists.
Inspired by Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s 1863 novel What is to be Done?, which advocated sexual
liberation as part of a movement ‘back to the people’, the Russian revolutionary tradition was always
relatively open to women activists. Kollontai and her colleagues, often working in exile, gained the
acquaintance of European socialists such as Bebel and Zetkin, and encouraged women in twentieth-
century Russia to take a leading role in the revolutions (Engelstein 1992; Kollontai 1977; Stites
1978).
341
Lucy Delap
economic factor s in women’s oppression, Woman and Socialism was quite
graphic about the nature of women’s oppression, ranging from the obstruc-
tive dress, dependency and triviality suffered by bourgeois women to the
double burden and brutal treatment of proletarian women. While Bebel
felt that socialist men were to be potentially the agents of women’s eman-
cipation, he also expressed an early formulation of what twentieth-century
feminist writers came to variously call the ‘Turk Complex’ or ‘patriarchy’.
13
He recognised that men enjoyed the sense of power and self-importance
that their dominance over women gave them. Nonetheless, he provided
an alternative vision of the future inspired by Fourier, involving pleasant,
changeable work, and the use of technology to lighten all labour. Unlike
Fourier, Bebel disliked contraception, and his vision of emancipated women
was closely tied to the assumption that most women were to be mothers,
and that reproduction was still their primary responsibility.
Bebel’s work raised the profile of the woman question within Marx-
ism, and inspired Engels to produce his Origin of the Family, Private Property
and the State in 1884 to describe the historical evolution of male dom-
ination. Engels drew upon the anthropological work of Lewis Morgan’s
Ancient Society (1877), and offered a materialist account of the ‘pre-history’
of ‘civilisation’, before men had come to dominate women and productive
relations dominated society. His work in historicising the family and gender
relations was influential for the socialist construction of the woman ques-
tion, though he allowed certain phenomena such as the ‘incest taboo’ and
women’s desire for monogamy to retain their natural status. Engels postu-
lated a period of ‘mother-right’, in which women gained power through
lineage being traced through the mater nal line, while paternity was still
uncertain and men were the mobile factors between communities. Men
worked outside the home, while women ruled it, in Engels’ scheme. But
women’s desire for permanent couplings and advances in agriculture and
animal domestication lead to the reversal of the situation, as men came to
generate an economic surplus and desired to pass it on to their children.
It was the material wealth of the father that became determinate as society
moved into ‘civilisation’. This ‘world historical defeat of the female sex’
thus enacted the first class oppression, and class antagonism remained the
13 The former term was coined by a British ‘feminist’, Eleanor Rathbone, to describe what Virginia
Woolf had also noticed, men’s psychological dependence on women’s subordination (Rathbone
1924; Woolf 1996).
342
The ‘woman question’ and the origins of feminism
key frame that Engels and many socialists were to use in discussing the
‘woman question’. The solution was to make women’s labour productive:
‘The emancipation of woman will only be possible when woman can take
part in production on a large, social scale, and domestic work no longer
claims anything but an insignificant amount of her time’ (Engels 1940b,
p. 184).
Engels’ theory was based upon a natural and unexplained division of
labour that enabled men to control the first private property. Though
Proudhon-inspired calls for all women to be returned to their ‘natural’
work in the home persisted in the movement, it became an alternative
Marxist solution to the woman question that women should be returned
to ‘public industry’. Domestic labour could then be socialised and free but
monogamous sex-love would emerge while marriage became irrelevant.
While Engels foresaw a ‘gradual growth of unconstrained sexual inter-
course and with it a more tolerant public opinion in regard to a maiden’s
honour and a woman’s shame’, he also felt that ‘sexual love is by its nature
exclusive...The equality of woman...will tend infinitely more to make
men really monogamous than to make women polyandrous’ (Engels 1940b,
pp. 82, 88). The ‘utopian’ sexual liberation of Fourier had been marginalised
within the socialist tradition. Moreover, this solution made the oppression
of working (proletarian) women obscured, and Engels saw the remaining
‘brutality’ they might suffer as insignificant, a left-over super-structural habit
from a former mode of production.
Two years later, Eleanor Marx and Edward Aveling elaborated on Engels’
and Bebel’s work with their essay the ‘woman Question: From a Socialist
Point of View’ in The Westminster Review (Aveling and Marx 1886). They
argued, like Bebel, that class and not sex relations were the issue, and only
after the revolution could gender equality prevail, through women’s material
independence of men. The goals of the contemporary women’s movement
(suffrage, repeal of government licensing of prostitution, higher education,
freedom to work) were validated, but Marx and Aveling argued that the
‘bed-rock of the economic basis’ of society was not understood by bour-
geois activists. The reforms sought by women would not fundamentally
change sex-relations, which could only achieved by the abolition of pri-
vate property and the state. In an interesting aside, the authors argued that
women must seek emancipation ‘from themselves. Women will find allies in
the better sort of men, as the labourers are finding allies among the philoso-
phers, artists and poets. But the one has nothing to hope from man as a
343