Under the July Monarchy (as during the Enlightenment and even occasionally before) liberal reformers argued that female intelligence was not inferior to male and that girls deserved a more serious education in order to develop it; a periodical devoted to the subject was established in 1845. Things remained mostly at the level of discussion, however, until Napoleon III, in one of his attempts to gain liberal support near the end of his regime, appointed Victor Duruy as Minister of Public Instruction. Duruy proposed setting up state-run secondary schools for girls, and his supporter Jules Simon, later an important Third Republic politician, gave a much-noticed speech on the subject in 1867, saying that young women, with their special qualities of intelligence, tact, and sensitivity, ought not to remain as “decked-up idols.” But his alternative was to make them “useful and charming companions in study for us,” and his vision of female education remained focused on marriage and family life, with no intention of preparing young women for independent careers. He retained the strong sense of difference between male and female nature common among people of both sexes, and in any case the Bonapartist regime fell before Duruy was able to act on these ideas.37
It was in 1880, following Gambetta’s triumph over the monarchists and clericals, that the Third Republic made a significant move in this direction, setting up state-run secondary schools for girls. The law was named for a young follower of Jules Ferry, Camille Sée (male, despite what his name may suggest), and its aims were still narrow. Ferry, like Jules Simon, was above all concerned to remove girls from a priestly education he blamed for creating a moral and intellectual abyss between husbands and wives; republican solidarity and the contentment of men were his motives more than the emancipation of women. But the Act’s effect soon outran these intentions. Although the curriculum of the new schools did not contain the mathematics and classical languages that prepared students for university entrance, subjects deemed too “abstract” for girls, it did envisage female teachers for the new collèges and lycées des filles (hitherto advanced instruction in girls’ schools had mostly been given by men), thus expanding opportunities for women in one area, and requiring a new teacher-training institute to prepare them. It was established at Sèvres (and headed by a woman) in 1881. There is considerable evidence that pressures were then mounting to bring instruction for girls closer to that given to boys, and thus to prepare them for the baccalauréat and the further education and careers to which it gave access. The demands seem to have come largely from bourgeois families of a modest sort, concerned (like their English counterparts mentioned above) to provide a career path for female children for whom marriage could not be expected to guarantee survival and security.38
Testimony that such attitudes were spreading in France comes from the new edition of a highly popular book of advice on choosing an occupation, Édouard Charton’s Guide pour le choix d’un état ou Dictionnaire des professions, published in 1880. Its earlier versions in 1842 and 1851 assumed the book’s audience to be almost wholly masculine; the only female occupation mentioned was teaching. By contrast the much-expanded book of 1880 contained a whole section devoted to professions des femmes with an extensive discussion both of particular female occupations (including accounting, commerce, and medicine) and of the whole question of women’s work. Charton was traditional enough (almost no nineteenth-century people of either sex were not) to begin by saying that a woman has “a natural profession, fitting to her powers and faculties, that of manager of her household and educator of her children,” but he rejected those who sought to confine them to it; many women needed to work for pay, whether to supplement a husband’s income, provide for her own sustenance before marriage or in widowhood or if she remained single, or to help meet the needs of relatives. “We add that this obligation is not always an evil; valiantly and ably fulfilled it becomes an opportunity for merit, a source of inner satisfaction, a genuine dignity and a basis for the esteem and respect of all. If the independence of those women favored by fortune becomes an escape from every serious obligation, a cause of idleness and uselessness, it is an evil, not a good. What is considered as a privilege becomes a ground of inferiority, of loss.” Charton’s views were in accord with the large increase in the number of young women who attained lycée degrees, tripling to 13,000 between 1885 and 1890; five years later there were over 800 women (still a small number to be sure, but not to be ignored) registered in university faculties. Ferry and Sée probably did not anticipate such a result, but once the anti-clerical animus of the republican politicians got mixed in with the desire of families to assure some kind of stable future for their daughters, the wider aims of the feminist movement began to find an opening. Their power of fulfillment came less from acceptance by male politicians than from their pertinence to the conditions of existence inside a more fully modernized form of bourgeois life.39
The absence of a similar political impetus for expanding female education in Germany was a chief reason why things went more slowly there. Both the left-liberal Progressives around Friedrich Naumann and the social democrats supported the educational objectives of the expanding feminist organizations, but neither had sufficient clout in national politics to make their backing effective. Secondary education was available to girls whose families could afford it, in various kinds of Mädchen- or Töchterschule (as well as from private tutors), but the curricula were much like that in French pensions, giving students the materials to provide their later husbands with what one fed-up reformer called “a pretty domesticity.” All the same some women succeeded in providing themselves with a good educational foundation, and clamored for admission to universities. Some went to Switzerland, where women could study medicine as early as the 1870s (a point noted by Édouard Charton). From the mid 1890s several German states (led, as in many such instances, by Baden) made it possible for girls who had spent sufficient time in schools to take the Abitur examination that was the German counterpart to the baccalauréat, and thus in principle have the right to attend universities. At first they were only accepted as “guests,” but by 1900 they could register as regular students in the chief Baden university, Heidelberg, a right accorded in Berlin only in 1908. Meanwhile, the traditional Töchterschule began to be supplemented with Lyceen, Oberlyceen, and Gymnasien for girls. At the outbreak of the War women constituted around 6 percent of students in German universities.40
The rate of progress was slow, but Gunilla Budde thinks it was sufficient by the end of the century to encourage increasing numbers of young women to reject their longstanding exclusion from the putatively universal principles of autonomy and responsibility that were expected to orient the lives of their brothers. The reduction in family size increased the chances that resources hitherto devoted chiefly to sons might support the education of daughters, and at least in some families (Dolores Augustine cites the Siemens as one example), the expectation spread that Bildung for women should prepare them to chart their own path in the world, partaking of the bürgerliche ethic of Leistung (achievement) previously reserved to men.41
Achievements and limits
The overall pattern underlying all these developments can be clarified by considering the argument of an insightful if too-optimistically titled book, Robert Max Jackson’s Destined for Equality: the Inevitable Rise of Women’s Status. At the deepest level, Jackson argues, the advance of women that has taken place since the middle of the nineteenth century rests on the unfolding of modern institutions and practices.
Modern economic and political organization propelled this transformation by slowly dissociating social power from its allegiance to gender inequality. The power over economic resources, legal rights, the allocation of positions, legitimating values, and setting priorities, once present in families shifted into businesses and government organizations. In these organizations, profit, efficiency, political legitimacy, organizational stability, competitiveness, and similar considerations mattered more than male privileges vis-à-vis females.42
As long as politi
cal authority and productive activity were regulated by the same hierarchical (and in our terms teleocratic) principles that underlay rigid male dominance inside families, “family role differentiation was directly embedded in economic and political inequality”: the public and private arenas each reinforced the gender inequality practiced inside the other. But as abstract considerations of utility and efficiency gained power outside the family, the continuity between the two realms was disrupted; men found themselves operating outside their families according to principles that did not support the power they still claimed within them; male supremacy was called into question by the evolution of the public world that had earlier mirrored and confirmed it. Jackson has no illusions that men in general supported either the principles or the policies that called their power into question; quite the contrary they often fought them, moved either by prejudice or by the satisfaction some found in domination. But “their institutional interests repeatedly prompted them to take actions incompatible with” their personal views or desires. A similar point of view has been upheld by other writers, for instance by Jürgen Kocka in debates with certain feminists who regard any society capable of realizing equality between men and women as “post-bourgeois.”43
A telling example is provided by Jackson’s discussion of the “Married Women’s Property Laws” that, beginning in the mid nineteenth century in America and somewhat later in Europe, abolished the centuries-old practice of giving husbands control over the real property of their wives for as long as the marriage lasted. Two linked considerations lay behind these changes. One was that the older arrangements reflected the situation in which families were centers of economic enterprise, making it desirable that all the resources available for operating the business be controlled by a single head – who, in the light of traditional assumptions, could only be male. As business organizations grew larger and more anonymous, becoming corporations with limited liability, often run by professional managers, the close link between family property and business grew looser, diminishing the need for husbands to control their wives’ capital. Even where family wealth and business remained intertwined, however, other considerations worked in favor of leaving title to property in the wife’s hands. During the nineteenth century, as we have already noted, businesses increasingly came to rely on credit no longer chiefly provided by family members but by anonymous lending institutions. In difficult times, if a firm was threatened by collapse, all the property in the hands of its head was at risk. Leaving the wife legal control over her property thus became a shield against ruin, quite apart from recognizing the rights of women. As Jackson notes, “In the fifty years after the laws’ passage, most litigation invoking the married women’s property acts concerned debtor–creditor relations, not husband–wife disputes. The spokesmen for commerce had condemned the common-law doctrine that stripped wives of legal independence because it muddied the legal obligations for debt. Women’s social status did not concern them.” Thus the evolution of commerce and finance undermined the inherited grounds for giving husbands control over their wives’ resources.44
Jackson recognizes all the same that the separation between male and female spheres grew wider before it narrowed. As modern forms of economic and social activity spread, men’s traditional connection to the world outside the household provided families with their only link to them. “Women deferred to men and depended on husbands because they had no practical alternatives outside the family. By shouldering the burden of sole economic responsibility, men gained deference and superiority within their families. As the structures of economic and political inequality gradually disengaged from gender inequality, the structure of family role differentiation faced increasing pressures.” It was “not the permanent, inherent needs of industrial society” that fostered the heightened separation of spheres, “but the transitional imbalance between the long-term egalitarian implications of modern society and the momentum that sustained gender inequality. The role-differentiated family – with an employed husband and a homemaker wife – was a transitory family form that bridged the transition between a family economy and a modern industrial economy.”45 Although Jackson’s argument probably underplays the role of cultural change – of the instability introduced into the gender system by Enlightenment criticism – and he does not try to understand the difference between the two phases in terms of the changing impact of involvement in distant connections for which I have argued here, the overall pattern he describes fits fairly closely with the one I have tried to sketch out.
Much of the path he charts, however, still remained to be traversed at the end of the nineteenth century. One way to describe what had been accomplished is Göran Therborn’s conclusion that despite the persistence of patriarchal relations and the prejudices that underpinned them, “the subjection of women had nevertheless ceased to be self-evident in Europe.” This was a limited achievement to be sure but it was far from a trivial one, since female subordination long rested precisely on such self-evidence, and there are parts of the world even in the twenty-first century where it still does.46 Many things kept the principles put forward by Condorcet, Hippel, and the Mills from being able to find realization, including the resistance to feminist demands by the large majority of men; of these some feared women as competitors, while some recoiled from the more complex and subtle challenges to a domination that may have compensated for a weakness they could not escape feeling in other parts of their lives. Were there space we would consider both the often silly but revealingly anxious satires of the “new woman” that appeared in newspapers and magazines, and the “crisis of masculinity” that a number of historians have discerned in the work of artists and writers such as Gustav Klimt and Otto Weininger, and in the anxious attention paid to such threatening figures as Salomé and Delilah.47
One mode of equality that was slow to be established was the right to vote, among the chief goals sought by nineteenth-century feminists the one it took longest to achieve. Typically it came in stages in Britain, conceded to women over thirty in 1918, at the moment when suffrage became fully universal for men, and to those in their twenties ten years later (in the USA the ratification of the nineteenth amendment in 1920 eliminated sex as a basis for the franchise); in Germany it came with equally characteristic suddenness, by virtue of the universal suffrage established in the Weimar constitution of 1918, at a moment when defeat in war gave power to left liberals and social democrats; in France the belief on the part of republicans that women were still deeply influenced by the church, and would vote accordingly, served as an impediment to sex-blind suffrage, or an excuse for not granting it, until just after World War II. However, those who see in this delay a testimony to the unchecked power of ancient prejudices in France often forget that by 1914 fifty Departmental or local councils had endorsed suffrage for women and that a measure in favor of it passed the Chamber of Deputies four times in the period between the wars, nearly succeeding in the more conservative Senate in 1925.48Opposition to women’s rights was not a cause that united all men, it divided them along many lines, sometimes in parallel with other issues, sometimes not.
The consciousness that fundamental change had occurred was widespread, and what it involved can be shown from a text that I hope provides a fitting conclusion to this chapter. It was from the pen of Camille Mauclair, a writer and critic well known at the time, who began as a radical symbolist (like others in his literary camp sympathetic to anarchism) but turned to a series of reform causes, at once social and aesthetic. In 1899 he published an article on “Women in the Eyes of Modern Painters” (“La Femme devant les peintres modernes”). Although focused on representations of women by artists, it took the change it found there as evidence of a larger shift in the way women appeared to men. Mauclair was fully aware of the way traditional male ways of looking at women turned them into objects of masculine desire and fantasy, as illustrated by the portraits painters had long made of them. In such images,
Her happy face, radiating a v
irgin brightness, is present by virtue of its smile and the clarity of its eyes; it is devoid of any mental mystery, it waits, like a sheet of blank paper, for the man’s feeling to inscribe his dream on it. It is a permanent spectacle, open to admiration like a landscape. And what our contemplation seeks to discover on it is itself, the motive of its attraction, why it is that we invest so many sentiments, upsets and spiritual anxieties in that countenance, natural, calm, proffered and impersonal.
In recent decades, however, painters’ representations of women had begun to alter, giving them a different kind of presence, first in work such as Manet’s famous Olympia and Déjeuner sur l’herbe and Degas’s portraits of women in his own family, then in pictures by lesser artists as well. Here Mauclair found women who give evidence of an individuality, a power of expression, and a testimony to independent thoughtfulness that make us aspire to know, no less than with portraits of men, what links these surface features to the mental and psychic life that animates them. In place of the ideal of a placid beauty, “carnal, radiant, and animal,” of the dressed-up and indifferent creature who reflects the “aroused desire of the painter and the man of the time,” we see a being whose enduring magnetism is accompanied by a “psychological expression whose birth is within.”
She has broken through the barrier imposed by gallantry and tradition, that isolated her from life and confined her in a narrow domain, by respect as much as by belief in her mental incapacity. She takes part in moral life, she shares the cares and responsibilities of modern man, she adopts the same mental habits, she is acquiring an equivalent personality, and her physiognomy gives evidence of it.
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