The Feminist Promise

by Christine Stansell

  In the turbulent months leading up to the Declaration of Independence, that roving habit took her down an intellectual path John Adams considered off limits. In March 1776 she wrote him of her desire to hear that Congress had declared independence. Anticipating the new government, she suggested—she took a helpful tone—that the delegates “remember the ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors.” On the subject of tyranny—much on the minds of George III’s unhappy North American subjects—she reminded him that everyone knew that ordinary men, too, had a disposition to be tyrants when it came to their wives: “a Truth so thoroughly established as to admit of no dispute.” The new laws should restrain such power by preventing “the vicious and the Lawless to use us with cruelty and indignity with impunity.”17

  Abigail probably had in mind the beatings, or “chastisement,” that husbands, as masters of their household, could legally inflict on wives, so long as they did not injure them.18 She did not challenge this system: She opposed men’s abuse of their power, not the power itself. Such objections were not out of line for a well-behaved woman, since neighbors and female kin did their best to manage the social order of their communities by bringing the force of disapproval to bear on cruel husbands and intervening when they could. Goodwives, too, had a stake in well-administered family government.

  It would not have been the description of men’s behavior, then, but rather the suggestion that the Congress take action that riled the delegate from Massachusetts. It was a preposterous thought, and in such testy times it could not be entertained. In asking that the new government protect women by restraining men, Abigail Adams raised disturbing possibilities. In this light, the whole edifice of male governance in the family might be considered an anomaly in a republic. If it was not right to leave women subject to husbands’ whims, then should they not exist in a more direct relation to the body politic?19

  Those mental openings are what John Adams spotted, and why he hauled out the heavy artillery. He blustered, feigning disdain even as his intensity showed how seriously he judged the threat. The tone is heavy-handed mockery, a tactic used against smart argumentative women long before and ever since. “As to your extraordinary Code of Laws, I cannot but laugh.” Really, he bantered, it was men who were in the power of women, although it might look the other way around, men who were subject to “the Despotism of the Peticoat.” He mused with a patronizing rhetorical chuckle that her proposal seemed to prove their enemies were right when they predicted that the rebellion would create chaos, stirring up children and apprentices, Negroes and Indians. But no one in his wildest dreams thought that women would get riled up, too. “Your Letter was the first Intimation that another Tribe more numerous and powerfull than all the rest were grown discontented.”20

  Insofar as his wife was concerned, he seems to have considered the subject closed. But to fellow Bostonian James Sullivan, Adams confided his worries. The only proper foundation of government was consent. But then, who had to consent? “Shall we say that every individual of the community, old and young, male and female, as well as rich and poor, must consent, expressly, to every act of legislation? No, you will say, this is impossible.” But here was the sticking point: “How, then, does the right arise in the majority to govern the minority, against their will? Whence arises the right of the men to govern the women?” Finally, he asked the real question: “Why exclude women?”21

  Why, indeed? The sparks struck between husband and wife momentarily illuminated a vexing problem. Adams understood that women’s uneasy place signified a greater irresolution; it was the contradiction that led to all other contradictions. Natural rights, taken this far, would destroy all distinctions and ranks. “It is dangerous to open so fruitful a source of controversy,” he fretted. “There will be no end of it.” “New claims will arise.” Women would demand the vote; so would young boys, and “every man who has not a farthing, will demand an equal voice with any other.” The question opened the door to democracy, at the time associated with the rule of the rabble—a possibility no one at the Continental Congress would entertain.22

  As for Abigail, she backed down, writing back with a coy couplet about women charming and submitting. She took a different tone, though, when she wrote her friend Mercy Otis Warren. “He is very sausy to me,” she complained irritably. Warren was the closest the colonies had to a woman of letters, a counterpart to the literary ladies of Paris and London. The daughter of one prominent patriot and the wife of another, Mercy Otis Warren was at the time publishing (under a pseudonym) anti-British satirical plays, and she would go on to write a major history of the American Revolution. “So I have help’d the Sex abundantly,” Abigail concluded, as if knowledge of “the Sex” and its need for help was something she and Warren talked about often. She toyed with the possibility that the two of them might pursue the matter. “I think I will get you to join me in a petition to Congress”—petitions being the one political right women had.23 But they never did.

  Thirteen years later, the first words of the United States Constitution majestically invoked the voice of an entire people agreeing to form a government. The document begins, “We the People of the United States.” It did not say “We the Founding Fathers” or “We the politically active minority of white men who have been sent to Philadelphia by our colleagues in the states,” historian Linda Kerber wryly observes. In other words, “We the People” was a fiction, an imaginative projection, not a sociological reality.24 Yet despite their contributions to the revolution, patriot women lacked the means to enter that fiction and reap its benefits.

  The revolutionary settlement left the British law of domestic relations untouched. Coverture was retained; if anything, some features actually worsened, although judicial and legislative applications varied by state, in part because the publication of Blackstone’s Commentaries in the 1760s codified what had been informal legal precedents and the system tightened up. The one exception was divorce. Here the states broke with the harsh British law, which required an act of Parliament to dissolve a marriage (and granted only 325 complete divorces between 1670 and 1857). Laws and courts varied state by state, but overall, looser divorces emerged by 1799, with women as well as men taking full advantage. Still, no one could enter and exit marriage at will. States retained control and a marriage could only end because a judge found that one person had failed to fulfill his or her duties. Typically, only the “wronged” spouse could remarry. The basics remained in place until after 1965, when laws for no-fault divorce began to appear.25

  The relative liberality of divorce reflected the value Americans placed on marriage as a freely chosen state. Marriages in the New World, after all, were not arranged or coerced. As a model of consenting relations whereby individuals joined together out of love and common interest, marriage took on added ideological freight as a metaphor for the nation. The conjugal ideal recast female subordination as a chosen state, softening the hierarchical connotations of family government, although it did little to change the reality.26

  The Constitution was mute on the subject of sex: There was nothing in it that spelled out the masculine basis of the political community. Indeed the word “male” was not mentioned until the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868. Yet except for the customary right to petition, women had no political rights, and their civil rights were also constrained. With a few exceptions they couldn’t vote, make contracts or recover debts owed them, or buy, own, or sell property.27 They also lacked the obligations to government that were the corollary of rights and defined the citizen: paying taxes (since they were not householders), working on the public roads, and serving on juries and in the militia. The last was more important than it seems: The exemption from the duty to bear arms in defense of the republic devolved from the facts of female irresolution, fickleness, and weakness. Thus John Adams thought the most obvious answer to Abigail’s challenge was that women’s delicacy made them unfit for “the hardy enterprises of war, as well as the arduous cares of s
tate.”28

  In sum, the nation as yet had no use for women. The enfranchised citizenry was a minority legislating for a majority, an archipelago of white male property holders surrounded by a sea of the voteless.

  Later in the 1790s, a cultural reevaluation came into play, a way to confer on women an ideological part to play, as mothers. Ideas about republican motherhood assured Americans that women too could add to the sum of citizenly virtue. As mothers and helpmates exercising reason, they could pass on the capacities for civic engagement to their sons. Thus the mother could be a silent partner to the active male citizen. Republican motherhood was a small gain that did not address women’s enforced absence from the affairs of the nation, but it did have important consequences. In the short run, the enthusiasm of prominent gentlemen and a few ladies for enhancing female reason through education—the Philadelphia physician Benjamin Rush, signer of the Declaration of Independence; Judith Sargent Murray, a Massachusetts patriot and essayist; the popular novelist Susanna Rowson—promoted the establishment of girls’ schools. And in the long run, the image of the virtuous mother implanting civic benevolence in her sons (only secondarily her daughters) undercut the older misogynistic disdain for the sex who bore the guilt of Eve. In the emerging middle class, women began to radiate natural virtue, a cultural acquisition that would over the next century work to enhance their access to broader participation in public affairs. Stereotypes of lustful, depraved, unruly women began to gravitate toward poor laboring women and slaves.29

  In contrast to American women’s acquiescence to their marginal place, women in the French Revolution forcefully engaged in the Revolution’s tumult, surprising and shocking onlookers with their patriotic fervor and militant demands. Not all, but some called for rights for women, and their claims played an important role in both the brightest hopes of the Revolution and its dark outcome. To the political right, they were harpies, and in time republican men also drew from the old playbook of misogyny to condemn them as dangerous and out of control. Countering the animosity, revolutionary women trumpeted their patriotism; they were les citoyennes, conscientious members of the new order.

  French women in 1789 entered the revolutionary crisis with a store of ideas and traditions to draw upon in presenting themselves as political actors. Women of all classes were accustomed to political roles, from aristocratic ladies engaged in machinations at court to street sellers who rioted for bread when prices soared. Intellectual and literary women reigned over semi-public, semi-private salons where conversation set the terms for political debate at large. A few worked as journalists in the crackling scene of Paris newspapers. Finally, the French Enlightenment theorists—les philosophes—whose ideas inspired and fed popular agitation, had long considered the place of women in a just society. This literature was hardly a brief for women’s rights. Quite the opposite. Eighteenth-century writers made women’s deference to men a keystone of good government, most famously Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose philosophical novels linked female submission and domestic duty to the state of nature that underlay the common good.30 But the work nonetheless brought issues of women’s place in the polity to the surface of discussion.31

  This meant that women entered the revolutionary crisis primed by questions that had already been asked, even though the answer was always the same: They belonged at home. From the first outbreak of agitation, bands of women sought to join the revolutionary fraternity. The 1789 women’s march on the court at Versailles launched the revolt against the monarchy: Clamoring for lower food prices, the crowd looked both backward to the ancient tradition of the food riot and forward to the demands of empowered citizens, by actually moving the seat of government when they brought the king and queen back to Paris. Women’s activity swelled thereafter—unrestrained, seemingly impetuous, but in actuality organized and purposeful. For years afterward on two continents, images of French viragoes would be used to smear women who went too far.

  In 1791, women poured into the National Assembly, the representative body of the constitutional monarchy, and from the galleries joined in debates and votes. They joined a number of the revolutionary clubs and formed a few of their own. Women in the clubs watched closely the National Assembly’s deliberations and worked to endow la citoyenne with virtue, reason, and responsibility. Well-to-do bourgeoises called them to serve the republic by supervising state-run facilities for poor women, beefing up traditional feminine charity work as a kind of republican social service administration. But others lobbied for political equality and civil reforms: an equitable divorce bill, equalization of inheritance, and (here it is again, Abigail Adams’s hope) protection from wife beating. The French joined the United States in liberalizing divorce, but with a more radical twist. A couple could be divorced by common consent rather than because one spouse charged the other with malfeasance, a provision that carried with it the shocking implication that marriages could be dissolved at will. The next year, two and a half times as many women as men took advantage of the new law, most frequently because of a husband’s abuse.32

  The high-water mark came in the months before and after the constitution of 1791. Arguments about female equality surged back and forth. The Marquis de Condorcet, a leading philosophe, published A Plea for the Citizenship of Women, which made the case for full political rights on the basis of universal reason: “Now the rights of men result only from this, that men are beings with sensibility, capable of acquiring moral ideas, and of reasoning on those ideas. So women, having these same qualities, have necessarily equal rights.” He concluded sharply that “either no individual of the human race has genuine rights, or else all have the same.”33

  The next year, Olympe de Gouges published her remarkable “Declaration of the Rights of Woman.” Gouges was a Paris playwright of common birth, and royalist in allegiance. Her relationship to democratic aspirations was uneasy—she addressed her “Rights of Woman” to the queen. Yet she reached further than any contemporary, to expose the hypocrisy of radical rationales for masculine sovereignty. Gouges sardonically questioned the very basis of male authority—“Tell me, what gives you sovereign empire to oppress my sex?” she demanded of male readers. “Man” was for her no abstraction but rather the literal man of the revolutionary clubs who “pretends to enjoy the Revolution and to claim his rights to equality” but dodged his responsibility for women’s situation, preferring “to command as a despot.” She called for a national assembly of women to draw up their own declaration of rights.34

  In 1793, Gouges was imprisoned for circulating tracts critical of the Terror and executed as an enemy of the republic. Her death and the ultimate crushing of women’s demands condemned her “Declaration” to obscurity. But the fact that her ideas had no immediate consequences should not obscure what they show about the revolutionary process. For a moment, the republican brotherhood seemed contingent and assailable. The Declaration was “both compensatory—adding women where they have been left out,” observes Joan Wallach Scott, “and a critical challenge to the universality of the term ‘Man.’ ”35

  From the beginning, opposition came from both the political right and the left. Women’s historic power in the French court left a toxic association in the popular mind between female political involvement and aristocratic decadence and guile; this cluster of images joined perennial anxieties about unruly women to stir up antipathy, even in the earliest heady days. Even Condorcet thought women should refrain from undue political activity lest they neglect their domestic duties. “You take care of your household government,” the editor of a widely read radical newspaper lashed out against the women’s clubs, “and let us take care of the republic; let men make the revolution.”36

  In the end the National Assembly did not consider women’s suffrage, and the 1791 constitution divided the republic into active and passive citizens. Active citizens were male and could vote and hold office. Passive citizens could not. The category included all women along with men of the lower ranks of property, age, occupati
on, status, and color. French women gained more civil rights than did their American peers. Along with divorce, the constitution made marriage a civil contract and remedied discrepancies in inheritance and property rights that had debilitated widows and daughters.37

  As other European powers united against the Revolution and the republic called its men to arms, the requirements for total citizenly dedication intensified; and the standards for sacrifice, virtue, and purity in defense of the nation became weapons of political reprisal. When the Terror began with its executions and imprisonments, female political activity became a lightning rod for accusations. The Jacobins had long distrusted the more moderate and bourgeois Girondins for their tolerance for women. Now their opposition hardened into enmity and with it, charges of being counterrevolutionary: The Girondin women were labeled sirens and harpies whose monstrous lust for power endangered the republic. In 1793, the Committee of Public Safety shut down the women’s clubs. In 1795, when the Committee was overthrown and the Revolution entered its next phase, the Directory prohibited women from joining any public gathering at all. A version of republican motherhood emerged. What was a conservative response in the United States to tensions about woman’s place thus came from darker origins in France. There, Bonnie Smith concludes, “a combination of bloodshed and legislation helped usher in domesticity.”38