The Women's History of the World

by Rosalind Miles

  They could, and they did. The machine of the patriarchs ground on, crushing women, children and native races as it went, consigning the flower of its youth to dusty death miles from home, making those same women, children, youths and natives the excuse for all its own self-serving, self-deluding obsessions. And when sexism combined with racism in the vicious circle of supremacy, women were victimized from both sides, as in the worst atrocity of the Indian Mutiny when the rebel sepoy troops imprisoned the British women after the fall of Cawnpore in the very bibighar (women’s house) where the white officers had previously kept their Indian concubines. When the soldiers refused to pollute themselves with the women’s blood, butchers were sent in.

  The British army recaptured Cawnpore only to find the bibighar running with blood. The house was littered with female underwear, hair, scattered limbs and naked, mutilated bodies. The soldiers shared out the tresses of one of the young girls and swore that, for every hair, a sepoy should die. The British commander, General Neil, decreed that the rebels’ punishment should be ‘the heaviest, the most revolting to their feelings, and what they must ever remember’. Accordingly the captives were forced to lick the bibighar clean of blood, dooming them in their religion to eternal torment in perdition, before being whipped and hanged in ‘a frenzy of retributive savagery which is one of the most shameful episodes of British history’.38

  In this horrifying massacre and its aftermath, the imperial theme swells up loudly and unmistakably beneath all the contemporary cant. The message was simple – dominion and domination. Empire movements, in defiance of all the new freedoms they purported to offer, merely served to confirm women as the world’s underclass, the perpetual subject race. But beneath the gentle swell of that eternal golden calm, something was stirring. After thousands of years of the human struggle, it was the turning of the tide.

  IV

  Turning the Tide

  As I sat watching Everyman at the Charterhouse

  I said to myself, why not Everywoman?

  GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

  10

  The Rights of Woman

  In Sex, Acquirements, and in the quantity and quality of natural endowments whether of Feeling or Intellect, you are the Inferior.

  THE POET COLERIDGE TO HIS WIFE SARA

  Husband and wife are one, and that one is the husband.

  SIR WILLIAM BLACKSTONE, ‘GREATEST OF ALL ENGLISH JURISTS’

  The history of mankind is the history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her.

  ‘Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions’ OF THE FIRST WOMEN’S RIGHTS CONVENTION IN AMERICA, SENECA FALLS, 1848

  The Queen is most anxious enlist everyone [to] join in checking this mad, wicked folly of ‘Women’s Rights’ . . .

  QUEEN VICTORIA TO SIR THEODORE MARTIN, 1870

  In 1848, an Englishwoman, a Mrs Dawson, applied for a divorce. Her husband had been openly adulterous, while his private pleasures included flogging her with a horsewhip and brutalizing her with a metal-spiked hairbrush. Her petition was refused. This decision followed a judgement of eight years earlier in the case of another unhappy wife, Cecilia Maria Cochrane. Escaping from an unhappy marriage to live with her mother in France, Cecilia had been tricked into returning to England by her husband, who then locked her up to ensure that she would never leave him again. When her mother brought a writ of habeas corpus to try to secure Cecilia’s release, the Court of the Queen’s Bench took occasion to restate the legal position. Women were born to live in a state of perpetual wardship to father or husband, and by entering into marriage they gave their consent to their ensuing state of civil death. Accordingly ‘there can be no doubt of the general dominion which the law of England attributes to the husband over the wife . . . [He] may keep her by force . . . he may beat her.’ Cochrane’s freedom to keep his wife under lock and key was confirmed even at the price of her liberty, as the judge made plain:

  It is urged that by refusing to discharge [Cecilia Cochrane] I am sentencing her to perpetual imprisonment. But I cannot doubt that a greater amount of happiness is produced in the married state from the mutual concession and forbearance which a sense mat the union is indissoluble tends to produce, than could be enjoyed if the tie was less firm.1

  These were not isolated cases. A Mrs Addison was denied a divorce at the same time, although she proved that her sadistic husband was also her sister’s lover, and a Mrs Teush was refused ‘on grounds of public morality’, although the Lord Chancellor himself ‘never recollected to have heard a better case presented by any woman’. For in truth the ‘tie’ of holy matrimony had never been firmer, even when all else was breaking apart. Between 1700 and 1850 the hydra-headed monster of revolution had torn Europe and the Americas apart, bursting the chains that had held the human race in subjection for thousands of years. In Africa, India, Arabia and the East, imperial adventurers both male and female had broken the bounds of geographical knowledge, and re-mapped the globe. Meanwhile the stay-at-homes, not to be outdone, had favoured the world with the pocket watch, the repeat-loading rifle, the cotton gin, wireless telegraphy, the electric generator and Pitman’s shorthand. But while barriers of ignorance and distance crumbled as if they had never been, one great anomaly remained. Women everywhere were still trapped in a state of sexual slavery virtually unchanged since the dawn of man-made civilization.

  For the human race had progressed as far as the twentieth century of the Christian world, and considerably farther by the calendar of any other culture, without making any real dent in the universal belief in male superiority. Every woman still learned at her mother’s knee that men were more important. At the turn of the century in post-revolutionary France, for example, a visitor recorded that at meal-times ‘the master of the house is first to serve himself; next come the men in order prescribed by age and station; the mistress of the house, her daughters and female friends do not approach till the last farm-hand has had his share.’2 By the middle of the nineteenth century, this masculine prerogative had hardened into a set of privileges which were only maintained by denying women everything that men awarded themselves. This ‘Declaration’ written by Elizabeth Cady Stanton for the 1848 Women’s Rights Convention at Seneca Falls, USA, set out the injustices visited on woman by man:

  He has never permitted her to exercise her inalienable right to the elective franchize . . .

  He has made her, if married, civilly dead.

  He has taken from her all right in property, even to the wage she earns . . . becoming to all intents and purposes, her master . . .

  He has so framed the laws of divorce . . . as to be wholly regardless of the happiness of women . . .

  He has monopolized nearly all the profitable employments . . .

  He has denied her the facilities for obtaining a thorough education . . .

  He has created a false public sentiment by giving to the world a different code of morals for men and women . . . .3

  Not unnaturally, men did not see it in this light. And the beneficiaries of the arrangement were not alone in their satisfaction with the status quo – the majority of women devoutly supported it too. Caroline Norton felt for herself the tyranny of masculine supremacy when her barrister husband exerted no more than his legal rights to accuse her of adultery, deprive her of her children, deny her any means of support and then, when she made some money for herself by writing, to sequester her earnings and assume copyright in all her work. Yet even while leading the campaign for the reform of these laws, Caroline could still proclaim, ‘I, for one . . . believe in the natural superiority of man as I do in the existence of God. The natural position of woman is inferiority to man.’4 Caroline Norton was confident that she spoke for ‘millions more’ besides herself: ‘the wild and stupid theories advanced by a few women of “equal rights” and “equal intelligence” are not the opinion of their sex.’

  This view commanded international
support at every level. From Britain, Queen Victoria expressed the feeling of ruling bodies everywhere with her implacable opposition to ‘this mad, wicked folly of “Women’s Rights” with all the attendant horrors on which her poor sex seems bent . . .’5 Victoria’s fears, that ‘woman would become the most hateful, heartless – and disgusting – of human beings, were she allowed to unsex herself!’ were shared by women worldwide of every age and class. In America, women were the only group in the history of the country actively to fight against their own enfranchisement. Elsewhere, too, wherever a handful of reformers succeeded in getting women’s rights on the national agenda, they were attacked violently and often physically by opponents of both sexes equally determined to maintain the natural dominance of man.

  In fact, so far from being ‘natural’, male domination was now being hastily re-invented. Patriarchal sanctions from legal exclusion to social taboo were wheeled out in battalions to meet the threat posed by women ready to risk ‘unsexing’ themselves for the chance of getting their hands on some of the advantages that men had enjoyed for centuries without any apparent harm to their organs of generation. The socialist reformer Beatrice Webb experienced the process at first hand when she visited a Professor Marshall of London University in March 1889 to discuss her new research project. Already an experienced researcher with a considerable body of work behind her, she found herself subjected to this advice from her self-styled superior:

  . . . that woman was a subordinate being, and that, if she ceased to be subordinate, there would be no object for a man to marry. That marriage was a sacrifice of masculine freedom and would only be tolerated by male creatures so long as it meant the devotion, body and soul, of the female and male. Hence the woman must not develop her faculties in any way unpleasant to the man: that strength, courage, independence were not attractive in women; that rivalry in men’s pursuits was positively unpleasant . . . ‘If you compete with us, we shan’t marry you,’ he summed up with a laugh.6

  The re-statement of women’s inferiority was not however occurring solely through individual initiative. Behind every panicking patriarch, historical factors were combining to create new conditions of women’s oppression; new fetters, traps, whips and goads appeared even with the very structures purporting to bring in the brave new modern world. Broadly, these fell into three separate but related developments:

  – industrial organization and the rise of capitalism

  – the birth of modern science and the redefinition of ‘the nature of woman’

  – the response of the legislators to social change.

  Of the three, the damage caused by the creeping blight of industrialization was the easiest to identify. Factory production, as the South African feminist Olive Schreiner showed, ‘robbed woman of her ancient domain of productive and social labour’:

  Our spinning wheels are all broken, and we dare no longer say proudly as of old, that we and we alone clothe our peoples . . . for a time we kept possession of the kneading trough and the brewing vat [but] today steam often shapes our bread and the loaves are set down by our very door.7

  The loss of the old-style family economy toppled women from their place at the centre of a structure that had given them status and fulfilment. In exchange they faced, for the first time, a rigid sex-segregation of work which decreed that man was that heroic novelty, ‘the bread-winner’. This was a move that automatically relegated women to a lower, less important level than they had known before. The new working conditions in fact contrived to separate women not only from their former productive labour like baking and brewing, but also from their men. Where previously both had been necessary and valued partners in the household unit, wives now had to see their husbands singled out for the special training to perform sophisticated industrial tasks, while they were increasingly condemned to low-grade, casual and poorly paid labour, with the inferior status that derived from their now-inferior contribution to the economy overall.

  This new and structured sex-segregation affected all women, not merely those of the emerging ‘working classes’. In pre-industrial times most women lived and worked in family units which were part domestic, part commercial, and shared with children, widowed or orphaned kin, elderly relatives, maids, servants and apprentices. The separation of home and work separated women not just from their fruitful labour and their men, but from the brood of children, from other women, from control over their own lives, and from access to the outside world. Neither the downtrodden wives of the ‘labouring poor’ nor the idle wives of rich men were able to exert any significant influence or play any part in the management of events. Effectively, they were squeezed out of any say in the world of work, while being forced, in most cases, to go on working. The course of the nineteenth century saw the women of all advanced economies pushed to opposing ends of the spectrum, high and low, as they were driven out of the middle where they had formerly ranged across the board according to their ability and circumstances, just as men had done.

  With the creation of women as a separate section of society, a new under-class, came a growing sense that they posed a problem of a unique and unprecedented complexity: so ‘the woman question’ was born. New dilemmas call for new solutions, and of all the emerging intellectual disciplines of the nineteenth century, none was more serviceable to its troubled opinion-makers than science. This new realm of knowledge offered the comfort of absolute certainty – the human brain could now be accurately measured to the nearest micro-milligram – and so the new science of ‘craniology’ was born.8 Craniology made the unquestioned assumption that intelligence related directly to brain size, then proceeded to ‘prove’ that the brain of the white male was larger than that of blacks, orientals, native Americans, or any of the ‘subject races’.

  Craniology’s contribution to the ‘woman question’ was the indisputable proof’ that the brain of a male is almost always larger than that of a female. The comfort this gave to the cause of male supremacy was, however, short-lived. On sheer brain mass women lost out to men; but in the ratio of brain size to body size, women invariably came out ahead. As the idea of the superior masculine intelligence has been vital to the justification of male supremacy, this caused a severe difficulty. Craniology rose to the occasion; intelligence was located in the frontal lobes, the parietal, the occipital, anywhere in fact where the male brain could be shown to be bigger than the female. In all this flurry of false scientism, the central question went unaddressed: if the possession of a penis and an outsize brain were the distinguishing marks of the lords of creation, why was the world not ruled by whales?

  Whales, though, were not the issue when the rulers of the world were busy proving themselves to be little more than overgrown monkeys. Once evolution had come to the aid of craniology, the case against female intelligence was complete – Darwin dismissed the ‘less highly evolved female brain’ as ‘characteristic of the lower races, and therefore of a past and lower state of civilization’.9 As this shows, the arrogant scientism which was so marked a feature of the emerging modern world was routinely employed not in the objective search for new truths, but in the determined recycling of the old lies. In addition, science itself became a new instrument of power; the swift colonization by men of this huge and virgin realm of knowledge placed in their hands the right to define what was, and what should be, what was ‘normal’ and what ‘natural’. The triumph of science completed a process stretching back to the dawn of humankind; the ultimate source of power, significance and creative might, once the miraculous female womb, then the sacred phallus, was now the masculine brain. And by the ultimate perversion of the great mother’s supreme function, the scientific mind of man now gave birth to the stunted, dwarfish version of woman which still cripples us today.

  For, like industrialization, modern science conspired to offer woman a new definition of her role and purpose which in fact confirmed her second-class status and left her worse off than she had been before. The doctors, physiologists, biologists, gynaecolo
gists, phrenologists and quacks who made their contribution to ‘the woman question’ with countless ‘scientific rationalizations’ of ‘woman’s nature’ simply discovered what the man on the Clapham omnibus could have told them in the first place: that women were weak while men were strong and that male domination was therefore not only right but necessary. The distinctive contribution of the good doctors, which indeed they offered in abundance, was ‘scientific proof that women were life-long martyrs to ‘the tyranny of their organization’. What this meant for a woman was movingly outlined by Dr George J. Engelmann, president of the American Gynecology Society, speaking in what can only be described as a hot flush:

  Many a young life is battered and forever crippled in the breakers of puberty; if it cross these unharmed and is not dashed to pieces on the rock of childbirth, it may still ground on the ever-recurring shallows of menstruation, and lastly, upon the final bar of the menopause ere protection is found in the unruffled waters of the harbor beyond reach of sexual storms.10

  With woman’s every natural function seen as a life-threatening crisis, the rational scientific male could not repose much confidence in such a frail vessel. Woman, it now emerged under the scrutiny of pseudo-biology, was a creature hopelessly fragile not only in body, but above all in what the craniologists had grudgingly conceded her by way of mind. Nervous disorders and mental instability were her lot, but there could be no hope of remedying her deficiency in the little grey cells by education: any learning for young ladies risked ‘excessive stimulation’ to their feeble mental parts and was incalculably dangerous. The philosopher Herbert Spencer, previously savaged by Carlyle as ‘the greatest ass in Christendom’ for his part in the evolution debate, was foremost among those who took it upon themselves to trumpet the ill-effects of ‘brain-forcing’ upon young women: diathesis (nervousness), chlorosis (‘green-sickness’ or anaemia), hysteria, stunted growth and excessive thinness were the least they should expect if they so much as touched a copy of Catullus. Nor was this all. Overtaxing the brain, Spencer warned, ‘produces . . . flat-chested girls’: consequently those who ‘survive their high-pressure education’ could never bear a well-developed infant’.11