Above all, they held on. The French founder of the first Society for Women’s Rights in 1866, Maria Desraismes, was already a well-known feminist and anti-clericalist by 1860; her last work, Eve dans l’Humanité, appeared in 1891. Elizabeth Cady Stanton retired from the presidency of the National American Woman Suffrage Association in 1892 at the age of seventy-seven; Susan B. Anthony took over for the next eight years, only standing down when she reached the age of eighty. In state after state, country after country, women fighting for the rights due to their sex fought on until they had outlived, burned off or converted the opposition.
When the moment came, though, it came in England. Women already had more power in America, through a combination of their country’s democratic ideal and their own active role as co-pioneers with their men, especially in the West. The British government, riding high on the world’s earliest and most successful Industrial Revolution and the glory of an Empire on which the sun never set, already presided over a system which excluded women entirely from these key national enterprises. In 1832, with the First Reform Bill, it proposed to make this exclusion legal and perpetual. This act, which granted the vote to huge numbers previously disenfranchised, restricted it solely to ‘male persons’ for the first time in English legislation.
Protest was immediate. So too was the masculine support without which the women’s struggle would have been far longer: on 3 August 1832 the famous radical, ‘Orator’ Hunt, presented a petition to parliament demanding that women who met the same property qualifications as men should get the vote too. In an echo of arguments from earlier revolutions in America and France, he urged that there should be no taxation without representation, and that women who were liable to be executed in strict equality with men, should enjoy the same equality in life.
Hunt’s petition was hooted down amid scenes of the fatuous ribaldry that to this day disfigure the Mother of Parliaments when women’s issues are in question. But the battle was now officially joined, on all fronts. At the world anti-slavery congress in 1840, English abolitionists imparted their feminist vision to their American sisters; this resulted in the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention which formally engaged the fight for ‘woman suffrage’ on the other side of the Atlantic. When in 1869 Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony launched their radical feminist newsletter, Revolution, there could be no more room for doubts as to the nature of the change that women sought.
The right to vote was always the cornerstone of every emancipation programme, its denial the central and most visible symbol of women’s subordination. But the struggle for women’s rights involved striking out for other freedoms too. As the oldest of the tyrannies, religion came high on the feminist hit-list, but for once the women were not alone. From the 1840s onwards a host of scholars, most of them German, had been producing work that not only demolished the Bible’s value as historical evidence, but brought about a profound change in the status of the scriptures. Equally damaging to traditional Christian faith were the discoveries of geological science, which from the publication of Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology in 1830 overwhelmed the world with unassailable evidence that the biblical account of the creation was simply a myth. The creation story took another mortal blow when the ‘Monkey Man’ Charles Darwin showed that man had not been uniquely privileged to be God’s handiwork, but had evolved over time just like any other animal. Under the combined onslaught of historians, linguists, geologists and Darwinians, no reasonable individual in 1850 could continue to believe, as had been possible only ten or twenty years before, that the Bible and its account of masculine supremacy were literally true. Scenting blood, feminist free-thinkers closed in fiercely for the kill. How could it ever have come about, they asked, that men had built a theory of male superiority upon a story that showed Adam as weakly knuckling under to Eve, then whingeing about it?
Assaults on Christianity for its degradation of women were coming in from all sides, like this onslaught of 1876 from the Roman Catholic heartland of Italy:
Women must withdraw themselves from the influence of the church, and with a new culture . . . they will be able to stop believing and making their children believe – thereby stunting the development of their intellects – that rain is sent us by Jesus, that thunder is a sign of divine anger and menace, and that successful crops and a good or bad harvest are to be attributed to the will of Providence . . .24
But it was from America, where Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony were united in their belief that the Bible had for 2000 years been the greatest block in the way of women’s progress, that the most radical attacks came. To Stanton, the Old Testament was ‘the mere history of an ignorant, undeveloped people’, subsequently manipulated to lend ‘heavenly authority’ to man’s demands for women’s subjection. Women would not even begin to grasp the nature and extent of this cosmic confidence-trick until they had access to a true version, which, in a mammoth undertaking, The Woman’s Bible (1895–8), she eventually provided. For thousands of years, God had given anti-feminism its cloak of respectability and divinity. Now the white-bearded old patriarch was shown to be an emperor with no clothes.
The feminist rejection of the low view of women that Christianity had imposed upon so many nations had an important consequence for another of the key issues of the women’s rights campaign: the demands for education. The ignorance of women had been bound in with Christian dogma – Eve’s sin consisted of reaching out for the tree of knowledge, so her punishment was to be for ever deprived of it. Unchallenged for centuries, this attitude produced generations of women doomed to be brought up in mental darkness and then condemned as stupid: ‘We are educated to the grossest ignorance, and no art omitted to stifle our natural reason,’ complained Lady Mary Wortley Montagu bitterly in the eighteenth century.25
By the end of this century, protests against what passed for women’s education had become widespread: ‘most in this depraved age think a woman learned and wise enough if she can distinguish her husband’s bed from another’s,’ observed the pioneer educationalist Hannah Woolley with her characteristic tartness. Yet the precedents for educating girls were not encouraging. Despite a long Western tradition of ‘learned ladies’, their success had been private and patchy – the brilliant d’Andrea sisters, both fourteenth-century Italian lawyers, were taught by their father, Caterina Corner, fifteenth-century queen of Cyprus, by her brothers, and the sixteenth-century poet and ‘priestess of humanism’ Tullia d’Aragona, by her lovers. There was nothing here to build on. In addition, the careers of individual ‘blue-stockings’ like that of ‘the Saxon nymph’ Elizabeth Elstob, who made unimagined advances in the study of Anglo-Saxon through her ‘incredible industry’, yet who ended her days in desperate poverty, struggling unsuccessfully to keep a dame school, were not encouraging. Worst of all had been the fate of Mary Astell’s proposal for what would have been the first college of higher education for women in the world; when first floated, around the turn of the seventeenth century, it had attracted a promise of £10,000 from Queen Anne, but bitter opposition ensured that nothing similar was even suggested for another 150 years.
Yet the ferment of revolutionary ideas around the vexed ‘woman question’ ensured that education for girls could not for ever be left off the agenda. One Victorian father, Thomas Huxley, born in the very year that Thomson published his Appeal on behalf of the benighted female sex, showed how far opinion had moved in one generation:
I don’t see how we are to make any permanent advancement while one-half of the race is sunk, as nine-tenths of all women are, in mere ignorant parsonese superstitions; and to show you that my ideas are practical I have fully made up my mind . . . to give my daughters the same training in physical science as their brothers will get . . . They, at any rate, shall not be got up as man-traps for the matrimonial market.26
The impact of these men, whose enlightened views located them in a fine line running back through Cotton Mather to Sir Thomas More and Erasmus, was to be incalcul
able. Barbara Bodichon, for instance, read the first British paper on votes for women in 1865, and was one of the key figures of the European suffrage struggle; she also funded feminist publications, and helped to found Girton College, Cambridge. All this only became possible because she had been brought up by a progressive educationalist who, like Huxley, saw to it that his daughter received an education exactly on a par with that given to his son.
The real breakthrough, however, came when, just as with the management of the suffrage struggle, women took matters into their own hands. From Emma H. Willard’s bold opening in 1821 of the Troy Female Seminary in the US, through to Miss Beale’s foundation of St Hilda’s College, Oxford, England, in 1892, the achievements crowd the calendar. These successes were won in the teeth of frequent fierce divisions between the reformers themselves. Some, like Catherine Beecher of the USA, believed passionately in women’s traditional role, and demanded education in ‘domestic science’ to fit girls for married life. Against this, others, like Emily Davies, the founder of Girton, fought her colleagues with unshakeable determination to ensure that her students had the same educational opportunities, and satisfied the same requirements as men did. Yet the divisions were overcome. Nor was this explosion of education for women purely an Anglo-American business: from the 1860s onwards, Learmonth White Dalrymple in New Zealand, Kalliopi Kehajia in Greece, Pandita Ramabai in India, and Marya Trubnikova in Russia worked with countless other women to further the schooling of girls at every level from kindergarten to graduate school.
For with the extension to female students of higher education (and the women reformers had proved that if men would not let them into their universities, they would found their own) the right to enter the professions could no longer be withheld. Male doctors might puzzle their heads as to why women should want to be doctors rather than nurses, but the female aspirants lost no time in setting them right – ‘I should naturally prefer £1000 to £20 a year,’ observed the first British woman doctor, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson.27 This dry speech masked a strong feminist idealism. Garrett Anderson had been inspired to think of becoming a doctor after hearing a lecture from Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman doctor of America; like Blackwell she used her influence to help women in every way, working for suffrage and opening up the medical profession, finally becoming the first woman mayor in England, of Aldeburgh, Suffolk, in 1908.
These women needed every ounce of the courage of their convictions to withstand the rearguard action mounted against them at every turn. The Australian doctor Harriet Clisby struggled for years in England and America before she finally qualified in 1865 at the age of thirty-five. America was not always as hospitable as this to women hoping for a medical education; when Harriet Hunt was personally admitted to Harvard in 1850 by the dean, Oliver Wendell Holmes, rioting students objecting to ‘the sacrifice of her modesty’ forced her to withdraw, never to return.
Even after qualification, the humiliations and obstructions heaped on female medics did not cease. To become Hungary’s first woman doctor Vilma Hugonnai-Wartha had to matriculate in advanced Latin and mathematics; to work as a nursing assistant to the professor of the medical school; to publish two dissertations; and to undergo a special viva-voce exam; all this in addition to the normal course of study completed by men. At the end of all this in 1879, it was announced that as a woman she would only be awarded a certificate of midwifery. Later still, even after she had also qualified at Zurich University, she was checkmated once again by new legislation allowing women to practise medicine only in partnership with a male doctor.
These struggles were duplicated for each and every one of the professions that women sought to enter. Every country held, too, peculiar challenges for feminism; the struggle worldwide consisted not of imposing a set of general principles from nation to nation, but of winning what could be won from the local conditions and national conventions. So in India, Sarojini Naidu, Abala Bose and others campaigned against both widow-burning and the caste system, in which a woman is invariably lower caste, because female, than the men of her own caste, while in Japan, Fusaye Ichikawa led the fight against the regulated prostitution that held thousands of Japanese women in virtual slavery.
Undoubtedly though, of all the causes that fuelled the fight for the rights of women, most important was the parallel struggle against the slavery of the southern states of America. Their horror at the plight of the Negroes pitched many women headlong into the quest for freedom – the campaigner Sarah Grimke was only four when she saw a female slave savagely flogged, and she never forgot it. While still a child she fought against the law forbidding anyone to educate a slave by teaching her personal slave to read and write, for which she was flogged herself. In these circumstances, abolitionism became the cradle of feminism as the violent and uncompromising hostility of masculine society turned these women into active campaigners for women’s rights: ‘I ask no favours for my sex,’ declared Sarah Grimke. ‘All I ask is that they take their feet from off our necks.’ In any conflict between the two causes, there could be only one choice, i was a woman before I was an abolitionist,’ Lucy Stone told the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. ‘I must speak for the women.’28
And speak they did, raising their voices everywhere, for education, for law reform, employment, civil rights and, above all, ‘Votes for Women!’ The symbolic power of the last is evident from the fact that it was not granted until after all the others had been won; women were admitted to secondary schools, universities and the professions, granted property rights and divorce laws, before they were permitted the sacred token of full citizenship. America, predictably, led the way, when a western state, Wyoming, enfranchised women in 1869. The first country to give women the vote, to its eternal credit, was New Zealand in 1893; the contemptible delaying tactics of the British government against Mrs Pankhurst, her shock troops, and their sedate sisters in the suffragist arm of the movement ensured that Australia, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Russia all brought their women to the polls before the British victory in 1918. But at last, after all the speeches, the petitions, the ridicule, the resistance, it was all over. Women’s wrongs were rights now. Women had won.
Or had they? In the shadow of the guillotine, Olympe de Gouges had cried that revolution never changes things for women. The rights that women had won through the long century and more of struggle were essentially rights of men. Women had had no option but to batter their way into that age-old fortress of male privilege, and storm the citadel where masculine supremacy still held out. But those who saw it as the final victory were deceived. Even in the moment of triumph, there were those who clearly saw what lay ahead:
No one who understands the feminist movement, or who knows the soul of a real new woman would make the mistake of supposing that the modern woman is fighting for the vote, for education, and for economic freedom, because she wants to be a man. That idea is the invention of masculine intelligence. Woman is fighting today, as she has all the way up through the ages, for the freedom to be a woman.29
To be a woman . . . what was that? In the discovery of the answer to this question was to lie another struggle, another battleground. Wearily but without complaint, the world army of women shouldered arms and marched forward once again.
11
The Body Politic
No woman can call herself free who does not own and control her own body.
MARGARET SANGER
Under no plea or promise can it be permissible to submit the individuality, either mental or physical, of the wife, to the will and coercion of the husband. The functions of wifehood and motherhood must remain solely and entirely within the wife’s own option.
ELIZABETH WOLSTENHOLME ELMY
Whenever a comparison was made which seemed to be unfavourable to their sex, the ladies were able to express a suspicion that we, as male analysts, had never overcome certain deep-rooted prejudices against the feminine . . . We had only to say, ‘This does not apply to you. You are an exce
ption, in this respect you are more masculine than feminine.’
SIGMUND FREUD
So the vote was won. The crown and central symbol of the struggle for women’s rights, it stood for all the other new rights and freedoms too – education, citizenship, entry to the professions, ownership of property. But what use was the chance of higher education to. an unmarried mother of fourteen? What was the freedom of the ballot-box to a middle-aged woman who, crippled with a prolapsed uterus after the birth of her seventeenth child in twenty years, could not drag herself into the polls?
Even as the struggle for women’s rights was in full swing, many realized that without physical emancipation for women, it would be a hollow victory. In 1919, Victor Robinson of the American Voluntary Parenthood League located the battle for contraception as the cornerstone and culmination of the fight for freedom, and warned of the opposition it would encounter just as every stage of women’s progress had before it:
The Women's History of the World Page 27
