Feminism

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FEMINISM

the french revolution and its influence
restoration, reaction, and the persistence of a "feminist" critique
the revolutions of 1848 and their aftermath
the peak of pre–world war i feminism
conclusion
bibliography

The word feminism, which originated in France during the nineteenth century, was not used in reference to female emancipation until the 1890s; even into the twentieth century some movements for women's emancipation did not use the word. There is, moreover, no single, specific definition for the term. This article uses the term feminism synonymously with women's emancipation—unorganized and organized efforts to improve women's status and oppose their systematic subordination. Critical responses to women's subordination appeared in Europe as early as the fifteenth century, but the eighteenth-century Enlightenment philosophy, with its emphasis on reason, education, progress, individual self-fulfillment, and natural law as a source of knowledge, redefined what it meant to be human, and thus raised issues about women's humanity. The role of women, and in particular, their legal civil status and their education, played a large role in Enlightenment discourse.

Karen Offen and other historians of feminism have detected two feminist currents evolving in the nineteenth century that were based on different representations of women. The "individualist," or egalitarian current derived from the assumption that women and men share a common human identity and therefore should also have equality in the public, political realm. Access to knowledge, education, and work would allow women to pursue self-fulfillment as individuals, just as men pursued their constitutionally guaranteed right to "happiness." The other current emphasized the difference between men and women, and particularly women's physical, emotional, psychical, and social capacities in motherhood and other relational—rather than individualistic—roles. Women's special cultural and social contributions as self-sacrificing nurturers formed the basis for advocating an improvement in their status and in their right to have a public role. It is important to keep in mind, however, that these two categories are a means for historians to understand and analyze the many faces of feminism, and that contemporaries did not necessarily perceive these distinctions in categorical terms. Feminists lived lives, espoused ideologies, and participated in movements that combined both currents. At the same time feminism emerged within specific national contexts and national identities, as well as in relation to other reform movements, philosophies, or nonconformist religions—all of which gave it multifaceted characteristics. But issues raised in one national context often inspired political movements across borders, and by the second half of the nineteenth century international organizations began forming, which, in turn, reinforced national movements.

the french revolution and its influence

In the efforts to implement Enlightenment principles, the French Revolution gave birth to modern feminism. That is not to say, however, that European feminism had only one moment of birth, or that the Revolution gave rise to a feminist "movement"—but it created a ripe occasion for intensified philosophical debate and political action. When Louis XVI (r. 1774–1792) called for the Estates-General to meet and invited his subjects to submit their grievances, women demanded economic and political justice for their sex. A few women immediately denounced male privilege, especially in the legal realm. In abolishing the estate system, eliminating feudal privileges, and producing the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, claiming that "Men are born and remain free and equal in rights," the National Assembly of 1789 sought to implement "universal" principles about human rights that immediately and deliberately excluded women, who were viewed as incapable of reason and unable to act as morally independent individuals. One staunch advocate of political rights, the marquis de Condorcet (Marie-Jean de Caritat; 1743–1794), argued that women should be granted citizenship; he eloquently stated that differences between men and women stemmed from education, not nature. He further unveiled the contingency of "natural" determination when, for example, he queried, "Why should beings exposed to pregnancies and to passing indispositions not be able to exercise rights that no one ever imagined taking away from people who have gout every winter or who easily catch colds?" (quoted in Hunt, p. 120).

A small group of women formed a cercle social (social circle) in 1790–1791 to campaign for women's rights, especially civil equality in marriage, divorce, property ownership, and education. In 1791 the playwright and essayist Olympe de Gouges published the "Declaration of the Rights of Women," in which she offered a poignant critique of female exclusion from the "Declaration of the Rights of Man." She stated that "woman is born free and remains equal to man in rights" and therefore should partake in all "public dignities, offices and employments." But none of the national assemblies ever seriously considered legislation that would grant women political rights, and the constitutions of 1791, 1793, and 1795 deliberately excluded them.

Nonetheless women engaged in street politics that, in their own minds, conferred citizenship. The Society of Revolutionary Republican Women, for example, had as its main purpose combating counter-revolution and defending, at a time of war, invasion of the Republic by foreign enemies. The group sought to expand women's political and even military participation. Their fate exemplifies the need to redefine and even rigidify gender roles in the revolutionary context. The group's confrontational activities in support of the Republic led the government to ban all women's clubs and societies in 1793. Lawmakers proclaimed that nature determined only men should take on public and political roles. The ultra-revolutionary journalist Pierre-Gaspard Chaumette (1763–1794) complained that women were making themselves into men, and pointedly noted that nature had not given men breasts to feed children. The Revolution created a more intense need to emphasize men's and women's natural biological differences and to determine their social roles accordingly. That same year Olympe de Gouges met her fate at the guillotine, denounced as an "unnatural" woman, and convicted as a counterrevolutionary. In reaction to the revolutionary chaos, the Napoleonic Code of 1804 codified women's subjugation by stipulating that married women had to obey their husbands in return for their protection and that they could not make legal contracts, control their own property or wages, or engage in business without their husband's permission; in short, the code placed women in the same status as children, criminals, and the mentally deficient.

More important than the explicit feminist activity during the French Revolution was the philosophical debate about women's civil and political rights that it provoked well beyond France. Condorcet's Plea for the Citizenship of Women became well known throughout Europe, as did Olympe de Gouges's "Declaration." The Englishwoman Mary Wollstonecraft caused a stir with her Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), in which she argued eloquently, like Condorcet, for women's inherent capacity to reason and for their need of much better education. Demands for women's rights were made in Belgium, the Dutch Republic, and in some German and Italian states and principalities. But there too advocates faced a backlash as well as the legal subordination of women as the Napoleonic Code was adopted throughout Europe.

restoration, reaction, and the persistence of a "feminist" critique

The Restoration of monarchical and religious authority throughout Europe after 1815 reinforced

women's legal subjugation. Science and philosophical conceptions of knowledge—such as positivism—reinforced women's physiological inferiority and their natural incapacity for any public function. Even in this conservative climate, however, social criticism of women's position persisted. The field for thinking about women changed dramatically in the contexts of increased female literacy, industrialization, urbanization, national independence movements, evolving nation-states, and the rise of socialism. A "literary feminism" emerged in tracts and novels such as Marion Kirkland Reid's A Plea for Women (1843), and Charlotte Brontë's novels Jane Eyre (1847) and Shirley (1849). Germaine de Staël's Delphine (1802) and Corinne (1807), and George Sand's Indiana (1832) and Lélia (1833) caused considerable controversy. These works implicitly or explicitly criticized marriage and stirred their readers with imaginative alternatives. Writers in Denmark, Spain, Germany, Bohemia, Russia, and Scandinavia produced similarly influential novels. The genre empowered women as writers and influenced the consciousness of readers.

The question of women's status gained more poignancy with the emergence of French and British utopian socialist movements between 1820 and 1840. In reaction to the visible impoverishment of the working classes, whose living conditions were worsened by industrialization and urbanization, utopian socialists turned their attention to the family. In particular, they attacked marriage as an institution that economically and sexually subjugated women. Followers of Henri de Saint-Simon (1760–1825), particularly Marthélemy-Prosper Enfantin (1796–1864), promoted a romantic vision of feminism that emphasized harmony between the sexes based on the complementary nature of their differences. While Enfantin encouraged women's emancipation, he also advocated free love, a move that caused dissension among his followers and eventually brought government prosecution. However some of Enfantin's followers began a newspaper that stressed the importance of women's economic independence and their right to work. The focus on sexual difference also led Saint-Simonian women to stress motherhood itself as a basis for equality, particularly in the role of childhood education.

Saint-Simonianism failed as an emancipatory movement for women in part because men in the movement would not share real power. Many of these feminists then turned to the ideas and followers of Charles Fourier, whose 1808 tract Théorie des quatre mouvements claimed that human progress as a whole required the emancipation of women. Another group of feminist men and women clustered around the newspaper Gazette des femmes; they circulated petitions demanding the suppression of article 213 in the Napoleonic Code, which required a wife's obedience to her husband. They also made explicit demands for equal parenting rights and for the right to work, to vote, to sit on juries, to attend universities, and particularly to study and practice law and medicine.

Anne Wheeler advocated Saint-Simonian ideas in Britain, where she wrote with the political theorist William Thompson Appeal on Behalf of Women (1825), in which she argued that the economy should be restructured to reduce competition. In the 1830s the utopian socialist Robert Owen criticized the family and women's sexual oppression within it. Antislavery and nonconformist religious movements also inspired advocates of women's emancipation in Britain. Meanwhile, in the German Confederation, reform Jews called for greater equity between men and women. In industrialized Saxony, Louise Otto sought improved conditions among working-class women, and campaigned for educational reform for middle-class women. In Italy, the Risorgimento gave female proponents of national unity considerable political voice. Among the most influential were Clara Maffei in Milan and Christina Trivulzio Belgioioso; Belgioioso had been inspired by Fourier.

the revolutions of 1848 and their aftermath

The revolutions of 1848 that erupted throughout Europe everywhere brought women into the political arena alongside men, and created new opportunities and new reasons to criticize their legal status. When the French monarchy was overthrown and a Republic established, feminist clubs and newspapers proliferated as they never had before. Various clubs advocated different types or degrees of female emancipation, ranging from complete equality in both private and public spheres to specific demands for the right to work. Most feminists at this time were not concerned with autonomy from men, children, and the family, but instead focused on motherhood as the reason for greater access to education and the right to participate in civil and political life. The concept of mother-educator not only became a source of dignity for women, but a key strategy in French feminism for justifying public involvement despite formal exclusion from politics.

The 1848 revolutions in central, eastern, and southeastern Europe also gave women political experience and to various degrees promoted an emancipatory consciousness among them. Women founded associations in German principalities and in parts of the Habsburg Empire to support political demands, such as education for the lower classes and the abolition of serfdom. Some of them sought change in the status of women. German feminists, for example, like the French, emphasized their distinctive contributions as women; but in the drive toward national unification, they also stressed their role in nation-building. Louise Otto founded the Frauen-Zeitung (Women's newspaper), in which she insisted that those who advocated emancipation should also embody a "true womanliness." The revolutions produced a long list of eloquent feminists throughout Europe who made various demands through their newspapers, magazines, and in their political participation. But just as had happened from 1793 on in France, revolutionary governments eventually excluded women from politics, censored their newspapers, and disbanded their clubs. Then the forces of counterrevolution throughout Europe further silenced feminists and the social movements that had supported them. The Habsburg Empire was so fearful of the power women had exhibited in this era of upheaval, it passed a law in 1849 that prohibited female participation in any political activity. In 1850, the Prussian king denied women the rights of assembly and association.

Untouched by the cycle of revolution and reaction, England produced the first sustained female emancipation movement in the second half of the century. Its solid liberal foundation and stable parliamentary system could more easily tolerate the feminist challenge than could the emerging nation-states of Continental Europe. British activists had been inspired by earlier French feminism. But they also learned from the successful organizational efforts of American women in the 1840s antislavery movement that then led to the first Women's Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, New York, in July 1848. British activists protested the marriage law that subordinated married women more completely than in any other European country; they demanded reform of the divorce law; and they criticized the moral double standard in the Contagious Diseases Acts of 1864, 1866, and 1869, which subjected female prostitutes (and women of the working classes wrongly suspected of prostitution) to medical examinations in order to prevent the spread of venereal disease. Josephine Butler spearheaded a loud campaign to repeal the acts, and her efforts spawned movements in France and Italy that opposed regulated prostitution.

Meanwhile, the social critic Harriet Taylor Mill, also inspired by American women, exerted tremendous influence on her husband, the well-known political theorist and parliamentarian John Stuart Mill. In 1869 he published The Subjection of Women, a scathing and eloquent critique that compared women's status to that of slaves: "I am far from pretending that wives are in general no better treated than slaves; but no slave is a slave to the same lengths, and in so full a sense of the word, as a wife is. Hardly any slave…is a slave at all hours and all minutes…. Above all, a female slave…is considered under a moral obligation to refuse to her master the last familiarity. Not so the wife: however brutal a tyrant she may unfortunately be chained to" (p. 41). Mill also stressed the injustice of a system that deprived women of their own property and even their own earnings, and claimed "the power of earning is essential to the dignity of a woman" (p. 60). Mill's tract was immediately translated into French, German, Swedish, Danish, Russian, Dutch, and Italian; before the end of the century, it was also translated into Polish, Spanish, and Japanese. In many countries it became the philosophical foundation for women's rights and the direct inspiration for organized movements.

the peak of pre–world war i feminism

Organized movements for women's emancipation developed throughout Europe by the end of the nineteenth century. Extended male suffrage, new concepts of citizenship, the rise of the mass press, improved education for girls, and organized socialist movements were among the factors that inspired or facilitated the demands for improved legal status, higher education, more employment opportunities, equal pay, and compensation for the work of mothers. In Italy, national unification required the codification of laws that varied across provinces, and thus raised questions about women's legal and civic status. In France, Léon Richer and Maria Deraismes demanded change in the French marriage law, particularly with regard to women's property rights. National tensions and military build-up throughout Europe gave added meaning to citizenship. Conscription into the military meant that men earned citizenship through the "blood tax" of national service; women argued that they too paid a blood tax by risking their lives in childbirth and raising their children to be good citizens. Their emphasis on the social functions of motherhood had strategic importance as governments increasingly viewed their populations as a national resource—just at a time when birth rates began to fall precipitously.

With the help of a burgeoning feminist press, the movement peaked between 1890 and 1910. Feminists continued to demand change in the realms of both the private (marriage law, property, divorce, custody of children) and the public (obtaining the vote, higher education, equal pay, access to professional work). The movement's peak coincided with movements for women's access to female forms of birth control that arose throughout Europe and that raised issues regarding female reproductive and sexual freedom. The kind of philosophy espoused by John Stuart Mill and others led women to think about possession over their own bodies and the concept of "voluntary motherhood"—which suggested the limitation of pregnancies through abstinence or through the use of female contraceptive devices such as sponges and pessaries. For the most part, however, organized feminism shunned birth control movements; while many women privately supported family limitation, they also feared that separating sexuality from reproduction would turn women into objects denuded of any dignity. Although some radicals attempted to make birth control a feminist issue—such as Nelly Roussel (1878–1922) in France—it would take another half century, and a revolution in consciousness, for reproductive freedom to assume a central role in the feminist agenda.

As feminism grew, so did the issues that divided its adherents. Socialism became one such wedge. The ideological marriage of female emancipation with the plight of the working poor and the vision of restructuring or overthrowing capitalism in the first half of the century was torn asunder in the second half with the legalization of labor unions, the International Workingmen's Association, and the birth of socialist parties. Because women worked for lower pay, most labor unions demanded a "family wage" for men, which would make it unnecessary for women to work outside the home, and this demand was articulated during the debate about the "woman question" at the 1866–1867 congress of the First International. Feminists responded with a renewed demand for the right to work at equal pay with men. Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and other socialist theorists including Clara Zetkin further articulated the notion that women could not possibly be emancipated until after a socialist revolution. Capitalism, not "masculinism," was the true enemy. In the 1880s the Second International further articulated this position, which became the official ideology of socialism. Most socialists viewed feminists—the vast majority of whom were bourgeois—as misled counterrevolutionaries who undermined the socialist-revolutionary project of overthrowing the bourgeoisie. Socialist feminists such as Clara Zetkin refused to work with "bourgeois" feminists, some of whom also opposed capitalism, but given the remote possibility of revolution, sought to improve women's status within the existing system. Religion further divided feminists; Christian women rose to the cause of female emancipation, but within a conservative framework: they sought social services and charity to make marriage and motherhood easier for women, and renounced the individualism and political demands of their sisters.

Initially, nineteenth-century advocates of women's rights did not seek political equality through the vote. But as demands for universal male suffrage grew louder in the 1860s, the first group advocating the vote for women formed in England. In 1904 suffragists formed the International Alliance for Women's Suffrage in Berlin, which helped advance the cause throughout Europe. The movement in Britain became the most vociferous and violent. Members of the Women's Social and Political Union, founded by Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst in 1903, resorted to violent civil disobedience; as the Parliament refused even to discuss the vote for women, the WSPU disrupted political meetings. By 1909 "suffragettes"—the term distinguished the radicals from the more moderate "suffragists"—were regularly breaking windows of official buildings. Suffragettes' demonstrations soon became riots, and organizers were arrested. The prisoners went on hunger strikes to further publicize their cause. They were then subjected to the brutal torture of force-feeding. By 1913 suffragettes resorted to placing bombs in public places and destroying museum paintings. That same year Emily Wilding

Davidson sacrificed her life to the cause of female suffrage when, before thousands of spectators at the Derby, she threw herself in front of the king's horse. These acts of violence and tragedy drew condemnation, but they also created a good deal of publicity that brought worldwide attention—and ultimately support—to the cause of votes for women.

conclusion

The historiography of feminism remains relatively new, and much research remains to be done. "Second wave" feminists—those of the 1970s—rediscovered the forgotten experience of women's emancipatory efforts in the nineteenth century. They understandably labeled their findings as the "first wave" of feminism that ended when women in most European countries were granted the vote after World War I. Karen Offen has more recently suggested a different metaphor—that of volcanic eruptions, the molten lava of which is never inert, and which continually pushes through fissures of established patriarchal power structures. This metaphor indeed helps promote an understanding of different national experiences and a better appreciation of the ongoing efforts of all sorts that persisted between the so-called waves. The French Revolution produced the most radical questioning of gender roles, which in turn led to a severe repression of women's voices, a pattern replicated in subsequent nineteenth-century periods of revolution and reaction. Countries less touched by revolution, diverse as they were—such as Britain, Russia, and the United States (whose feminism so influenced Europe)—could more easily afford to tolerate women's organizations. But everywhere World War I silenced the feminist voice, as the vast majority of women put aside demands specific to their sex and loyally devoted themselves to their respective nationalist causes and war efforts.

bibliography

Primary Sources

Bell, Susan Groag, and Karen M. Offen, eds. Women, the Family, and Freedom: The Debate in Documents, 1750–1950. 2 vols. Stanford, Calif., 1983.

Hunt, Lynn, ed. and trans. The French Revolution and Human Rights: A Brief Documentary History. Boston, 1996.

Mill, John Stuart. The Subjection of Women. Toronto, 2000.

Waelti-Walters, Jennifer, and Steven C. Hause, eds. Feminisms of the Belle Epoque: A Historical and Literary Anthology. Texts translated by Jette Kjaer, Lydia Willis, and Jennifer Waelti-Walters. Lincoln, Neb., 1994.

Wollstonecraft, Mary. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. New York, 1988.

Secondary Sources

Allen, Ann Taylor. Feminism and Motherhood in Germany, 1800–1914. New Brunswick, N.J., 1991.

Moses, Claire Goldberg. French Feminism in the Nineteenth Century. Albany, N.Y., 1984.

Offen, Karen. European Feminisms, 1700–1950. Stanford, Calif., 2000.

Paletschek, Sylvia, and Bianka Pietrow-Ennker, eds. Women's Emancipation Movements in the Nineteenth Century: A European Perspective. Stanford, Calif., 2004.

Rendall, Jane. The Origins of Modern Feminism: Women in Britain, France, and the United States, 1780–1860. London, 1985.

Stites, Richard. The Women's Liberation Movement in Russia: Feminism, Nihilism, and Bolshevism, 1860–1930. Princeton, N.J., 1991.

Taylor, Barbara. Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism and Feminism in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge, Mass., 1993.

Elinor Accampo

Encyclopedia of Modern Europe: Europe 1789-1914: Encyclopedia of the Age of Industry and Empire