SD

Birthing the “Woman Question,”

1848-1870

ik crust of patriarchal political order rocked and trembled in

1848, the so-called springtime of the peoples. Beginning with
the ouster of Louis-Philippe in Paris, protests and disturbances erupted
in Berlin, Vienna, and Frankfurt, in Mainz, Meissen, Milan, Modena,
Barcelona, Cologne, Prague, Venice, and Stockholm. The once redouta-
ble chancellor of Austria, Prince Metternich, fled Vienna for exile, and
the once fearsome European system of control on freedom of speech, the
press, and association evaporated—though only temporarily. “Democra-
cy” was on the march—but would it include women? ,
In some of these cities, feminist activity poured forth through the fis-
sures opened by men’s claims for representative government, for free-
dom of the press and association. Once again claiming their share of lib-
erty, women founded newspapers and formed their own associations to
demand rights and acknowledge their duties as integral members of “the
people.” Some demanded the right to vote on laws, freedom in marriage,
including the right to divorce, and they called for educational and eco-
nomic solutions to combat women’s growing poverty. Others fought
alongside men on the revolutionary barricades; a few even adopted male
costume in order to fight against the established order. In Paris, a group
of women who baptized themselves “the Vesuviennes,” after the famous
volcano in southern Italy, organized to parade through the streets in
revolutionary bloomer costumes and tricolor sashes, whetting enthusi-
asm for the new order. Their “political constitution” called for men to
share the housework, and demanded civil divorce.! They clearly be-
lieved, with the Saxon activists Robert Blum and Louise Otto, that
“women’s participation in the state is not just a right but aduty.”? —
The feminist honor roll for the 1848 revolutions grows ever longer. In
the German-speaking world, the names of Louise Otto in Saxony,
Matilda Franziska Anneke in Cologne, Kathinka Zitz-Halein in Mainz,
and Karoline Perin in Vienna have joined the list of known activists in —

Offen, Karen M. European Feminisms, 1700-1950: a Political History.

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 Birthing the “Woman Question” 109
Paris, including Jeanne Deroin, Eugénie Niboyet, Désirée Gay, and Jenny
P. d’Héricourt. In most historical accounts of the revolutions of 1848,
the extraordinary political activism of these women and others like
them is scarcely mentioned; perhaps it seemed too disruptive to histori-
ans preoccupied by a male-centered political agenda. Even in the emerg-
ing histories of European feminism, this period and its counterrevolu-
tionary sequel, extending from the widespread revolutions of 1848 to the
literal birth of organized women’s movements in the mid-186o0s, re-
mains incompletely understood. On the Continent, feminist activity in
the French Second Republic (1848-51) is by now well documented.?
Feminist historians insist on the significance of women’s demands for
political rights, which immediately followed the new government’s
proclamation in early March of “universal” suffrage and its abolition of
slavery (both developments informed by earlier campaigns in England to
end slavery, and to partially broaden the all-male parliamentary fran-
chise). But historians have only recently thrown light on developments
to the east of the Rhine.‘
What does seem clear is that by 1850 counterrevolutionary forces had
brutally suppressed feminist activism in most societies. But the issues
resurfaced with relative rapidity in the later 1850s and early 1860s as in-
creasing numbers of articulate women and men spoke out on the “wom-
an question” (in French, question des femmes; in German, Frauenfrage;
in Russian, zhenskii vopros; and in Swedish, kvinnofrdgan}), ina renewed
burst of print. They argued their cases in fiction, poetry, and essays and
articles in periodicals and in the daily press. These efforts might not yet
qualify as an organized “movement,” but their very frequency and broad
geographical distribution suggest that the impulses to action would be
increasingly difficult to contain, much less to eradicate.
In the 1860s the fissures in the crust of patriarchy widened and the
molten lava of feminist protest against women’s subordination would
| begin an even more sustained flow. New organizational and reformist
initiatives blossomed as European feminists rephrased women’s rights
in terms of equal individual human rights (usually coupled with sex-
based duties). They continued to develop analogies between women’s
emancipation and the parallel campaigns for ending black slavery in the
United States and serfdom in the Russian Empire, and to address the
problems of workers and the urban poor—the latter disproportionately
female. Perhaps most important for the long term, the woman question
took its place at the heart of the knowledge wars, providing the very core
around which the new human sciences—sociology, anthropology, biol-
ogy, psychology, pedagogy, and economics—would be constructed.

Offen, Karen M. European Feminisms, 1700-1950: a Political History.

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 IIO , The Nineteenth Century
CHALLENGING MALE-ONLY CITIZENSHIP
IN THE FRENCH REPUBLIC
The issue of civic (or political) rights for women in 1848, particularly
their demand for the vote, deserves a closer look. Most European states
in the mid-nineteenth century did not have representative institutions,
and in those few that did, no women could vote for parliamentary repre-
sentatives. Nor, for that matter, could most men; despite the rhetorical
claims for democracy, parliamentary representation, even for the proper-
tied, was a relatively new and rare phenomenon. In the oldest parliamen-
tary monarchy, England, as we have seen, women had been deliberately
written out of the Reform Act of 1832, and even the most radical demo-
crats, the Chartists, demanded the vote only for all men. Rare indeed
were arguments like the one so eloquently expressed by the Scottish suf- :
fragist Marion Kirkland Reid, in her Plea for Women (1843): “The ground
on which equality is claimed for all men is of equal force for all women;
for women share the common nature of humanity, and are possessed of
all those noble faculties which constitute man a responsible being, and
give him a claim to be his own ruler.” Picking up on a theme developed
by feminists during the French Revolution, Reid argued that men legis-
lated in their own interest; women’s interests required representation,
particularly as propertied (single) women, like men, paid taxes.’
The French Second Republic was the first nation-state in Europe to
enfranchise all men without property or tax restrictions; this was called

boasted that:° , | ,
“universal” suffrage and “democratic.” The Provisional Government

The provisional electoral law that we have made is the most expansive
that has ever, among any people on earth, called on the people to exercise
the supreme right of man, his own sovereignty. The election belongs to
everyone without exception. Dating from this law, there are no more
proletarians in France. Every Frenchman [Francais] of mature age [en dge
viril| has political citizenship. Every citizen is an elector. Every elector is
sovereign. The law is equal and absolute for all. | a
But the masculine usage of this “everyone” and “all” greatly aston-
ished some French women. A small group of Parisian women immedi-
ately demanded to know why women had been “forgotten” and prepared
a petition to the Provisional Government, insisting on the complemen-
tarity of the sexes, and making the point that if the “revolution has been
made for all,” women were assuredly “half of everyone,” that “there
could not be two liberties, two equalities, two fraternities,” that “the
people” is “composed of two sexes.”’ Shortly thereafter, a group consti-

Offen, Karen M. European Feminisms, 1700-1950: a Political History.

E-book, Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb04531.0001.001.
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 Birthing the “Woman Question” III
tuting themselves as the Committee on the Rights of Women (Comité
des Droits de la Femme) sent a delegation to the new government, de-
manding an explanation. “You say ‘There are no more proletarians,’ but
if women are not included in your decrees, France can still count more
than seventeen million of them.” The mayor of Paris, who was also a
member of the Provisional Government, adroitly deferred action on this
claim to the not yet elected National Assembly. But the deliberate ex-
clusion of women exposed a serious omission at the heart of the move-
ment for a democratic republic, demonstrating for all to see that the con-
cept “citizen” in France had been gendered masculine.
The Parisian women, spearheaded by Jeanne Deroin and Eugénie Ni-
boyet, refused to let the matter drop. They pursued their appeal for
woman suffrage in the press and in the clubs; they also proposed nomi-
nating candidates. In La Voix des femmes, Deroin appealed to the Na-
tional Assembly, arguing for “complete and true equality,” even invok-
ing the triumph of intelligence over brute strength and, like her English
counterpart Marion Reid, the principle of no taxation without represen-
tation: “When they abolish all privileges, they will not think of conserv-
ing the worst one of all and leaving one half of the nation under the
domination of the other half. They will at least give us a role in national
representation.”’
The people’s delegates to the National Assembly did refuse. When
Victor Considerant, a deputy and a committed Fourierist, subsequently
proposed extending the municipal vote to single adult women only, he
was laughed off the floor. The French Assembly’s scorn for woman suf-
frage did not go unnoticed abroad. In London, the venerable Times took
notice when Benjamin Disraeli (who would one day be Queen Victoria’s
Prime Minister} raised the issue of parliamentary suffrage for women
once again in the British House of Commons during a mid-June debate
on the representation of the people:!°
I believe that in another country some ridicule has been excited by a gen-
tleman who has advocated the rights of the other sex. (A laugh.) But, Sir,
as far as mere abstract reasoning is concerned, I should like to hear any
gentleman of those who will support the hon. member get up and oppose
that claim. In a country governed by a woman (hear])—where you allow
women to form a part of the other estate of the realm, for women are
peeresses in their own right—where women possess manors, and hold
law courts—and where women are by law elected as churchwardens (a
laugh)—I don’t see when women have so much to do in this country in
state and church, why, when you come to the reason of the thing, they
should not also have a right to vote.

Offen, Karen M. European Feminisms, 1700-1950: a Political History.

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 112 The Nineteenth Century
_ It was in this international context that the defeat of civic rights for
French women and Jeanne Deroin’s subsequent candidacy for the Legis-
lative Assembly in 1849 would take on added significance. Even in the
mid-nineteenth century, such news traveled fast. In Vienna, an as yet
- unidentified group of women also called for political rights: “Beware of
believing that we are not filled with the most lively interest in the __
emancipation of humanity. . . . We claim equality of political rights.
Why should women not be elected to the Reichstag? .. . It would be false
to call suffrage universal, if at least half of all the subjects are ex-
cluded.”"
By mid-June 1848 (after weeks of civil disruption) the National As-
sembly, which was far from the revolutionary body anticipated in
March, abruptly shut down all political clubs, making an explicit point _
of closing those organized by women. In the course of these debates over
suffrage and the closing of the clubs, feminists effectively exposed the
political significance of language for the politics of citizenship. In France,
did tous les francais encompass women? In England, did the term “man”
or “people” encompass women? Clearly, the answer—in the electoral
laws at least—was no. In England, the importance of gender politics in
legal language was sufficiently recognized that in 1850 Parliament
would pass an Act (thanks to the pro-woman legal reformers Lord
Brougham and Lord Romilly) addressing this issue: “In all Acts words
importing the masculine gender shall be deemed and taken to include ©

change. | ,
females unless the contrary . . . is expressly provided,” as had been the
case in the 1832 Reform Act.” This clarification would open doors to

THE LANGUAGE OF FEMINIST DEMANDS | ,

| IN THE 1848 REVOLUTIONS | 7
_ Feminists in the era of 1848 deployed the language of rights and equality —
to argue their cause. They very often argued for women’s equality in
terms of women’s differences from men, however, rather than in terms
of similarities. The concept of equality at that time was still understood
primarily as a question of formal equality in the law (the right to hold
property, the right to vote, for example) or of equal opportunities (to
formal education, to employment). Although feminists made demands
for women’s inclusion in all arenas of worldly ambition a priority, they
did not then understand equal rights as a synonym for “sameness” or as a
demand for identical treatment for all individuals in all circumstances of
societal life. Women were claiming their rights as women, as human be-

Offen, Karen M. European Feminisms, 1700-1950: a Political History.

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 Birthing the “Woman Question” 113
ings who happened to be female, but they also claimed their womanhood
with pride. In the process, some took their distance from accusations of
sensuality even as they reclaimed the word “emancipation,” which had
stirred up controversy since the 1830s when the Saint-Simonian experi-
ments had branded it into the public mind as a synonym for sexual
promiscuity. The manifesto of the Paris-based Society for the Emancipa-
tion of Women in mid-March 1848 stated it in these terms:
The word emancipation, in its absolute and legitimate sense, signifies
above all, intellectual and moral liberation [affranchisement]. This first
and highest condition being, for both sexes, the normal basis of all social
progress, carries with it all the other consequences. The word emancipa-
tion is so often abused that this explanatory note seemed necessary.
Two women exemplify the possibilities and limitations of European
feminist thought and action in 1848. The French woman Jeanne Deroin
and her somewhat younger German counterpart Louise Otto, from Sax-
ony, illustrate the ways in which the cause of women’s emancipation
was wedded to the political and intellectual history of the times. Their
respective approaches also provide insight into the national differences
that emerged in the course of the nineteenth century. Both women took
active roles in the revolutionary events of midcentury Europe, publish-
ing women’s periodicals during the revolutionary years, Deroin in Paris,
and Otto first in Meissen (Saxony), then in Gera. Both made radical de-
mands: Deroin advocated women’s suffrage, while Otto argued for a re-
casting of women’s educational and economic situation. Both asserted
women’s claims to liberty and equality as staunchly as they defended
women’s “difference,” without perceiving these claims as in the least
paradoxical or contradictory. Both were “relational” feminists, comfort-
able with the notion of “equality-in-difference,” a term popularized by
the French male feminist Ernest Legouvé.*
Jeanne Deroin was a Parisian working-class woman in her early for-
ties, a seamstress and teacher, who though married and a mother used
her given name rather than that of her husband, Desroches. As noted ear-
lier, she had participated in the Saint-Simonian movement during the
1830s, contributing many articles to the Saint-Simonian women’s paper,
and she had subsequently absorbed many of the teachings of Charles
Fourier concerning the reorganization of the household and labor. She
considered herself a democratic socialist, but she gave priority to the
cause of women.”°
Writing in the women’s newspaper La Voix des femmes (Women’s
Voice}, founded by Eugénie Niboyet shortly after the outbreak of the
Paris revolution, Deroin first called for women’s formal participation in

Offen, Karen M. European Feminisms, 1700-1950: a Political History.

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 114 The Nineteenth Century
public affairs. Even after the National Assembly closed the clubs, effec-
tively ending all organized female political activism in France, Deroin
persisted. Even after the male voters elected Louis-Napoleon (heir of the
Bonaparte dynasty) president of the Republic, she continued to press for
women’s inclusion in political life. She founded her own periodical,
L’Opinion des femmes (Women’s Opinion), and in the spring of 1849, in
a serialized essay on “woman/’s mission,” she presented her vision of
what women’s participation in the public sphere needed to accomplish. '®
Despite the disappointments of the previous year, Deroin asserted
that the revolutionary overthrow of the monarchy in 1848 and the estab-
lishment of a democratic form of government had radically changed the
conditions of political life in France. Violence and repression must
henceforth yield to participatory government. The first priority of
democratic government must be to end the struggle between women and
men. Only by abolishing male privilege (in this case, male political privi-
lege) could the new government achieve the realization of a truly new
society. Deroin viewed privileges of sex as even more insidious than
those of class. “The abolition of the privileges of race, birth, caste, and
fortune cannot be complete and radical unless the privilege of sex is to-
tally abolished,” she wrote. Deroin argued that only by achieving full
citizenship could women effectively participate in the reconstruction of
French society.
In Deroin’s view, the contributions of women and men to society
were utterly distinct. Deroin insisted on the complementarity of the
sexes, and she based her arguments for women’s participation in politi-
cal affairs on sexual complementarity and women’s difference (both bio-
logical and social] from men—in particular, on woman’s “sacred func-
tion as mother” and her “sublime humanitarian maternity.” In Deroin’s
estimation, woman had not only a right but a duty, given her maternal
role, to intercede in both civil and political life in order to carry out the
duty of watching over the future of her children.
Women, Deroin argued, must be called on to “teach everyone how
fraternity should be practiced,” to show men the way of transcending
secular quarrels between individuals, between families, and between na-
tions. Women had nothing less than an apostolic mission to “realize the
kingdom of God on earth, the reign of fraternity and universal har-
mony.” Deroin never clearly elaborated her reasons for insisting on
women’s ability to achieve these goals; in the existing climate of male
revolutionary violence, both physical and verbal, she seems to have con-
sidered women’s moral superiority self-evident.

Offen, Karen M. European Feminisms, 1700-1950: a Political History.

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 Birthing the “Woman Question” I15
Deroin did more than make claims for women’s participation in pub-
lic life, however; she acted on her ideals. Early in 1849, she petitioned the
Democratic Socialist Party to become a candidate for the Legislative As-
sembly. Her most vociferous opponent, the party's leading polemicist,
the printer Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, was well known for his antifeminist
assertion that women could be only “housewives or harlots.”!”? The
Democratic Socialists refused Deroin’s candidacy, but she merits a dis-
tinctive place in the history of European feminism for her synthesis of
ideals and activism. Not only was she the first European woman to de-
clare her candidacy for public office under a democratized regime, but
she was also one of the first women to be arrested and imprisoned for her
efforts to organize joint associations of male and female workers (yet an-
other form of political activity prohibited in mid-nineteenth-century
France). In 1852 Deroin fled to England, along with other men and
women who actively opposed Louis-Napoleon’s tightening grip on po-
litical power. Although she kept in touch with French progressives, she
spent the remainder of her life in London as a political exile.'®
Feminist activists in the German states adopted an alternative set of
arguments, although as in France they emphasized women’s difference
as a central tenet. There, German womanliness, in combination with so-
cial motherhood, provided the central theme. In German feminist dis-
course, arguments often carried nationalist overtones, emphasizing the
distinctive contribution women, as women, could and must make to the
building of the still nonexistent German nation, a conspicuous goal of
political reformers prior to the forced unification of the many German
principalities by the Prussian king in 1871. The arguments put forth by
Louise Otto, a well-educated single woman of upper-middle-class back-
ground who, like Deroin, had become a political radical, exemplify this
particular approach.
Based in Saxony, one of Germany’s most industrialized regions, in
1849 Otto founded and edited the Frauenzeitung (Women’s Newspaper),
the longest-lived of several German revolutionary women’s publica-
tions.'? Since the mid-1840s, she had crusaded for systematic reform of
the education of middle-class women and for improvements in the con-
dition of working women in Saxony’s industrial cities. Marriage, in
Otto’s view, was a degraded institution, merely “a support institution
for the female sex.” She scorned women’s “characterlessness” in a cul-
ture where the building of character (Bildung) was considered so ex-
tremely important for educated men. Reflecting the spirit of idealist
German philosophy since Kant (though Kant would hardly have applied

Offen, Karen M. European Feminisms, 1700-1950: a Political History.

E-book, Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb04531.0001.001.
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 116 The Nineteenth Century
such ideas to women), Otto emphasized “independence,” not only of a
moral or ethical nature (“the exercise of judgment”) but also of a mate-
rial or economic nature (“the exercise of action”).”°
Of particular significance to Louise Otto was her oft-repeated concern
with “true womanliness,” a quality quite different from, and far more
potent than, the characterlessness she objected to in so many German
women of her age. Her arguments for “true womanliness” carried a de-
| fensive tone, however; she constantly issued disclaimers against those
who discredited the emancipation of woman “by devaluing woman to
become a caricature of a man.” Otto was doubtless thinking of the out-
spoken writer Louise Aston, who had been expelled from Berlin in 1846,
following publication of her “Wild Roses.””’ |
Lifestyle issues had become a sore point among German feminists,
following a recent wave of Georgesandismus, a term used to refer to self-
proclaimed “emancipated women” who appropriated the unorthodox
and much-caricatured habits of the French novelist George Sand. These
contentious habits included wearing male dress (still illegal—even in
France—without a police permit), smoking, and engaging in liaisons
with men to whom one was not married. Indeed, in Central Europe, Sand
had become a symbol of all that was dangerous about French culture, and ©
condemnations of her loose lifestyle showed up repeatedly not only
among antifeminists and German nationalists, but also in the pro-
woman arguments of German feminist reformers of this period. In con-
sequence, German feminists at midcentury often demonstrated a pecu- |
liarly self-righteous and straitlaced quality. Otto’s conception of “true
womanhood” was, above all else, virtuous, courageous, moralistic, pa-
triotic, and peaceable. In addition to refuting Georgesandismus, it repre-
sented all the things German men allegedly were not.” ,
The arguments of a Parisian male feminist confirm the emphasis be-
ing placed on “equality-in-difference.” The French essayist and play-
wright Ernest Legouvé summed up the arguments for radical change in
the legal, educational, and economic status of women in his Moral His-
tory of Women (1849), which he first presented in the spring of 1848 as a
series of public lectures at the Collége de France, sponsored by the new
republican Ministry of Public Instruction.** Legouvé called on men to re-
flect about the political implications of including women in the new re-
gime; he charged that the 1789 revolution had failed because it was un-
just to women. He advocated that the “virile” republican principles of
liberty and equality must, in order to be realized, be complemented by
what he called “the feminine virtue of fraternity,” which “grew out of
women’s love.” No republic, he intimated, would succeed except at this

Offen, Karen M. European Feminisms, 1700-1950: a Political History.

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 Birthing the “Woman Question” 117
price. Legouvé’s lectures and subsequent book offered a protracted ar-
gument for “equality-in-difference,” a case for women’s emancipation
under the republic, grounded in women’s distinctive physiological, men-
tal, and emotionai differences from men, and especially in their vital so-
cial role as mothers. He emphasized the importance of women’s past and
prospective contributions as a sex to human culture, in both private and
public life. He insisted as well on the necessity for separate but equal—or
parallel—tracks for women and men, linked through the institution of
monogamous marriage. His explicit target was the legal subordination of
women embodied in the Napoleonic Code and the inadequate education
of women. He did not, however, advocate full political rights for women.
In the context of 1848 pre-election politics, he proposed that “women

men.” |
should have a place in the State, but a place different than that of

Recent analyses of German feminism suggest that many religiously

identified reformist factions were just as eager as those in France to in-
voke women’s “difference” as a basis for equality, and to invoke female
influence as a potent political tool. The research of Ann Taylor Allen on
“spiritual motherhood” and of Catherine Prelinger and Sylvia Palet-
schek on the radical German Catholic group led by Johannes Ronge,
which founded the Hamburg High School for Girls, demonstrates how
imbued with radicalizing potential this notion could be, but Dagmar
Herzog’s findings in Baden also suggest its limits.”
At midcentury, however, advocates of female subordination were also
invoking arguments for the importance of female influence. The secular
philosopher Auguste Comte (who would be christened as the “father” of
sociology and the founder of “positivist” philosophy) insisted in a new
work, System of Positive Philosophy (1848), that equality of the sexes
was contraindicated by Nature as well as by human evolution: “ All his-
tory assures us that with the growth of society the peculiar features of
each sex have become not less but more distinct.”*° Arguing for the sub-
ordination of politics to morality, Comte appointed women as “sponta-
neous priestesses of humanity,” consigning them to the realm of the
family, where man could support woman but should also worship her.
The Roman Catholic pope Pius IX, fleeing from the revolution in
Rome in 1849, similarly invoked the positive power of educated and in-
fluential womanhood when he called for promulgation of the dogma of
the Immaculate Conception of Mary. As men defected from the church,
the pope seemed especially anxious to retain women’s allegiance in a
time of revolutionary upheaval; he understood and hoped to harness the
power of Christian mothers in forming souls for the church.’” Though

Offen, Karen M. European Feminisms, 1700-1950: a Political History.

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 118 The Nineteenth Century
they were poles apart politically, both the pope and Comte testified to
their shared belief in the importance of female influence for the regen-
eration of European political and cultural life, as well as to the necessity
of controlling and channeling it. Unlike the feminists, neither argued for
women’s emancipation, even in qualified terms, based on such beliefs. In
the highly politicized atmosphere of mid-nineteenth-century Europe,
the reinvigorated and highly elastic notions of separate spheres, female
influence, civic motherhood, and mother educators could and would
henceforth serve both revolutionary and counterrevolutionary ends.
Both revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries could agree on one
thing: women’s civic activism, even when it was not accompanied by
overt feminist claims, posed a clear threat to male hegemony. In order to
douse the flames of revolution on the Continent, therefore, governments
shut down women’s associations and clubs and passed laws excluding
women from taking an active role in the political press. During the Pra-
gue revolution, the editors of Bohemia attempted to forestall women’s
rights agitation. When a delegation of Prague women went to see the
Habsburg empress in Vienna, their goal was to found a girls’ school in
Prague. Only one woman, Bozena Nemcova, spoke openly in favor of
girls’ education without disavowing rights claims. As a precautionary
measure, the imperial authorities enacted a law on association in March
1849 that banned all political activity by women.”* In 1850 the Prussian
king pushed through a decree “protecting lawful freedom and order from
the abuse of the rights of assembly and association,” which banned
women—as well as male students—from becoming members of political
organizations and even from attending their meetings.° This law would
remain in force until 1908. Measures of this type were also enacted in
Bavaria, Saxony, and Brunswick, and in 1854 were incorporated into the
protocols of the German Confederation. Only a few principalities and
free cities escaped their rigor.
Feminist women were not silent about the failed revolutions of 1848
with respect to women’s rights. In her poem “For All” (1848) Louise
Otto bemoaned the exclusionary aspect of the situation in Germany:*°
...on men alone rights were conferred
In the upheavals of the revolution.
For even though it seemed like changes had occurred
And like the monarchy was on the brink of dissolution:
Those new struggles were for the rights of man;
The rights of woman were not part of their plan. ...
The free men spoke of fraternization:
They were citizens, not lords and slaves;
They sang of their new affiliation |

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 Birthing the “Woman Question” 119
And considered themselves a reborn race.
But they viewed their sisters with deprecation—
There were no rights for half the populace,
For the cry “for all!” excluded women—
They were denied the rights of citizens.
A similar refrain came from the pen of the Spanish poet Caroline
Coronado in her meditation on “Liberty” (1852}:°'
Young men are proud,
Old men are happy, ,
There is equality in our land,
Liberty in the realm.
But I tell you, sisters,
That the law is only their law,
Women do not count,
Nor is there a Nation for this sex.
Therefore, though I hear the men,
I do not applaud for myself nor feel joy.
Thus it was not surprising, in view of the once again extremely re-
pressive political climate of continental Europe, that organized women’s
movements could hardly get off the ground. The most successful initial
efforts to organize took place outside Europe, in the United States, be-
ginning with the Seneca Falls Convention in July 1848. This convention,
called shortly after the forced closing of the Parisian women’s clubs, re-
wrote the American Declaration of Independence on women’s behalf. In
mid-1851, the English critic Harriet Taylor Mill (who had recently mar-
ried her longtime companion John Stuart Mill) expressed her admiration
in the Westminster Review of the activism by American women who in
1850 had convened at Worcester, Massachusetts, in pursuit of their
“rights.” “What is wanted for women,” she wrote, “is equal rights, equal
admission to all social privileges; not a position apart, a sort of sentimen-
tal priesthood.” Jeanne Deroin and Pauline Roland, from the depths of
their prison cells, appealed to the women of America in 1851: “The
darkness of reaction has obscured the sun of 1848, which seemed to rise
so radiantly.” “No mention was made of the right of woman in a Consti-
tution framed in the name of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity.”*
The great French dramatist Victor Hugo, in exile following Louis-
Napoleon’s coup d’état, mourned the death in 1853 of one of the women
activists exiled from France as the revolution was crushed and universal
manhood suffrage once again abolished. At her funeral he prophetically
declared: “The eighteenth century proclaimed the right of man; the
nineteenth will proclaim the right of woman.”** On the Continent,

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 120 The Nineteenth Century
Hugo’s prophecy would long await vindication. Not until the late 1850s
and 1860s would organized efforts on women’s emancipation even begin
to establish a toehold.

NEW INITIATIVES, MULTIPLE FRONTS, 1850-1865 |

The prospects for women’s political rights on the Continent had been
crushed for the foreseeable future, but other initiatives emerged on mul-
tiple fronts scattered throughout Europe. Within a few years, calls for re-
form of marriage laws, for education and employment for women took
center stage in England and in the Scandinavian countries, perhaps
stimulated by the agitation for married women’s property acts then un-
der way in the United States.
English feminists quickly took action. In 1854 Barbara Leigh Smith
(later Bodichon} and Caroline Norton published two stinging critiques of
the legal annihilation of English wives, who were more thoroughly sub-
ordinated in marriage law than in any other European country.” The
custom of coverture in the common law made them effectively legal
nonpersons; even their personal belongings were the property of their
husbands. Moreover, a full-fledged civil divorce was possible only by a
special Act of Parliament, and then only following a court finding that
the wife had committed adultery. Thanks to the intervention of Lord
Brougham, founder of the Law Amendment Society (1844), with the help
of a number of other reforming members of Parliament, action began in
1856; 1,300 English women, including some of the best-known writers,
sent a petition to Parliament in March.* The petition argued that all
women, not only more privileged women, and not only wives, were ad-
versely affected by coverture, in a time when earnings were increasingly
necessary for women of all classes. Even the relatively antifeminist jour-

tiative.°’ ,
nalist Eliza Lynn (Linton) supported this married women’s property ini-

Parliament approved a Divorce Act in 1857, but at the expense of any

resolution of the married women’s property problem, which retained its
central place on the English feminist agenda for another twenty years. In
Mary Lyndon Shanley’s summary: “Parliament did enlarge the rights of |
married women significantly in the course of the nineteenth century,
but it repeatedly réjected the invitation held out by feminists to equalize
the rights and obligations of husbands and wives.”*
_ The issue of women’s legal subjection was resolved more speedily in
Norway and Sweden, thanks in part to two pioneering novels with femi-
nist themes, The District Governor’s Daughter (1854-55) by Camilla

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 Birthing the “Woman Question” I21
Collett, and Fredrika Bremer’s Hertha (1855)].°? Bremer’s novel proved
particularly influential in rallying support to overturn {in 1858) Swe-
den’s Paternal Statutes of 1734, which gave fathers enormous legal
authority over daughters, even as adults. By 1872 unmarried daughters
in Sweden would achieve full legal emancipation. Denmark passed a
similar Majority Act, giving single adult women full civil (legal) stand-
ing, in 1857.
In Italy, the achievement of national unification in 1861 raised
questions about women’s inclusion in citizenship as well as about their
education. In 1861 a handbill signed by a group of Italian women
citizens (cittadine italiane) from Lombardy argued that “the chief
foundations [of the liberty of the nation] must be the broadest possible
affirmation of the emancipation of women.” Unification also raised
the question of laws regarding married women. To consolidate the na-
tion, the laws of five major preexisting political regions, each of which
treated the legal position of women differently, had to be harmonized in
a unified code. During debates on the proposed code, the Milanese fem-
inist Anna Maria Mozzoni argued, against the law professor Carlo Fran-
cesco Gabba, for the full civil and political emancipation of women.
Neither marriage, nor motherhood, nor occupation, nor physique
should disqualify women, whose natural rights were, in Mozzoni’s
opinion, absolute.*! The Italian Code, enacted 1865, followed the pat-
tern set by the Piedmontese (Albertine) Code of 1837, which itself drew
heavily on the Napoleonic Code, with the major difference that its pro-
visions for separation of property in marriage imposed less of a handicap
on married women.
Efforts to reform the legal situation of married women in France had,
meanwhile, to await the liberalization of the Second Empire in the late
1860s. Léon Richer,and Maria Deraismes combined forces to challenge
the Napoleonic Code’s provisions for marital authority and the subordi-
nate status of wives with respect to community-property law. Single
adult women had long been fully emancipated in civil law, but were still
subjected to administrative hassles concerning their marital status.
Richer’s periodical, Le Droit des femmes (founded 1868), would insis-
tently promote radical change in French marriage law during the next
twenty years, in the face of great resistance.”
In mid-nineteenth-century Russian society, married women did enjoy
property rights. But young unmarried adult women were still formally
subject to the legal authority of fathers; thus, personal autonomy had a
far more concrete meaning than it did in France or England, where such
women were legally—if not morally or economically—tree of such con-

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 122 _ The Nineteenth Century
straints. Young Russian women of the 186os often resorted to fictitious
marriages (called “white marriages”) with sympathetic and unconven-.
tional young men in order to acquire the necessary male authorization to
escape from their families, pursue studies, and follow their dreams. His-
torian Linda Edmondson has persuasively suggested that the tight link
between state and patriarchal family authority in Russia can explain
why feminist agitation for personal liberty in that setting quickly devel-
oped in an antifamily and antistatist direction.” ,
_ Other, more organized efforts to improve other aspects of women’s
situation soon sprang up, especially in England, which had been far less
traumatized by the 1848 revolutions than its neighbors on the Conti-
nent. There, women members of the woman-friendly National Associa-
tion for the Promotion of Social Science (NAPSS}, founded in 1857,
spawned a host of organizations and projects aimed at improving wom-
en’s condition: these included the Ladies’ National Association for the
Diffusion of Sanitary Knowledge, the Society for Promoting the Indus-
trial Employment of Women and the Workhouse Visiting Society (both
1859}, followed by the Female Middle-Class Emigration Society, the Vic-
toria Press (an all-women publishing venture, which produced the
Transactions of the NAPSS}, and the National Union for Improving the
Education of Women of All Classes (1871). Efforts as varied as the Mar-
ried Women’s Property Committee (1867}, the London National Society
for Women’s Suffrage (1867), and the Ladies’ National Association for
the Repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts (1870) all had roots in the
concerns of NAPSS women members. As historian Kathleen McCrone
has noted, “the roster of the [NAPSS’s] female members reads like a
who’s who of Victorian womanhood,” including many of the leading
names in Victorian feminism, such as Lydia Becker, Helen Blackburn,
Jessie Boucherett, Frances Power Cobbe, Emily Davies, Bessie Rayner
Parkes, Barbara Leigh Smith, and Elizabeth Wolstenholme.”“ ,
Women’s education and employment opportunities were of special .
concern to feminists throughout Europe during this period. In London,
Barbara Leigh Smith (later Bodichon), Bessie Rayner Parkes, and their as-
sociates in the Langham Place Circle founded not only the Society for
Promoting the Employment of Women (to address the needs of single
middle-class women) but also the Englishwoman’s Journal. In Paris dur-
ing the early 1860s, when the imperial government authorized the ad-
mission of women to employment in state-operated concessions, includ-
ing the telegraph service and tobacco concessions, Elisa Lemmonier pio-
neered schools for girls’ vocational instruction. André Léo (Léodile Bera

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 Birthing the “Woman Question” 123
Champceix) founded the society Revendication des Droits de la Femme
(Demand for Women’s Rights) to encourage women’s education and pro-
mote legal reforms. In Berlin, the Lette-Verein (1865) was established to
promote women’s work, under the patronage of the Prussian crown
| princess, and Louise Otto succeeded in founding the “nonpolitical” All-
gemeiner Deutscher Frauenverein (General Association of German
Women}. In St. Petersburg a local women’s group also made plans for a
Society for Women’s Work. In 1865 the Dutch Anna-Maria (Minette}
Storm van der Chijs established the first industrial trade school for girls
in Amsterdam, and in 1869 Dutch activists founded a private secondary
school for girls in Haarlem. In 1870 Karolina Svetla would organize the
Bohemian Women’s Commercial and Industrial Society in Prague.
Training schools for teachers were among the many significant under-
takings. Women activists in Britain had already established schools to
prepare impecunious single women of the middle classes for positions as
governesses in private households and as schoolteachers. In the wake of
the brief “revolution of 1868” in Spain, Madrid reformers founded a
teachers’ institute for women, with the intention of mounting a cam- _
paign for the instruction of girls and women, most of whom were still il-
literate. Teaching children was the one position then deemed as suitable
employment for women, no doubt because it could be construed as an
extension of women’s maternal role, and preparation for civic mother-
hood itself, following marriage. But even here, advocates for girls’ educa-
tion increasingly insisted on the importance of educating women for
their own sake, as a human right, not only for the sake of their children.”
In smaller countries such as Denmark, where traditionalists actively op-
posed formal education for girls, such schools were founded relatively
late and then only with the most conservative rationales.
The claims made for women’s right to work reached a new level of
radicalism in England, with the publication by Barbara Leigh Smith of
the pamphlet Women and Work in 1857. Combatting the mounting tide
of male-breadwinner argumentation, Leigh Smith’s arguments deliber-
ately highlighted the sexual politics involved in the question of women’s
self-support:*
Fathers have no right to cast the burden of the support of their daughters
on other men. It lowers the dignity of women; and tends to prostitution,
whether legal or in the streets. As long as fathers regard the sex of a child
as a reason why it should not be taught to gain its own bread, so long
must women be degraded. Adult women must not be supported by men,
if they are to stand as dignified, rational beings before God. ... Women
must have work if they are to form equal unions.

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 124 The Nineteenth Century
Even more controversial than training women so that they could earn
their own keep was the project of obtaining women’s entry to university-
level coursework and degrees. Throughout Europe, wherever higher edu-
cation provided the gateway to professional careers in church and state
service as well as a means of obtaining advanced knowledge, women’s ef-
forts to enter these male sanctuaries frequently provoked stiff resistance
from professors and male students, as we will see below in the case of
medicine.
Still bolder feminist initiatives followed as new issues emerged. Cri-
tiques of government-licensed prostitution added another highly
charged issue to the feminist agenda, in the context of mounting urban
social problems, especially female poverty. Since its inauguration in
Paris in 1802, complete with a “morals police” agency, the state regula-
tion system had been spreading throughout Europe, enthusiastically
promoted by a combination of male physicians, public hygiene experts,
and military authorities. Following Italian unification in 1860, for ex-
ample, regulating prostitution quickly became a governmental priority.
In England, Parliament enacted a series of Contagious Diseases Acts
in 1864, 1866, and 1869, setting up a modified system of state regulation
designed to protect male military personnel from venereal diseases by
controlling and inspecting female prostitutes. This program quickly led
to indiscriminate police harassment of women on the streets of garrison
towns, including many who were not prostitutes. These actions pro- ,
voked Josephine Butler, who quickly launched a campaign for repeal of
the acts. The so-called Women’s Protest, signed by 124 women, and pub-
lished in the Daily News (London} in the 1870 New Year’s Day issue,
pointed out not only the violation of women’s civil rights inherent in the
acts but also the double standard of morality these laws implicitly sanc-
tioned: “It is unjust to punish the sex who are the victims of a vice, and
leave unpunished the sex who are the main cause, both of the vice and its
dreaded consequences; and we consider that liability to arrest, forced
medical treatment, and (where this is resisted) imprisonment with hard
labour, to which these Acts subject women, are punishments of the
most degrading kind.’”*” This manifesto bravely confronted a problem
that well-bred “ladies,” single ladies and clergymen’s wives in particu-
lar, were not supposed even to know about, demanding that the “causes
of tne evil” be addressed. Butler’s efforts in particular earned feminists
the epithet “the shrieking sisterhood” from the Saturday Review and an
embarrassed “conspiracy of silence” from the British press. Undaunted,
Butler founded her own periodical, The Shield, to spread word of the an-
tiregulationist campaign.

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 Birthing the “Woman Question” 125
Butler’s campaign quickly became an international affair. Feminist
writers such as Harriet Martineau in London, Julie-Victoire Daubié in
Paris, and Anna-Maria Mozzoni in Milan all addressed the issue of regu-
lated prostitution, calling for the dismantling of a system that so bla-
tantly discriminated against women. In the course of the 1870s Butler’s
crusade led to the formation of an international alliance which had as its
ultimate goal not only the abolition of state-regulated prostitution on
the French model throughout Europe but also the so-called white slave
trade itself.*® The Contagious Disease Acts in England were finally abol-
ished in 1886, but the abolitionist campaigns on the European continent
would continue into the twentieth century.
British feminist initiatives against regulated prostitution, married
women’s property law, and the continuing difficulties of ending bad
marriages focused attention on the problem of male sexual violence
against women and children in the family. Frances Power Cobbe led the
charge on this issue, first challenging “the divine right of husbands,”
then exposing what life was really like for some women within the sanc-
tuary of the family in an attempt to liberalize marriage laws on behalf of
aggrieved wives.” Such concerns also raised questions about male use
and abuse of alcohol.
The women’s campaign against war, increasingly viewed as another
state-sanctioned form of male violence, capped the new feminist initia-
tives launched in the 1850s and 1860s. In late August 1854, shortly after
the outbreak of the Crimean War, the Swedish novelist Fredrika Bremer
published a letter in the Times of London. Bremer was already well
known in England, thanks to the efforts of her translator Mary Howitt.
Her “Invitation to a Peace Alliance” called for a peaceful international
alliance of women “opposing the direful effects of war... and contribut-
ing... to the development of a state of peace, love, and well-being, to
come forth when once the terrors of war shall be over, and the time of
devastation has passed away.” Bremer proposed uniting philanthropic
Christian women across boundaries and borders, inviting them “to join
hands as sisters,” and to learn from one another, in order to “alleviate
the miseries of the earth.”
Bremer’s peace initiative was but one of a series of transnationalist
feminist initiatives that sought to unite women in order to address gen-
eral societal problems, not only to remedy their effects but, more signifi-
cantly, to address their causes. These “problems” included the phe-
nomenon of war itself. In the later 1860s, as the Prussian military cam-
paigns of annexation and expansion with the goal of national unification
got under way, the Swiss feminist-pacifist Marie Goegg would establish

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 126 The Nineteenth Century
an International Association of Women with multiple emancipatory
aims, not the least of which was to seek to forestall war itself by address-
ing the underlying causes of militarist values. One of Goegg’s objectives
was, in historian Sandi Cooper’s words, “the re-education of mothers to
prevent another generation of boys trained to respect the false idols of
national glory through military conquest.”*! Goegg’s articles and
speeches were published in the short-lived periodical of the International
League for Peace and Freedom, Les Etats-Unis d’Europe. The Prussian |
victory over France in 1870 and the Paris Commune in 1871 would put
an abrupt end to Goegg’s prescient pacifist-feminist project, but it would
reemerge in the 1870s with new vigor.”

LAUNCHING THE KNOWLEDGE WARS ,

In 1850 a virtually unknown Danish woman, Mathilde Fibiger, pub-
lished her Klara Raphael: Tolv Breve (Clara Raphael: Twelve Letters} |
under the patronage of a well-known Copenhagen intellectual, Johan
Ludvig Heiberg. There she told the story of a young woman who wanted
to devote herself to the pursuit of ideas. Fibiger’s Clara Raphael refused
marriage to a worthy man in order to achieve her goal:” a
For the first time in my life I feel sorry that Iam not a man. How poor and
empty is our life compared with theirs! Is it just that half the people
should be excluded from all intellectual pursuits? Or did our Lord really
create us of poorer stuff than men (as I have heard one fascinating gen-
tleman of the neighbourhood declare in all seriousness), so that we are to
be content to carry out automatically the trivial labour allotted to us in
this life? Does our mind then possess no power and our heart no enthusi-
asm? Indeed they do, but the real life within us has not come to aware-
ness, our spirit is captive and prejudice stands guard outside the prison. ,
Fibiger’s volume stirred up a stormy controversy, a virtual literary
war on the woman question, both in Copenhagen and throughout the
Scandinavian literary world. It was a harbinger of things to come, as in-
dividual women of intellect and ambition began to articulate their de-
‘sires not in terms of sexual complementarity, but in terms of self-
realization outside of and beyond the highly disadvantageous constraints
of marriage and family. Prior to Florence Nightingale’s Cassandra
(written in 1852 and privately published in 1860}, which railed against
the suffocation of privileged women in family life, Klara Raphael had
claimed the life of the mind for women.
The issue of women’s relationship to knowledge took a dramatic step
forward in the years between 1850 and 1870. Feminist writers attempted _

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 Birthing the “Woman Question” 127
to seize the high ground, claiming knowledge in their own right, and
thus going beyond the old debate about women’s creativity by demon-
strating it. Thereby they hoped to mute questions as to whether women
could create works of “genius,” or should settle for being the mothers of |
“men of genius,” as Henry Buckle would suggest in 1859.
In France, the novels of the prolific George Sand continued to pour
forth from the presses, inspiring women writers all over Europe. In 1865,
a flurry of pamphlet literature would propose her candidacy to the vener-
able Académie Francaise. In England Charlotte Bronté had raised the
novel to new heights, with Jane Eyre (1847) and Shirley (1849}, ably sec-
onded by Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848), Ruth (1853), Cranford
(1853), and North and South (1855); and Elizabeth Barrett Browning pub-
lished her landmark epic poem Aurora Leigh {1855}. Each of these writ-
ers placed analyses of the woman question at center stage. Subsequently,
the novels of George Eliot (Marian Evans} offered new evidence in the
case for women’s literary genius. Artistic genius manifested itself in the
massive canvases of the painter Rosa Bonheur. When France’s Empress
Eugénie awarded the Cross of the Legion of Honor to Bonheur in June
1865, she insisted: “It was my desire that the last act of my regency be
consecrated to showing that in my eyes genius has no sex.”
The French Protestant feminist Jenny P. (Poinsard) d’Héricourt had
used the years following the failure of the 1848 revolution to earn a de-
gree in homeopathic medicine and become a practicing midwife, certi-
fied by the Paris Faculty of Medicine. In an 1855 article, “On Woman’s
Future,” published in Turin in the Kingdom of Piedmont, she reminded
her readers of the Saint-Simonians’ earlier call for women to speak out:
“Today,” she wrote, “several women have disengaged themselves from
the secular absorption of their sex and have developed their own indi-
viduality. These women, andI am one of them, can now reply to that call
...and that is what Iam going to do.””
Challenging the established wisdom, Jenny P. d’Héricourt revealed
herself as a full-fledged combatant on a par with men in the knowledge
wars. Invoking the law of progress, she traced out a theory of gender for-
mation. Organic modifications, she argued, have their seat in the brain,
which is “essentially modifiable.” There are now women, who have had
a masculine education, who are in possession of rational faculties, just as
there are men who preponderantly display feelings. “It is radically
false,” she argued, “that nature made men rational and women emo-
tional; it is education and morals that made them thus: feelings and ra-
tionality are equally distributed. ... The brain is the instrument of prog-
ress.” The mind may have no sex, but the genderless brain requires exer-

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 128 The Nineteenth Century
cise to develop. No more women’s nature, women’s destiny, women’s
functions, no more women’s sphere. Women, just like men, are en route
to “individual independence.” Finally, women must cease asking for
their rights and take them. They must remain women, not emulating
masculine habits or airs, and they must ally themselves in solidarity
with other women. “Victory,” d’Héricourt insisted, “will belong to
those who are united by affection and a common goal, who know how to
dare and to act.” |
Intellectually unleashed, as only a woman approaching fifty can be,
Jenny P. d’Héricourt also challenged biblical authority, insisting that
claims for the equality of the sexes based on Christian belief (much dis-
cussed in recent years) were in fact not true. Citing multiple examples
from the Old and New Testaments alike, she demonstrated that “both
proclaim the inferiority of woman, imposing on her the most absolute —
submission to her father and her husband, refusing her every right, as
daughter, spouse, mother, alienating her from the priesthood, from sci- ,
ence, from instruction, denying her intelligence, outraging her modesty,
torturing her feelings, permitting the sale and exploitation of her beauty,
preventing her from inheriting or owning property.”*° Catholicism, in
her view, was a particular obstacle: a falling away from blind faith would
be a good thing for women.
It was on the crest of these attacks that Jenny P. d’Héricourt con-
fronted the antifeminism of her countryman from the Franche-Comté, _
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, a leading spokesman for the workers’ mutualist
, movement and the adversary of Jeanne Deroin’s earlier electoral cam-
paign. In a heated exchange Jenny challenged Proudhon’s published
views on the woman question since 1841. She also published his re-
sponse to her, in which he argued that women’s cause must not be sepa-
rated from that of men, that justice could never make woman man’s.
equal, and that the “inferiority of the feminine sex did not constitute ei-
ther serfdom or humiliation, or a lessened dignity,” but rather the oppo-
site. He considered the agitation of women on women’s behalf as “a
_ madness due precisely to the infirmity of the sex, and to its incapacity to
know itself and to govern itself alone.””” a
Jenny d’Héricourt quickly counterattacked, claiming that Proudhon
was effectively applying a double standard for justice as concerns
women. In reply, Proudhon sketched the outline of what would become
his infamous “calculus” of the inferiority of women to men. The discus-
sion terminated abruptly in March 1857, when Jenny declared Proud-
hon’s failure to respond to her rebuttal to be his admission of defeat.

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 Birthing the “Woman Question” 129
Proudhon’s response was forthcoming with the publication in 1858 of
his major work, De la Justice dans la Révolution et dans I|’église (On Jus-
tice in the Revolution and in the Church], particularly the section “Love
and Marriage.” Singling out the would-be emancipators of woman,
Proudhon claimed: “Feminine indiscretion has caught fire; a half-dozen
inky-fingered insurgents obstinately try to make woman into something
we do not want, reclaim their rights with insults, and defy us to bring the
question out into the light of day.”°? Emancipation, Proudhon insisted,
maintaining his earlier formula “housewife or harlot,” amounted to
prostitution. He then laid out the details of his calculus of women’s
“ohysical, intellectual, and moral inferiority” to men, based on the Aris-
totelian premises of what G. J. Barker Benfield aptly named “the sper-
matic economy,” and what we might now call the testosterone imprint.
“The complete human being,” Proudhon proclaimed, “is the male.”
With regard to intellect, he claimed: “Genius is... virility of spirit and
its accompanying powers of abstraction, generalization, invention, con-
ceptualization, which are lacking in equal measure in children, eunuchs,
and women. ... To the generation of ideas as to the generation [of chil-
dren] woman brings nothing of her own; she is a passive, enervating be-
ing, whose conversation exhausts you as much as her embraces.””? In her
book La Femme affranchie (Woman Affranchised, 1860) Jenny P.
d’Héricourt returned to the charge: “We demand our right, because we
are persuaded that woman has to set her stamp on Science, Philosophy,
Justice and Politics.”
In Lausanne, Switzerland, one French woman had already begun to set
her stamp on science and philosophy. In the late 1850s Clémence Royer
opened a course for ladies on “woman’s philosophy,” defending the posi-
tion that women had a special sort of genius. “What I must find,” she ex-
plained in her introductory lecture, “is a form, a feminine expression of
science. It is... anew art which I have to create,” an art that could give
life to the cold and virile character of science, an art that could engage
women fully in scientific endeavors. “As long as science remains exclu-
sively in the hands of men,” Royer explained, “it will never go down into
the depths of the family and society. ... Why... should [women] be ex-
cluded from the hunt for truth?’”°' Royer went on to publish (in 1862) her
French translation of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species, which she
prefaced with a long and iconoclastic commentary. In the 1870s, follow-
ing her return to France from Switzerland, Royer would become a con-
troversial participant in the Anthropological Society of Paris.

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 130 The Nineteenth Century
REJUSTIFYING PATRIARCHY
Brave proclamations, these proclamations of women’s integral being and
capacities—and they were hotly contested from the 1850s on. Indeed,
one of the least well-known features of the knowledge wars in this period
is the pan-European surge of scholarly or quasi-scholarly publications
justifying the necessity of patriarchy. Amid the celebrations of woman-
hood, the eulogies of motherhood, and the enthronement of the fem-
inine on a pedestal, a more hostile intellectual countercurrent was de-
veloping. In addition to the widely circulated responses of Proudhon and
Jules Michelet in France, the contributions of their German contempora-
ries Arthur Schopenhauer and Wilhelm Riehl and those of Sir Henry
Sumner Maine in England and J.-J. Bachofen in Switzerland must be
noted. Some of the most distinguished intellects of the nineteenth
century engaged the woman question head-on, assembling their physio-
logical, anthropological, philological, and historical expertise in defense
of—or justification of—male rule. The newly emerging human scien-
ces—sociology, psychology, anthropology—all engaged these debates.
Writing “On Women” in 1851, an aging Arthur Schopenhauer (whose
mother had been a salonniére and a confidante of the poet-philosopher
Goethe} once again invoked Nature’s plan for women, which he summed
up as suffering and submission. Schopenhauer, anticipating Nietzsche
and others, constructed women’s “difference” almost entirely in the
negative. With regard to matters of the intellect, he declared, women
lack reason; therefore they lack also a sense of justice. They lack an ap-
preciation of great art, and they lack genius. Indeed, Schopenhauer
claimed, “the most distinguished intellects among the whole sex have
never managed to produce a single achievement in the fine arts that is
really great, genuine, and original; or given to the world any work of
permanent value in any sphere”:
[Women] form the sexus sequior—the second sex, inferior in every re-
spect to the first; their infirmities should be treated with consideration,
but to show them great reverence is extremely ridiculous, and lowers us
in their eyes. When Nature made two divisions of the human race, she
did not draw the line exactly through the middle. These divisions are po-
lar and opposed to each other, it is true; but the difference between them
is not qualitative merely, it is also quantitative. ...It would be a very de-
sirable thing if this Number-Two of the human race were in Europe also
relegated to her natural place, and an end put to that lady nuisance,
which not only moves all Asia to laughter, but would have been ridi-
culed by Greece and Rome as well.

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 Birthing the “Woman Question” 131
Even monogamy unduly exalts woman as being man’s equal, Schopen-
hauer argued; the Asian peoples knew better. Women should, moreover,
not inherit property or handle wealth: “The people who make money are
men, not women; and it follows from this that women are neither justi-
fied in having unconditional possession of it, nor fit persons to be en-
trusted with its administration.”
In Germany, the young journalist and social scientist Wilhelm Hein-
rich Riehl seconded Schopenhauer’s counterattack. In reaction to the
upheavals of 1848, Riehl undertook a sociological project to discover the
“real” Germany, the traditional, patriarchal Germany of the country-
side. While working on his trilogy “The Natural History of the German
People,” Riehl published an essay “On Women: A Social-political
Study” in the Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift in which he castigated “the
emancipated women” of 1848, who had forgotten the natural vocation of
their sex.” This denunciation provided the springboard for his further
discussion of male-female relations, based on biblical authority, in a
volume entitled “The Family” {1855}. Cultural development, he claimed
(like Comte before him}, led to increasing differentiation and distinct-
iveness of the sexes, not toward undifferentiated equality. Women could
be emancipated, he argued, only by making (male} heads of households,
not individuals, the representatives of the family to the state. Bachelors,
like spinsters, were, in Riehl’s scheme of things, unfortunate and unen-
franchisable.
In France, the sociologist Frederic LePlay embarked on an investiga-
tion of worker and peasant households comparable to that of Riehl, with
an eye to discovering the key to social reform that would keep women in
their place as men’s auxiliaries. In LePlay’s view, as expressed in his trea-
tise Réforme social (Social Reform, 1864), in which as yet unreformed
English marriage laws provided his model, women’s place must be de-
finitively in the household; she should have nothing to do with manu-
facture, commerce, or property. This reformer championed separation of
spheres and male breadwinners with a vengeance. LePlay’s investiga-
tions into social and economic life would be complemented by the find-
ings of Paul Bernard, winner of a competition on the history of paternal
authority sponsored in 1860 by the French Imperial Academy of Moral
and Political Sciences.“
Jules Michelet’s popular sociophilosophical inquiries Love (1859) and
Woman (1860) drew heavily on recent medical research about female re-
productive physiology to promote the doctrine of women as perpetual
invalids and thus to give new meaning to the term “physiological reduc-

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 132 The Nineteenth Century
tionism.” Michelet argued that “Woman” must necessarily remain un-
der man’s authority within his household, her mind as well as her body
fertilized by his superior attributes. In addition, he advocated cutting
woman off from her family of birth, thereby rendering her totally de-
pendent upon her husband. Michelet’s flowery and pseudopoetic pat-
riarchal doctrines, disguised in the form of marriage manuals addressed
to men and widely translated, would cast an unusually long shadow
throughout Europe and America during the remainder of the century.”
It is in light of such repressive reactions to the feminist eruptions in
1848 that these campaigns to reformulate the intellectual foundations of
patriarchy—and indeed, to reassert masculinity and its prerogatives—
must be reevaluated. It is in this light, too, that one must reconsider the
better-known literary and philosophical campaign by poets and writers
to idealize “Woman” as “the angel of the house” (angel del hogar, in the
Spanish version; angelo del focolare, in Italian).°° Rousseau’s Julie, the
new Heloise of the mid-eighteenth century, provided an enduring model
for the “angel,” but subsequent versions took culturally specific forms.
The poems and essays of Coventry Patmore (The Angel in the House,
1854-63) and John Ruskin (Of Queen’s Gardens, 1865) in England con-
tributed to this project, as did the widely translated treatises of the
French Protestant pastor Adolphe Monod, with his Woman: Her Mission
and Life (in French, 1848; English, 1858; also in Danish) and the Italian
Catholic prelate Gioacchimo Ventura di Raulica, author of the mul-
tivolume, much-translated La Donna cattolica (1855). As for feminists,
many doubtless agreed with the French women’s rights advocate and
popular public speaker Maria Deraismes, who in the 186os declined “the
honor of being an angel” and castigated those who so insisted on
women’s self-sacrificial and purely domestic role as women’s worst
enemies.”
New historical scholarship during this period focused close attention
on the origins and development of human societies, particularly Euro-
pean antecedents. Writing before the era of great archaeological excava-
tions and on-site anthropological expeditions, these scholars had to rely
on evidence drawn from early written records preserved in law and lit-
erature. They prided themselves on observing a scientific, scholarly ap-
proach to the past, though they wrote with an unapologetic eye on their
own times. Two major works published in 1861 reveal the centrality of
the woman question to theories about the history of societal develop-
ment.
In Ancient Law, the British legal scholar Sir Henry Sumner Maine
drew on the fruits of comparative jurisprudence to argue that since time

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 Birthing the “Woman Question” 133
immemorial Indo-European societies had been organized around patriar-
chal families, though the absolute authority of the father had been sub-
ject to increasing erosion in more recent times as the personal and pro-
prietary freedom of individuals, especially female individuals, increased.
“Ancient law,” Maine wrote, “subordinates the woman to her blood-
relations, while a prime phenomenon of modern jurisprudence has been
her subordination to her husband. The history of the change is remark-
able.’”’*? As family organization had ceded before the emergence of the in-
dividual, so too had contract replaced status in progressive societies.
Unmarried adult women, like men, could contract as individuals.
At the University of Basel, where he was professor of Roman law, Jo-
hann-Jakob Bachofen carefully analyzed the rise and fall of matriarchy in
the ancient Mediterranean world. He was deeply impressed with the sig-
nificance of religion and the importance of myth as an interpretative
tool. In Das Mutterrecht (Mother Right} Bachofen thought he had docu-
mented the overthrow of female rule by male rule, and he clearly consid-
ered patriarchy to be a superior state in social organization, representing
in his mind the triumph of “mind” over “matter.” His enduring contri-
bution was to demonstrate authoritatively the existence of matrilineal
kinship patterns in early Mediterranean culture, if not that of actual fe-
male governance.” The findings of Maine and Bachofen, supplemented
by those of the Scot John Fergusson McLennan on primitive marriage,
provided new rounds of ammunition with which to attack the problem
of appropriately reordering the sexes in contemporary European socie-
ties. Their influence was felt in the subsequent works of such diverse
writers as Friedrich Engels and Friedrich Nietzsche.
Two of the most important aspects of the knowledge wars with regard
to the development of feminism in the 1860s were, first, the campaign
for women’s medical education, and second, the development of a well-
documented critique of women’s serious disadvantages with respect to
paid employment.
At stake in the campaign for medical education was nothing less than
knowledge of and control over women’s bodies and over reproduction.
Male physicians were increasingly asserting their authority in issues of
gynecology and obstetrics, and building practices in these areas, the tra-
ditional prerogative of midwives. In France, where abortion had been de-
clared a crime against the state during the French Revolution, and again
criminalized in the Napoleonic Penal Code (1810}, and where midwives
were subjected to governmental control, the debate was complicated by
concerns over feeble population growth.
The stakes were raised in the later 1850s and 1860s when prominent

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 134 The Nineteenth Century
male physicians, particularly the public health enthusiast Ambroise
Tardieu (who brought up the issue of abortion at the Academy of Medi-
cine in early 1852, and subsequently became France’s leading medical-
legal authority on the subject), first, argued for changing the legal stan-
dards to ensure conviction of abortionists, and second, alleged that mid-
wives were functioning all too frequently as abortionists—that is, as an-
tisocial profiteers—rather than as promoters of new life.”°
In England, Parliament passed the Medical Act of 1858, which re-
stricted entry into the field of medicine to holders of British university
degrees. This was a direct response to the recent registration of the An-
glo-American Elizabeth Blackwell, who had obtained her medical degree
in the United States and had interned in France. Incensed by this devel-
opment, and inspired by the example of their predecessor and mentor, a
few dedicated English women prepared to storm the bastions of the Brit-
ish medical profession. The British government’s criminalization of
abortion in 1861 may have also been a factor in their determination.
Meanwhile, in 1864, the University of Zurich had quietly opened its
doors to women auditors. Young women from Eastern Europe, including
Poland, Romania, and especially Russia, flocked to enroll at Zurich.
There, science and progressive politics had linked arms in the later 1850s
and 1860s, in tandem with the freeing of the serfs. But a feminist critique
had begun to develop only with the publications of M. L. Mikhailov
(inspired in no small part by the publications of Jenny P. d’Héricourt,
whom he had met in Paris) and with N. G. Chernyshevsky’s novel Chto
Delat’ (What Is to Be Done?, 1863). Some privileged women were swept
into study of the natural sciences and medicine on the same wave as
their male counterparts, auditing courses at St. Petersburg University.
But after these universities and medical schools were closed to them in
1863-64, many left Russia to pursue their studies abroad, and Zurich
gave them an initially warm welcome. This set a precedent that could
not be ignored by other medical schools in Western Europe.”’
The admission of women to the study of medicine unfolded quite dif-
ferently in France. A German woman, Mathilde Theyessen, claimed the
honor of becoming the first certified woman physician of nineteenth-
century Europe, passing her examinations as an “officier de santé et de
pharmacie” in Paris in 1865. The 1868 decision to admit women (in-
cluding Elizabeth Garrett, the American Mary Putnam Jacobi, a Russian,
Mlle. Gontcharoff, and the first French woman, Madeleine Brés} to the
examinations of Paris Faculty of Medicine was made by Empress Eugé-
nie (long a promoter of girls’ education} and the Council of Ministers,
during another short regency. When the Second Empire fell, she and the

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 Birthing the “Woman Question” 135
minister of education were rushing to found a women’s medical school
before the Russians established one in St. Petersburg. The obstacles to
women’s practice of medicine in France lay not in the faculties or in ac-
cess to the examinations, but in the subsequent steps: their exclusion
from the competitive examinations leading to hospital-based intern-
ships and residencies in medical specialties. These hurdles, controlled by

women physicians to clear. |

the medical authorities themselves, would prove far more difficult for

Of the British aspirants to medical education, Elizabeth Garrett man-

aged to enroll for examinations in Paris in 1868, but Sophia Jex-Blake de-
termined to become a doctor in Britain, obtaining permission to study
medicine in separate “ladies’ classes” at the University of Edinburgh. “Tf
women claim that they do need and can appreciate instruction in any or
all sciences, I do not know who has the right to deny that assertion,” Jex-
Blake argued in 1869.” Three conflict-ridden years later, the University
Senatus refused the women permission to register for the examinations
that would lead to their degrees. The women won their lawsuit against
the university, but officials subsequently stalled by appealing the deci-
sion, ultimately forcing the women to leave, after great delays and ex-
penses. In 1877 London University became the first English university to
grant medical degrees to women, following Parliament’s amendment of
the Medical Act the previous year to remove all restrictions grounded in
sexual difference. The costs were great, but women’s admission to the
medical profession in England was henceforth secured.
The reactions of some university-trained men to the campaigns to
admit women to medical education were astonishingly harsh. In Ger-
many and Austria, in particular, the male academic community mobi-
lized against women’s efforts to enroll in any aspect of university study.
The objections of the Munich-based medical professor Theodor von
Bischoff, in his tract Das Studium und die Austibung der Medizin durch
Frauen (The Study and Practice of Medicine by Women, 1872) would
have a lasting influence. In the later 1870s, the German professoriate in
all fields would close ranks against women students in virtually all areas
of study, and that opposition would last well into the 1890s.”
Even in England, where women won the battle for medical education,
opposition to higher education continued. Opponents claimed that
higher education would ruin women’s reproductive capacities, or lead to
nervous breakdown, and that in the process such women would some-
how become thoroughly masculinized. Against such accusations as
those of Henry Maudsley that the aim of higher education for women
was “to assimilate the female to the male mind,” Elizabeth Garrett An-

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 136 The Nineteenth Century
derson, Britain’s first female physician, insisted that “the single aim of
those anxious to promote a higher and more serious education for
women is to make the best they can of the materials at their disposal.”
“Tf they fail,” she added pointedly, “it assuredly will not be from think-
ing that the masculine type of excellence includes all that can be desired
in humanity.””* Among other rights, women had the right to minds—
and views—of their own.
Feminists did not need university degrees, however, to make impor-
tant contributions to economic knowledge, based on systematic obser-
vation, in the debate over women’s employment. In a time when both
economists and labor leaders in Britain and France were arguing the case
for a “family wage” that would keep women in the home, women acting
as social scientists were gathering data of their own to point out the

tive. .
problems with the male-breadwinner model. Already in the 1840s, Flora
Tristan had been surveying the issues regarding women and employ-
ment, and had offered some especially astute observations on the issue of
women’s inferior pay in her book Union ouvriére (Workers’ Union,
1843): if women were given equal pay for equal work, she noted ironi-
cally, women would earn more than men, because they are more produc-

In La Femme (1860), Jules Michelet damned the word ouvriére as

“impious” and “sordid,” but his indignant opposition could not eradi-
cate the phenomenon of women workers. Jules Simon’s study of the
woman worker, published in 1861, reignited opposition to the industrial
employment of women outside the home. Simon was well informed
about the many difficult social problems that had developed for work-
ing-class families in English textile-manufacturing towns and examined
their counterparts in France with those problems in mind. Though his-
torians have since shown that a surprisingly high proportion of the
women employed in textiles were young and single, Simon nevertheless
discussed their work exclusively as that of married women. His operat-
ing assumption was that every single woman was a prospective wife and
mother of a large family whose labor-force participation, even prior to
marriage, not only actively prevented the acquisition and practice of
domestic skills, but also posed a deadly threat to her virtue. Like many of
the liberal economists of his time, Simon advocated raising men’s wages
to provide a “family wage” that could support a wife and children. Any
productive labor performed by women, he argued, should be done by
them in their homes, where they could remain “women.” “If there is one
thing nature clearly teaches us,” Simon asserted, echoing Michelet,
Comte, and others, “it is that woman is made to be protected, to live as a

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 Birthing the “Woman Question” 137
girl with her mother, as a wife under the protection and authority of her
husband.””
Julie-Victoire Daubié, the first woman to pass the French baccalau-
réat examination (1861)—which carried with it admission to university
education—disputed Simon’s arguments. She had prepared her book La
Femme pauvre |The Poor Woman) for an essay competition sponsored in
the late 1850s by the Academy of Lyon, and she published it in 1866.
Rather than attempting, like Simon, to return working women to a de-
pendent familial role by raising men’s wages, Daubié, like her feminist
predecessors, urged reforms that would permit women to become eco-
nomically independent. Moreover, she called for the passage of laws that
would curb sexual harassment and thereby allow women more freedom
of movement in French society. She objected particularly to the intru-
sion of men into what she considered to be women’s occupations:”°
Whenever we investigate carefully the causes of the poor woman’s pre-
carious state, we see that these can be attributed to an administrative
centralization that arbitrarily excludes her from schools and employ-
ments, and to an irresponsible immorality that, after banishing her from
the family, has loaded her down with the triple oppression of laws, insti-
tutions, and customs.
Daubié enumerated and condemned these laws, institutions, and cus-
toms in exquisite detail in her lengthy study, which tore holes in the
paternalistic arguments of liberal economists such as Simon. In the
1860s, when the American Civil War had inscribed the emancipation of
black slaves on the consciousness of most thinking Europeans, the
studies of women’s work by Bessie Rayner Parkes in England and Louise
Otto in Germany likewise called for freedom for individual development
through economic emancipation for women. “We want to free ourselves
from the pressure of dependence,” asserted Otto, “by demanding a nat-
ural sharing of labor for men and women.””’
In 1866-67, when the debate over the woman question surfaced in the
annual congresses of the newly formed International Working Men’s As-
sociation, studies such as these provided ample ammunition for advo-
cates of women’s right to work. These meetings, attended by a mixture
of progressive middle-class intellectuals and craft workers, engendered
heated debate over women’s role in the labor force and in the family. Few
of the workingmen present supported the principle of women’s right to
work. Like so many of the learned men of that time, they preferred the
notion of a “family wage” that would allow men to earn enough to sup-
port their wives and children. Here arguments from Proudhon, Simon,
and Michelet were much rehearsed, commingled in the workingmen’s

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 138 The Nineteenth Century
debates with those of Marx and Engels. The consensus of the 1867
Workers’ Congress, following a year of study and heated debate, was that
women should be emancipated from work in order to remain in the fam-
ily. “The greatest name on earth is the name of the father, the greatest
thing is paternal authority: these are the creative and conserving ele-
ments of the family,” announced the Commission’s 1867 Report:
Woman, by her physical and moral nature, is naturally called to the
peaceable minutiae of the domestic hearth; this is her department. We do
not believe it is useful for society to give her any other charge. If the wife
of the proletarian is able to become a deputy to the Chamber, the
worker’s soup may well be inadequately seasoned. As a mother, woman
is the child’s first educator, but on the express condition that the father
acts as the directing agent.
In Paris, feminists objected strenuously to the First International’s
conclusions. In a series of public lectures held there in 1868, numerous
speakers addressed the issues. The feminist socialist Paule Mink elo- ,
quently made the case for women’s autonomy, for her right to work and
to receive equal pay: “By denying woman the right to work, you degrade
her; you put her under man’s yoke and deliver her over to man’s good
pleasure. .. . It is work alone that makes independence possible and
without which there is no dignity.” But like the arguments of many of
her predecessors, Mink’s argument for equality and independence was
cast in terms of women’s differences from men:”
Why can’t woman be man’s equal without wanting to become like him?
Copying is inevitably a form of weakness; above all, one must affirm and
remain oneself. Women have virtues that are their own, and men have
qualities peculiar to themselves. Why meld them into a formless mass
whose parts are unrecognizable? We affirm our individuality, but we
want to remain women.
Far from unsexing women, Mink argued that paid employment would al-
low women to develop themselves to the fullest extent as female indi-
viduals.
The knowledge wars of the 1850s and 1860s had precipitated signifi-
cant contributions from feminists as well as the rearticulation and reaf-
firmation of objections to women’s emancipation from those we can
call, in retrospect, antifeminists. The roles of work and family in struc-
turing female subordination had been clearly identified. The time was
ripe, then, for a publishing event that would greatly accelerate the flow
of feminist thinking throughout Europe: the appearance in 1869 of John
Stuart Mill’s great work The SubjectionofWomen.

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 Birthing the “Woman Question” 139
RECASTING THE DEBATE: MILL’S ‘SUBJECTION
OF WOMEN’ AND ITS DETRACTORS
In the heat of arguments over women’s genius, ancient history, medical
education, differential wages, and in the midst of continued romantici-
zation of women’s “sphere” by aesthetes and religious leaders, and de-
fenses of patriarchy by sociologists and historians, the renowned British
philosopher John Stuart Mill composed his most eloquent argument for
women’s legal emancipation from patriarchal institutions, The Subjec-
tion of Women. The publication of this weighty little book in 1869 was
an event of truly international significance for the cause of women’s
rights. The London edition was quickly reprinted in New York and
Philadelphia; translations appeared shortly thereafter in nearly every
European language. Significantly, many of Mill’s translators were wom-
en and feminists, among them the Italian Anna Maria Mozzoni, the
German Jenny Hirsch, and some years later {1890s} the Spanish novelist
and essayist Emilia Pardo Bazan. The rising young cosmopolitan literary
critic Georg Brandes, an enthusiastic advocate of women’s emancipa-
tion, prepared and promoted the Danish translation.
The woman question had been central to Mill’s thinking since the
early 1830s, and he remained convinced that there was no reason to ad-
mit the “necessary subordination of one sex to the other.” He had finally
broken off discussions with August Comte on this issue, rejecting once
and for all Comte’s physiological determinism on the woman question.
Extending the principle he had developed in his powerful and influential
tract On Liberty (1859}, Mill suggested that all artificial or socially con-
structed barriers to the flourishing of the female personality should be
eliminated, thereby allowing the question of “woman’s nature” to be
answered once and for all. Women, he argued, should be allowed the
same opportunity for personal liberty, the same freedom to acquire indi-
vidual dignity, as was allowed to men. He sustained his focus on the pos-
sible benefits that the development of female capacities might have for
society as a whole. “The anxiety of mankind to interfere in behalf of na-
ture, for fear lest nature should not succeed in effecting its purpose,” he
insisted, “is an altogether unnecessary solicitude.” Confronting the ba-
sic concern of those who opposed women’s emancipation, Mill threw
out a challenge:®
I should like to hear somebody openly enunciating the doctrine (it is al-
ready implied in much that is written on the subject)—“It is necessary to
society that women should marry and produce children. They will not do

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 140 7 The Nineteenth Century
so unless they are compelled. Therefore it is necessary to compel them.”
The merits of the case would then be clearly defined. | |
The beauty of Mill’s carefully constructed and eloquent argument was
that woman’s “nature” could never be properly determined until all the
legal and cultural constraints on women’s full development as human
beings were removed. This line of reasoning allowed women’s rights ad-
vocates to take the offensive in demanding emancipatory reforms in
womens legal status and education without having to justify such de-
mands on the basis of women’s special nature.
The Subjection of Women was widely reviewed and discussed in
print, and far beyond England, because of Mill’s already great reputation
as a philosopher. One of the fiercest responses came from the eminent
German historian Heinrich von Sybel, a critic of the French Revolution,
who like so many German intellectuals totally opposed training women
for anything except marriage and motherhood." In England, the reply of
Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, an unreconstructed authoritarian who had
spent many years in the colonial service in India (and the uncle of the
twentieth-century novelist Virginia [Stephen] Woolf), expressed his
adamant belief that, because of differences of physical strength and the
requirements of marriage, there could be no equality between the sexes.
In a rejoinder to Stephen, the women’s rights activist Millicent Garrett
Fawcett reiterated her objections to the legal subjection of English
women in marriage, while her colleague Lydia Becker took Stephen to
task for faulty assumptions by wrongly basing his understanding of
equality on physical qualities, and in particular by applying a misguided
analogy between the subordination of women and that of children.
Equality of personal rights and of opportunity, not of condition, charac-
terized Becker’s approach to discussing the equality ofthesexes.” —_
In France, Edouard de Pompéry, who shared Mill’s ultimate objective, _
criticized Mill for resting his case for equal rights on the ostensible _
equality of faculties. Pompéry, in contrast, invoked the principle of jus-
tice: “It is not in the name of equality of faculties between man and —
woman that the rights of woman should be demanded, but in the name
of human justice, which should assure to each member of society the

sweeping conclusion: = .
fullest and most complete expansion of his being.” And, he added, ina _

. Slavery, serfdom, the subjection of women have been passing necessi-

ties, along with war, theocracies, despotism, and that paternal power
which extends to the right of life and death over every member of the
family; but none of these institutions can find justification in rights or
, stand firm in the faith of reason.

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 Birthing the “Woman Question” I4I
The conservative Russian intellectual N. N. Strakhov responded to two
translations of Mill’s Subjection in a long essay published in Zaria (Feb-
ruary 1870). Strakhov viewed Mill’s argument for legal emancipation of
women as inappropriate for Russia, but he was even more critical of the
extravagant faith in human reason displayed by Russian advocates of
female emancipation:*™
The new solutior. to the ancient questions, boldly put forth, amounts to
the following: There is no difference between God and nature (God is
merely nature personified) ... between spirit and matter (spirit results
from the behavior of matter)... between human beings and animals (a
human being is simply an upright animal)... or between man and
woman {a woman is some kind of beardless man, only shorter).
Other opponents, elaborating the societal implications of the new evolu-
tionary theory proposed by Charles Darwin’s celebrated Origin of Spe-
cies (1859), asserted that even if women’s legal subordination were
ended, as Mill proposed, they could never reach the heights of creativity
and intellect established by men. Mill’s book thus launched a new round
of discussion, centering on the new issue of evolutionary constraints on
women’s freedom, as suggested by contemporary scientific inquiries
into brain size and cranial capacity, and the relation of both to body
mass.
Physical anthropologists, in England, in France, in Germany and
Switzerland, had already applied their new expertise in measuring
skulls, both ancient and more recent, in responding to the woman ques-
tion. Evolutionary theorists, led by Darwin himself, drew on the skull
findings not only to assert women’s difference but also to emphasize
their mental as well as physical inferiority. In his second important
book, The Descent of Man (1871), Darwin proposed the evolutionary
importance of sexual selection, or choice of mate, as responsible for in-
creasing the differentiation between men and women over time—with
reference not only to their physiology but also to their mental and emo-
tional makeup. He suggested that as women had become increasingly
protected by men, they had lost the necessity of having to sharpen their
wits in the unremitting struggle for survival, thereby assuring their rela-
tively inferior development. He was clearly convinced that the results of
evolutionary sexual differentiation, and the resulting male superiority,
could never be undone, irrespective of the wishes of nineteenth-century
women’s rights advocates. Men’s rivalry with other men, for women and
in life’s competition, and their role as breadwinners would ensure their
continuing superiority. “Although men do not now fight for their
wives,” Darwin remarked, “and this form of selection has passed away,

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 142 The Nineteenth Century
yet during manhood, they generally undergo a severe struggle in order to
maintain themselves and their families; and this will tend to keep up or
even increase their mental powers, and, as a consequence, the present
- inequality between thesexes.”"? = , a a
The evolutionary sociologist Herbert Spencer was also skeptical
about women’s ultimate potential to rival men. Once an enthusiastic
partisan of women’s equal right to exercise all their faculties (in his tract
Social Statics [1851]}, Spencer subsequently expressed his concern about
the negative effects on women of excessive bookishness: “How many
conquests does the bluestocking make through her extensive study of —
history? What man ever fell in love with a woman because she under-
stood Italian?”®° A further strong dose of Darwinism, coupled with his
insistence on the importance of knowledge about the comparative psy-
chology of the sexes as a grounding for all social science, led Spencer to
assert that “adaption to the paternal and maternal duties” determined
the psychology of the sexes. This difference, he argued, had evolved in
response to requirements for human survival. Even so he came to more
optimistic conclusions for the future than had Darwin: a lessening of
women’s needs to cultivate men’s good will ought to “entail a less early
arrest of individual evolution [for women], and a diminution of those
mental differences between men and women which the early arrest pro-
duces.”*®” Unlike Comte, Riehl, and others, Spencer seemed to be predict-
ing a relative convergence over time, rather than increasing divergence, |
between the sexes. Mill’s recasting of the question of women’s emanci-
pation had indeed stimulated a wide range of responses, many of which -
would deeply mark all subsequent European thought. |
In May 1867 woman suffrage returned to the political agenda in Eng-
land. The entire Western world witnessed the first substantive parlia-
mentary debate on woman suffrage, initiated by John Stuart Mill and the ,
many women activists who insisted that it become part of the electoral- Oe
reform agenda. Mill gave the campaign a further strong push, arguing the
case for changing the word “man” to “person” on the floor of the House
of Commons. Although the amendment was defeated, the new Reform |
Act enfranchised a broad range of male taxpayers. A coalition of woman- —
suffrage advocates banded together to challenge the exclusion of unmar-
ried female ratepayers—"no taxation without representation” seemed to
offer an irrefutable argument. Historian Jane Rendall has underscored
, the fact that women in the early suffrage movement spoke a complex
language, promoting individualist arguments to be sure, but also arguing
a relational case, based on woman’s civilizing mission in the struggle
| against barbarism and savagery, whether at home or abroad.®”.

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 Birthing the “Woman Question” 143
Responding to the challenge posed by the woman question, and espe-
cially Mill’s reformulation of the debate in terms of classical liberty—
that is, of removing the shackles that held women down—the intellec-
tual, scientific, and creative establishments in a number of countries be-
gan to mobilize. When coupled with feminist queries concerning the
causes of prostitution and war, feminist demands—whether formulated
in terms of emancipation, liberty, equality, rights, or justice—threatened
the existing order of things, by challenging the holders of educational,
economic, and political power. Feminist demands for self-realization
and societal partnership implied a thoroughgoing reorganization of fam-
ily and society; ultimately, the very practices of mating and reproduc-
tion, and the institutions that controlled them, were at stake.
Italy’s first woman writer, the historian, salonniére, and journalist
Cristina Belgiojoso, writing in the first issue of the new liberal publica-
tion Nuova Antologia (1866), contemplated these developments as part
of the passage to a “modern society.” “What would happen to the family
as it is presently constituted,” she queried, “if women were initiated
into masculine pursuits, and shared with men public, social, and literary
activities?”*° The French liberal economist Henri Baudrillart, who ob-
jected to Mill’s proposals, examined at length the question of women’s
emancipation in the Revue des Deux Mondes in 1872. Baudrillart was
not one to exaggerate what was ultimately at stake:”!
If one accepts the terms in which [the woman question] is posed [i.e., in
terms of individual liberty], one can see in it the germ of perhaps the
greatest revolution the world has yet experienced. It would be nothing
less than the coming into its rights of an entire sex—that is to say, half of
the human species—which until now has been unjustly dispossessed.
Even abolitionism, which has been devoted to eradicating the servitude
of several million poor blacks from the face of the earth, would amount
to little in comparison to this.
The plethora of claims for women’s emancipation had flowed beyond
the land of utopian dreams and had entered the promised land of political
possibilities. Speaking of the “two genders” (deux genres) in 1868, Maria
Deraismes triumphantly underscored what all could see: “Women’s in-
feriority is not a fact of nature. ... It is a human invention, a social fic-
tion.””*

Offen, Karen M. European Feminisms, 1700-1950: a Political History.

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 Internationalizing Feminism,
1870-1890 © a —
‘[ war declared by Prussia on France in 1870 brusquely
4. checked the momentum of organized feminist efforts in con-
tinental Europe. This war resulted in French defeat, the fall of the Second
Empire, and the unification of Germany under Wilhelm I of Prussia. Fol- _
lowing the treaty of Frankfurt in early 1871, a brief but violent civil war,
known as the Paris Commune, erupted in March. Feminist activists in
_ Paris made a broad range of claims on women’s behalf during this impor-
tant episode, but their efforts were once again damped down by another
wave of repressive legislation and controls. Further internationalization
of the women’s movements ensued, though with the initiative passing
from the French, considered too revolutionary by some, to the English-
speaking world. French arguments for women’s emancipation, which
had long emphasized partnership with men and maternal influence, in-
creasingly exhibited assertions of absolute equality and the individual
_ right to self-development, while British arguments, even in their most
individualistic forms, show upon closer examination enduring traces of
the case for equality and rights based on women’s distinctive civilizing _
- mission and duties. Meanwhile, pressures for ending women’s subordi-
nation began to build in Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, Imperial Ger-

, corded. , 7
- many, and in the Scandinavian countries. By 1889, with the commemo- |
rations of the French Revolution, considerable progress could be re- |

~WAR, REVOLUTION, AND THE QUESTION OF _ ,

WOMEN IN POLITICAL LIFE |
The French events of 1870-71 have occupied a distinctive place in
women’s history, thanks in large part to socialist historians’ early fasci-
nation with European revolutions and women’s participation in them. —

Offen, Karen M. European Feminisms, 1700-1950: a Political History.

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