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Overview
Although other historians have viewed the suffrage movement as aimed at exclusively political ends, she argues that such a categorization ignores many of the most compelling reasons why thousands of middle and upper-class women risked ostracism, obloquy, and, often, physical harm in the pursuit of the right to vote and why their efforts met with such intense opposition. The alliance of respectable" middle-class women with prostitutes, the attack on marriage, and the suffragists' distrust of the medical profession are among the topics the author addresses. Drawing on hypotheses advanced by Michel Foucault, she asserts that feminists sought no less than the total transformation of the lives of women.
Originally published in 1987. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691606552 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 07/14/2014 |
| Series: | Princeton Legacy Library , #787 |
| Pages: | 308 |
| Product dimensions: | 9.10(w) x 6.10(h) x 0.60(d) |
Read an Excerpt
Sex and Suffrage in Britain, 1860-1914
By Susan Kingsley Kent
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1987 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-05497-1
CHAPTER 1
"THE SEX"
Man possesses sexual organs; her sexual organs possess woman.
Otto Weininger, M.D., 1906
Though the term was not introduced until 1890 or so, the movement that came to be called "feminism" became large and outspoken during the second half of the nineteenth century. Feminists sought to reverse what they deemed to be the declining role of the middle-class woman. They reserved their most furious objections for representations that equated the female with the sexual. Feminists cast their arguments in the context of a larger discussion about the value and function of the family and its individual members' roles in industrial capitalist society.
The dominant theme of middle-class ideology stressed women's roles as wife and mother to the exclusion of all other functions and invested in women the responsibility of upholding morality and purity. While denying middle-class women sexuality, nineteenth-century bourgeois society paradoxically heightened an awareness of women as primarily reproductive and sexual beings. Increasingly during the nineteenth century, women became symbols of their husbands' wealth and success — objects of conspicuous consumption — and this inexorably made them and their sexuality a kind of objectified commodity. Although these views seemed to predominate in public discussion, significant dissent arose to challenge them. The "revolt of women" produced a critique and an alternative to these ideas. Formulated within what Foucault termed the "dominant discourse," the women's movement articulated a number of pointed "discourses of resistance."
The discussion of gender roles took place within a framework of centuries of political and economic change. Some of the changes were defined in terms of analogies to marital or sexual relations. Mary Lyndon Shanley has demonstrated, for example, that seventeenth-century antagonists in the debate over Parliament's relation to royal authority used an analogy to the relationship between husband and wife in order to buttress their respective positions. Royalists pointed to the hierarchical and irrevocable nature of the marriage contract to justify absolutism. Such arguments compelled advocates of parliamentary rule to discredit the royalist conception of both marriage and monarchy. They applied their individualistic premises about government to the sphere of domestic organization as well. Randolph Trumbach and Lawrence Stone have pointed to more literal links between politics and gender. Speaking of the domestic relations of the eighteenth-century aristocracy, Trumbach has argued that as the patriarchal household as a system of economy and authority lost predominance, relationships within the household became more egalitarian. The patriarchal household had rested on the presumption that the male head of the household owned his wife, his children, his tenants, his animals and tools, and his land. By the eighteenth century, patriarchal authority and control had given way to the assertion that "all men were created equal." Ownership of individuals had been discredited, and "the equality of men and women was declared." The notion of equality between all men and between men and women was still very far from complete in the eighteenth century, but it had entered the lexicon of socio-political thought, and it continued to dominate political, economic, and social discussions in the nineteenth century.
The substitution of egalitarian relations for patriarchal patterns of authority in formal politics had profound ramifications for the household, as Stone has demonstrated. The necessary political, social, and economic changes took a century to implement. Property ceased to be the raison d'être of marriage and was replaced by notions of romantic love and companionship. Marriage became emotionally rather than economically based, and the family was transformed from an economic to a sentimental unit. Divorce became possible because marriage was no longer a question of property, and — ideally — women were no longer the property of their husbands.
In reality, however, as Trumbach has shown, men were severely constrained in the degree to which they could consider women their equals, and the idea of women as property remained strong throughout the nineteenth century. In 1789, an observer of the position of women commented, "Though the idea of being property, or parts of our goods and chattels, be exploded from our philosophy and from some of our laws, it still remains in our pre-possessions or customs, counteracted by a little senseless and romantic gallantry." Property in women was institutionalized in the parliamentary divorce law and enshrined in the double standard of morality. Until 1857, the divorce law granted the right of a husband to petition Parliament to divorce his wife if he could prove her adultery, yet wives had no such rights over their husbands. Not simply in 1789 but until very recently in this century, the double standard remained inviolate.
The debate over absolute authority in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries carried over from political organization to marriage law, and the acceptance of the social contract in the political realm had its limited counterpart in the marriage contract in the domestic realm. The debate was advanced significantly in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as industrial capitalism altered the political, economic, and social structures of England. By the 1780s, men of new wealth were challenging the legitimacy of government by limited monarchy and landed aristocracy. The victory they realized in 1832 with the Reform Act signaled the emergent ascendancy of industrial and manufacturing wealth over the heretofore dominant landed and commercial elites. Throughout the nineteenth century, England experienced the dismantling of aristocratic, patriarchal institutions and concentrated on building a society based on liberal, individualistic, egalitarian philosophies. Middle- and working-class groups of men agitated and asserted their rights to participation in the new industrial order, basing their claims on the ideology of liberalism. With traditional forms of power and authority facing challenge from insubordinate groups, women, too, joined the fray, seeking out changes in law and custom that would more clearly reflect their changing role in the family. For if marriage and the family were now firmly based on ideals of romantic love, companionship, and some notion of equality between men and women, the legal, economic, and social position of women had yet to affirm that fact.
Under the law of coverture, married women had no rights or existence apart from their husbands. "By marriage," opined Sir William Blackstone, "the very being or legal existence of a woman is suspended, or at least it is incorporated or consolidated into that of the husband, under whose wing, protection and cover she performs everything, and she is therefore called in our law a feme covert." The popular aphorism "my wife and I are one, and I am he" described a situation in which a married woman had no legal rights to her property, her earnings, her freedom of movement, her conscience, her body, or her children; all resided in her husband. Throughout the nineteenth century women and their male allies challenged these holdovers of aristocratic patriarchal society, largely successfully.
The first such challenge to property in women and children occurred in the 1830s, when Caroline Norton sued for control over her children after her husband absconded with them. The Custody Act of 1839 gave women custody of their children under the age of seven in cases of divorce or separation. Thereafter, the husband resumed control, though visitation rights were secured for his wife. The act modified but did not overturn paternal control, for any father had complete authority over his children, determining their domicile, the extent and location of their schooling, their religion, and their guardianship. The Guardianship of Infants Act of 1886 gave mothers the guardianship of their children upon the death of the father; and in 1925 women obtained full custody rights to their children.
Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon's A Brief Summary in Plain Language of the Most Important Laws Concerning Women, published in 1854, laid out in a systematic fashion the legal situation that condemned women to a position of chattel of men. An advocate of women's economic independence, Bodichon helped to set in motion the campaign for women's property rights. With the passage of the Married Women's Property Acts of 1870 and 1882, married women secured the right to retain and own any property or earnings they might bring to their marriage; husbands no longer enjoyed full and free access to their wives' assets.
The economic position of women independent of men was enhanced by the movement for women's education. In 1848, Queen's College was founded and began to grant degrees to women. In the 1850s, Mary Frances Buss and Dorothea Beale opened the North of London Collegiate School for Ladies and Cheltenham, respectively, so that single middle-class women might qualify for employment that would provide an income to support them. Girton College at Cambridge in 1871, the University of London in 1878, and Newnham College at Oxford in 1879 admitted women to examination.
Patriarchal laws and the idea of property in women changed slowly during the course of the century. In 1884, Parliament rescinded the law that allowed men to have their wives jailed if they refused sexual intercourse. In 1891, with the decision of Queen v. Jackson, a man could no longer imprison his wife in his home in order to enforce restitution of conjugal rights. The Times lamented, in response, that "one fine morning last month marriage in England was suddenly abolished."
Women obtained some amelioration even from the law that most symbolized their status as property of men — that of divorce. Until 1857, divorce could be obtained only by Act of Parliament and was available only to the wealthy elite. The Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857 created a court for divorce and established the grounds for the procedure. Men could divorce their wives, as before, on the basis of adultery alone; women, however, had to prove their husbands' adultery in addition to cruelty, desertion, incest, rape, sodomy, or bestiality. The Royal Commission on Divorce, reporting in 1850, had recommended that adultery was much more serious on the part of the wife than on the part of the husband. The underlying tenet of the double standard in law and custom, as Keith Thomas has suggested, incorporated the "view that men have property in women and that the value of this property is immeasurably diminished if the woman at any time has sexual relations with anyone other than her husband." The Matrimonial Causes Act, however inequitable, did allow divorce for women, and women continued to challenge the double standard until the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1923 established a single standard for divorce for both sexes.
The most radical challenge of the women's movement to patriarchal control consisted of demands for enfranchisement on the same lines as men. The Reform Acts of 1832, 1867, and 1884 had afforded to increasing numbers of men the opportunity for political participation, until virtual universal manhood suffrage prevailed. When women began to agitate for inclusion in the public arena in the 1860s, their claim was denied, and continued to be denied, on the basis of their sex. Though the liberal state embraced the notion of equality and individuality, Trumbach's observation of eighteenth-century aristocrats holds true for nineteenth-century men as well, that "in the end, the traditional means by which the adult male's identity was formed placed serious restrictions on the extent to which a man could treat a woman as his equal." The patriarch, having been deprived of his identity as the master and owner of men, reclaimed at least part of his identity by maintaining possession of women.
The ruling elites of England had neutralized somewhat the threat they perceived from the inclusion of the lower orders in the political process by means of education acts that required at least some schooling in middle-class values. The threat posed by women's challenges to patriarchal order was seen to be even greater than that of the working classes. The potential contradiction between, on the one hand, a liberal ideology that had legitimated the dismantling of aristocratic power and authority and the enfranchisement of most men and, on the other, the denial of the claims of women to full citizenship was resolved by appeals to biological and characterological differences between the sexes. Definitions of femininity evolved whose qualities were antithetical to those that had warranted widespread male participation in the public sphere. Men possessed the capacity for reason, action, aggression, independence, and self-interest. Women inhabited a separate, private sphere, one suitable for the so-called inherent qualities of femininity: emotion, passivity, submission, dependence, and selflessness, all derived, it was claimed insistently, from women's sexual and reproductive organization. Upon the female as a biological entity, a sexed body, nineteenth-century theorists imposed a socially or culturally constructed "femininity," a gender identity derived from ideas about what roles were appropriate for women. This collapsing of sex and gender — the physiological facts with the normative social creation — made it possible for women to be construed as at once pure and purely sexual; although paradoxical, these definitions excluded women from participation in the public sphere and rendered them subordinate to men in the private sphere as well.
The language and images used to define gender reasserted the bases for patriarchal control, but now they did so in bourgeois terms. Theories of middle-class professionals — scientists, doctors, lawmakers, and sociologists — spoke directly to the question, incorporating older notions of a hierarchical relationship between the sexes in their discussion of the direction and meaning of social change. As the debate advanced, women succeeded in eliminating laws that made them the property of men, and in 1918 they were granted the vote. But at the same time, the ideology of "woman's sphere" and "woman's nature," legitimated by science and medicine, circumscribed their actions and limited the possibility of women sharing real power with men. Consequently, the vote, perceived by feminists to be the means of bringing about a total transformation in the lives of women, turned out to be nothing of the sort.
These notions of femininity that prescribed "woman's sphere" and "woman's nature" were used metaphorically as various groups vied for control in this period of great social change. The metaphors were not necessarily consistent, but they played on "natural dichotomies" expressed in the opposition of male and female. L. J. Jordanova had noted that "our entire philosophical set describes natural and social phenomena in terms of oppositional characteristics," or dichotomies, "where the two opposed terms mutually define each other." Many nineteenth-century theorists appropriated an idea of the feminine to justify the middle classes' acquisition of power in the private and public spheres. In the struggle to eliminate or neutralize traditional, aristocratic forms of power and authority, for instance, bourgeois protagonists often described the aristocracy as "feminine," lacking in those masculine qualities of strength, resolve, and discipline that were indispensable to the creation and maintenance of the industrial order. Aristocrats were by contrast weak, dissolute, and depraved, that is, "feminine," and their fitness to govern was brought into question.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Sex and Suffrage in Britain, 1860-1914 by Susan Kingsley Kent. Copyright © 1987 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
- FrontMatter, pg. i
- CONTENTS, pg. vii
- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS, pg. ix
- INTRODUCTION, pg. 3
- CHAPTER I. "THE SEX", pg. 24
- CHAPTER II. PROSTITUTION, pg. 60
- CHAPTER III. MARRIAGE, pg. 80
- CHAPTER IV. THE DOCTORS, pg. 114
- CHAPTER V. THE LAW, pg. 140
- CHAPTER VI. SEX WAR, pg. 157
- CHAPTER VII. SUFFRAGE, pg. 184
- EPILOGUE, pg. 220
- NOTES, pg. 233
- BIBLIOGRAPHY, pg. 269
- INDEX, pg. 287