Women, Resistance and Revolution (5 page)

Wi’ thy pitcher on thy knee;

Curse thee, thou’d be always lurking

And I may slave myself for thee.

Women are becoming important as consumers:

See thee, look what stays I’ve gotten,

See thee, what a pair o’ shoes;

Gown and petticoat half rotten,

Ne’er a whole stitch in my hose …

But the sanctions are quite traditional:

Thou knows I hate to broil and quarrel,

But I’ve neither soap nor tea;

Od burn thee, Jack forsake thy barrel,

Or never more thou’st lie wi’ me.
¹⁹

There was no common experience for women of the effects of early capitalism. Its consequences were diverse and affected different groups of women in quite distinct ways. It tended to differentiation of interest and expectation rather than a unifying feminist consciousness. Feminism at this stage was still aspiration and idea amongst a small group of women; it had no possibility as movement. As for a relationship between feminism and any conception of a completely transformed world, this was barely visible. When it appeared it was as mystical glimpse rather than revolutionary programme. It was trapped in its own contradictions. The only manner of challenging male hegemony in this life was to prophesy as the Lord’s handmaiden of the next life, but the only way of seeing practical improvements
was to seek entrance into the barred world of men. The only way women could achieve respect and dignity was by not being women, by denying their femaleness. Virgin or blue stocking distinguished themselves as apart from other women. They were regarded not surprisingly with some suspicion by other women. The woman of the upper classes complains of her uselessness, the woman of the lower classes enjoyed no uselessness.

However, despite this conflict and the diversity of women’s situation the grounds for attack were really laid in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They relate closely to the values associated with early capitalism. The questioning of authority, the idea of individual responsibility and conscience as a guide for political action, the elevation of activity, the notion of control and change of the outside world, and its corollary that these changes in turn affected the characters of human beings, were as relevant for women as they were for men. The difference was in the material situation of men and women in relation to production. Indeed, the bitterness of the opposition wherever women sought to apply them to their own predicament already indicated that female impudence was even more explosive than the radical insolence of their men. In daring to invade the man’s sphere the bourgeois feminist was in fact threatening the basis of the division of labour which assigned the world of reproduction and child-rearing to women and the world of production to men and thus endangered the development of that single-minded zeal to accumulate in her man. The separation of family from work had occurred before capitalism, but as industry grew in scale it appeared in its most distinct and clear form.

CHAPTER 2

Utopian Proposals

The education of women should always be relative to that of men. To please, to be useful to us, to make us love and esteem them, to educate us when young, to take care of us when grown up; to advise, to console us, to render our lives easy and agreeable. These are the duties of women at all times, and what they should be taught in their infancy.

J.-J. Rousseau, Emile

I soon noticed that the feelings I expressed were turned into jests, and that my intelligence was silenced, as if it were improper for a woman to have any. Thus I locked up in myself everything I felt. I early acquired the art of dissembling and I stifled my natural sensibility.… When I was caught in a lie, I never gave any excuse or explanation. I kept silent.… I was, and I still am convinced that women being the victim of all social institutions, are destined to misery if they make the least concession to their feelings and if in any way whatever they lose control of themselves.

Mme de Vernon in Delphine,
a novel by Mme de Staël

All shame is false shame. We should be a great deal better without it. Women blush because they understand.… Delicacy enslaves the pretty delicate dears.… I hate slavery: Vive la liberté.… I’m a Champion for the Rights of Women.… You may say what you will, the present system of society is radically wrong.… If you want to know what I would do to improve the world, I’ll tell you: I’d have both sexes call things by their right name.… Drapery, whether wet or dry, is the most confoundly indecent thing in the world.

Harriet Freke, a caricatured revolutionary woman in Belinda by Maria Edgeworth, 1808

Prostitution is the legitimate offspring of marriage and its accompanying errors.… Has a woman obeyed the impulse of unerring nature: so society declares war upon her, pitiless and eternal war. She must be the tamed slave, she must make no reprisals; theirs is the right of persecution, hers the duty of endurance. Society avenges herself on the criminals of her own creation.

Shelley, ‘Notes on Queen Mab’, 1813

Workers, in 1791 your fathers proclaimed the immortal Declaration of the Rights of Man, and it is thanks to that solemn Declaration that you are today free and equal men before the law. All honour to your fathers for this great achievement, but there remains for you men of 1843, a task no less great to accomplish. In your turn, free the last slaves remaining in France; proclaim the Rights of Woman, and, using the same terms as your fathers did, say: ‘We, the proletariat of France, after fifty-three years’ experience, acknowledge having been duly convinced that the ways in which the natural rights of women have been disregarded are the sole causes of the world’s misfortunes, and we have resolved to include in our Charter woman’s sacred and inalienable rights. We desire that men should give to their wives and mothers liberty and absolute equality which they enjoy themselves.’

Flora Tristan, L’Union Ouvrière, 1843

In the French Revolution the feminist aspirations of the privileged and the traditions of collective action of the unprivileged women encountered each other. They regarded each other uneasily and never really combined. But each emerged tinged with liberty, equality and fraternity and the memory of revolution. Things could never be quite the same again. Women rioting over prices in Normandy in 1789, women of the third estate in Grenoble taking action in favour of the States General, women demanding in the lists of grievances presented, better medical provision and improved education, protection of trades from male competition, women marching to Versailles to confront the baker and the baker’s wife, pamphlets and petitions about divorce, prostitution, are all indications of a great acceleration of activity and consciousness.

But there was considerable ambiguity in ‘liberty, equality,
fraternity’ towards women. True, the thinkers of the enlightenment had questioned the immutability of apparently natural characteristics and argued for the limited access of women from the upper classes into education and professions. But there was another strain in revolutionary ideology. Rousseau’s ideas of a state of nature where man was in harmony with the physical world had important liberatory implications. From this revolutionaries could oppose feeling and sensibility to authority and custom, argue for unions based on individual sex love, and support human potential against the crushing mechanical wheels of existing social institutions. But directly applied his ideas were most emphatically opposed to the intellectual and creative aspirations of women. Rousseau presents a justification for women’s place in the organization of capitalist society which is at once more effective and more sophisticated than puritanism’s religious homilies. He told women that ‘naturally’ man’s world is external, woman’s internal. Thus the woman had to learn that her subjection was not simply in her relationship to affairs of the spirit, to God, to politics, to production, but in her relationship with the whole external world. She is identified as part of nature. Her education should equip her to nourish and serve men, not to act of her own accord. Only in this role can she find natural fulfilment.

This version of women’s ‘nature’ was to be expressed in certain reactionary aspects of the romantic movement. In the artistic and cultural revolt against capitalism there was considerable ambiguity about the liberation of women. In one sense romanticism demanded the freeing of human beings from repressive institutions, the realization of the true self, and thus implied a new life for women. But also men continually looked backwards seeking a golden age of naïve harmony and elevated woman as the noble primitive. With this went always an element of fear. Nature must be contained. A domesticated romanticism produced a crop of egg-faced ringleted bonneted fragile girls, which successfully internalized women’s role as the helpless, emotional, hysterical angel in the house and was well suited to the division of labour in capitalist society. When she studied as much as when she prayed or worked she was still man’s object, and should feel herself scrutinized by his desire. She saw herself through his eyes. She defined herself in relation to his needs, his achievements. In return she was pampered and cared for. Basking in the man’s eyes, she must see in them his reflection. She only existed through
him. He was her intermediary, he came before her and the cash nexus, he protected her as he protected his property, he mediated for her to his God and educated her for his delight. He made her into his idea of herself. In her he sought his lost nature. In her he located his fear of himself, by paying tribute to the instinctive intuitive sensibility he imagined she possessed. Finally he flattered her with her desire to be subdued by him, telling her that this was synonymous with womanliness.

This romantic woman cult is a complex and pervasive phenomenon which persisted in a variety of ways during the nineteenth century and is with us still. It was peculiarly effective in the early nineteenth century in teaching women to see their own subordination as ‘natural’ in a period when everyone else was demanding their natural rights. A dominant group is secure when it can convince the oppressed that they enjoy their actual powerlessness and give them instead a fantasy of power. John Henry dies proud in his physical strength, when the white man’s money and cunning rather than his muscles are the real basis of control. Rousseauite heroines cultivate sensibility and natural freedom while their men create the economic basis for social relations in which these qualities are at once inessential, irrelevant and impossible – and are preserved as drawing-room accomplishments, hot-house plants. Women were so perfectly colonized they policed one another. The privileged women had material stakes in the world as it was. The older women broke in the younger ones and taught them to manipulate their men. At first revolutionary feminists were bewildered by resistance, naïve in the faith that liberty and equality were theirs, trustful of their men and forgetful of the warning carried in the word ‘brotherhood’. They argued their case patiently and with eloquence. Petitioning the Assembly in 1789 women pointed out to the men: ‘You have destroyed all the prejudices of the past, but you allow the oldest and the most pervasive to remain, which excludes from office, position and honour, and above all from the right of sitting amongst you, half the inhabitants of the kingdom.’
¹

How was it that the revolution could dissolve the subordination of the humblest and most downtrodden, including black slaves, but leave millions of women still under the yoke of their men. Carried away with enthusiasm and confidence Citoyenne Claire Lacombe declared in a revolutionary women’s club in 1793 that the prejudice which relegated women into the narrow sphere of the household
and made of half humanity isolated passive beings was no more. She would have been wise to grant this prejudice greater tenacity and capacity to survive. Her optimism was unfounded. Apart from a few rare individuals like Condorcet, most men including Robespierre, Marat and Hébert opposed any suggestion of an active political life for women, as unnatural. They believed women should serve the revolution in a more traditional manner as wives and mothers. These opinions Napoleon was most emphatically to endorse, though he extended the patriotic privilege of breeding to his mistresses. The feminists were only a tiny minority. The women of the First Empire flit half naked about his court or recline languidly for a portrait on a chaise longue. Their breasts are uncovered and swelling in anticipation. They moisten transparent clothes to cling to their bodies, and emphasize natural contours. They suffered from natural draughts, and shivering they fell ill. Some even died in pursuit of this unnatural idea of nature.