Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! Feminist historian Nell Painter has questioned the validity of this representation of the speech, arguing that white suffragists dramatically changed its content and title. This illustrates that certain social actors with power can construct the story and possibly misrepresent actors with less power and social movements.
Despite their marginalization, Black women emerged as passionate and powerful leaders. Ida B. Wells argued that lynching in the Reconstruction Period was a systematic attempt to maintain racial inequality, despite the passage of the 14th Amendment in which held that African Americans were citizens and could not be discriminated against based on their race Wells Quite plainly, this argument was proven wrong, as had been the case with the passage of the 18th Amendment followed by a period of backlash.
Ferguson in , the complex of Jim Crow laws in states across the country, and the unchecked violence of the Ku Klux Klan, prevented Black women and men from access to voting, education, employment, and public facilities. In the nineteenth century, this was most evident in relation to the marriage contract which deprived women of their legal identity, their property, their children, and their rights over their own bodies.
Hence, as the strong opposition they faced from many prominent liberals illustrated, the theoretical framework of nineteenth-century liberalism could not automatically be applied to women. For the most part, historians tend to see nineteenth-century feminism in terms of three consecutive phases with some overlap but with marked differences between them.
The first p. Fox and the journal he edited, the Monthly Repository. For the most part, this particular feminist discussion came to an end by the late s. Although there were some links through the continuation of a radical Unitarian tradition and preoccupation with abolitionism, this feminism of the mid-nineteenth century came from a different social and economic milieu and had a number of concerns very different from those of the radical feminists of the earlier decades.
While this form of moderate feminism linked to specific political and social goals continued into the twentieth century, it was accompanied and sometimes came into conflict with other feminist ideas in the s and s.
There is considerable discussion about precisely when and how each of these phases of feminism thought developed, beginning with new debates about the extent to which the period of reaction and repression that followed the French Revolution and accompanied the Napoleonic Wars silenced all feminist voices.
But there is debate also about the similarities and differences of the feminist approaches of particular periods and the extent of the continuity of feminism across the whole period. Hence the late eighteenth-century insistence by both Catherine Macaulay and Mary Wollstonecraft on the need to provide women with the kind of broad and rigorous education that befitted rational creatures gave way in the early decades of the nineteenth to a demand that women needed a p.
By the s, however, this approach was being challenged by some women associated with radical Unitarian views, who demanded that the education of women be looked at in a slightly different way and in terms of the development of their own intellectual potential.
But she insisted also that, until their talents and capacity for development were given free play, it was impossible to determine the relative abilities of men and women. Properly educated mothers, in her view, needed to be schooled in history, natural philosophy, and the philosophy of mind as well as modern languages—rather than the accomplishments that dominated the education of middle- and upper-class girls Pichanik The benefits of educating mothers continued to be extolled, but in a more and more perfunctory way after the mid-nineteenth century as the need for women to have access to universities and to professional work came to the fore.
Debates about the intellectual differences between the sexes and about the construction and meaning of femininity itself were fundamental to any significant change in the position of women; nonetheless the demand for improved education was a modest one that could quite easily be accommodated within the existing gender order.
This was not so easily done with other feminist demands focusing on marriage or sexuality—which often led to discussions of the current enslavement of women in marriage and to the need for their emancipation. The political conservatism that engulfed Britain after the French Revolution and the preoccupation with wealth that accompanied industrialization, as Barbara Taylor argues, made ideas of emancipation seem impossible. It was not until the emergence of new ideas about cooperative production, social organization, and even domestic life began to emerge in the course of the s that these broader questions of the emancipation of women came again to the fore Taylor It was amongst radical circles that this question was discussed and especially amongst the interlinked circles connected with the socialist Robert Owen and the Unitarian radical W.
By contrast, Owen and his followers saw their approach as one based on a scientific view of human nature and society. A new social order based on cooperation would not only be more equitable and just, but also allow for a richer human development—and for the emancipation of all, including both men and women, from the constraints that currently bound them.
This ideal of freedom for women was not accepted or endorsed by all of those connected with Owen, p. But Thompson devoted much less space to arguing about possible future freedom than he did to delineating the many forms of oppression which women suffered at present.
But he moved in a rather different direction in his condemnation of the ways in which existing marriage laws and assumptions made women sexual slaves, while denying them any entitlement to sexual desire, activity, or fulfilment within marriage. A number of the women associated with the Owenites both shared and expressed the concerns about married women and their sexual slavery that were so important to Thompson.
As Barbara Taylor has suggested, several of them had left unhappy marriages and demanded personal and sexual freedom in their own lives, in ways quite similar to Wollstonecraft. It was not only those connected to socialist movements who condemned the legal and social oppression of women, but also some radical religious groups.
It was amongst radical Unitarians, Kathryn Gleadle argues, especially those connected with W. Fox, many of p. Anticipating the argument that J. Mill was later to make so forcefully, they insisted not only that the origin of the position of women was to be seen in earlier forms of slavery, but also that it was the institution that most clearly resembled their current position as well.
Does it not consist in being subjected to laws which she has been carefully excluded from all participation in forming…? Does not their slavery consist in having been systematically excluded from an education, which, however miserably defective it may be, has been an additional weapon in the hands of her tyrant? It was only by establishing equality at the heart of the legislature, they argued, that a just and rational society might be effected.
Others suggested rather that women might become family income earners, while men assumed responsibility for the domestic sphere. Others took up this broad question of women in relation to family life in different ways, suggesting the possibilities of a new model family which was more egalitarian than the norm and in which fathers played a very different role in regard both to housework and to childcare.
Central to the Unitarian case, Gleadle argues, was their conception of the relationship between the family and the state. Democratic principles, many of them argued, could not be confined to the state, but had to extend to the family hearth.
These debates that had been so important amongst Owenites and radical Unitarians came to an end by the early s. There was little connection, in terms either of personnel or of outlook, between the ideas of these groups and those that came to the fore in the late s and s.
With the demise of the cooperative movement and of ideas about communal living, a radical approach to family life and domestic labour disappeared. The liberal framework of the feminist discussions of the mid-nineteenth century, with its individualism and its emphasis on the particular form of nuclear family that was evident within the British middle class, put paid to these particular ideas.
The need for political rights and for women to become full citizens was a key concern for most mid-Victorian feminists. But this focus on legal and political reform was accompanied by a shift in approach to personal life and a greater acceptance of conventional ideas about morality and marriage.
Sexual questions continued to be important, and a small number of feminists continued to insist on recognition of the sexual oppression within marriage, and for the first time to raise explicitly the issue of marital rape Kent But what was of greater moment was the sexual double standard and most particularly the acceptance of it that underlined the regulation of prostitution through the Contagious Diseases Acts.
The one person who was involved both in some of the debates of the s and s and those of the mid-nineteenth century was Harriet Martineau. Martineau was a critical and in some ways radical Unitarian and published in the journal edited by W. She served, however, rather to anticipate the changes that came in the mid-century than to bring into this later period the radical critiques of an earlier generation.
Martineau had shown little interest in the broader criticism of sexual hierarchy evident amongst Unitarian and Owenite groups or in their support for personal and particularly for sexual freedom for women.
On the contrary, where those like Thompson, W. Fox, and Eliza Flower deplored the ways that women were tied to marriage and criticized sexual double standards, Martineau demanded absolute adherence to prevailing sexual norms, refusing to associate with any women thought to have engaged in irregular sexual conduct. She never thought to make the same demands of men. Her endorsement of domesticity for women and her concern about sexual morality went along with a great determination to ensure that she was not seen as connected to anyone like Wollstonecraft.
Her sense of the possibility of making feminist demands and critiques came rather through her connection with the women engaged in the campaigns for the abolition of slavery whom she met while in America in the s. Martineau is a complicated figure in nineteenth-century British feminist thought. But while concerned about the situation of women, she was often hesitant to advocate fundamental change or to identify herself with those demanding it. When she pointed to the limited employment opportunities available to women, for example, something which had directly affected her own life, rather than advocating for greater employment opportunities for women, Martineau contented herself with pointing to the contradictions evident between the assumption that most women were supported by their menfolk—and the vast amount of paid labour that women actually undertook.
Adopting a cool and neutral stance in many of her discussions of women and the problems that they faced, she often adopted a masculine voice as well. The issue that brought this home to her was the Contagious Diseases Acts.
As we will see, these Acts, which served to regulate prostitution in specified ports and garrison towns, were a source of very great anger and p. Martineau too was appalled by the Contagious Diseases Acts and joined with Josephine Butler and others seeking to have them repealed.
As Simone de Beauvoir was to do in the late twentieth century, Martineau became a feminist more or less retrospectively, in response to the enthusiasm and urgency of a younger generation of women—who in turn offered her recognition of the work on women she had done in her earlier life.
Although there were differences in the specific views and outlooks of those associated with these various feminist campaigns of the mid-nineteenth century, all of them articulated their views within the broad framework of political and economic liberalism. There were a number of different ways in which they did this, but in all the need to recognize women as individuals was paramount.
What was needed instead was a theory of woman as a noun whose first end of being was one proper to herself Cobbe One key point stressed by many mid-Victorian feminists was the need to see the current position of women, not as natural or necessary, but rather as a throwback to an earlier age.
The position of women at the present time, Mill argued, bore all the signs of its origin in a primitive form of slavery and bondage. Hence the situation of women was out of kilter with all other aspects of contemporary society. Rather than being placed in these categories, feminists argued, women needed to be classified as adults with the same legal and political rights and economic opportunities as other adults.
Ought Englishwomen of full age at the present state of affairs, to be considered as having legally attained majority? Or ought they permanently to be considered, for all civil and political purposes as minors? Cobbe : But it was no longer either necessary or viable.
There is no middle course, they argued,. Between a system which shall map out precise duties, not only to each sex, but to every class and to every individual constituting the State, and the system which leaves to all equal freedom to work at what they choose and what they are fit for. And the principles on which modern society is based, forbid that any system should live save that of freedom of labour, a freedom which, from its nature, must be complete and universal.
Butler et al. In arguing for a removal of the many restrictions that women faced, Millicent Garrett Fawcett also summoned the arguments that were part of the case for free trade. Free-traders argue that all artificial restrictions upon commerce should be removed, because that is the only way of insuring that each country and each locality will occupy itself with that industry for which it has the greatest natural advantages.
In like manner, we say remove the artificial restrictions which debar women from higher education and from remunerative employment…and the play of natural forces will drive them into those occupations for which they have the greatest natural advantages as individuals. Fawcett : Although often drawing her rhetoric from a different strand of liberalism through her insistence on the ways in which organized prostitution enslaved women and hence on their need for emancipation, Josephine Butler too deployed liberal arguments in her opposition to the Contagious Diseases Acts.
She was concerned about the tendency towards central government regulation in place of local and municipal control over many community matters, including public health. I have borne 13 children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me!
The MeToo movement gained new prominence in October , when the New York Times published a damning investigation into allegations of sexual harassment made against influential film producer Harvey Weinstein. Many more women came forward with allegations against other powerful men—including President Donald Trump. It was not limited to Washington: Over 3 million people in cities around the world held simultaneous demonstrations, providing feminists with a high-profile platforms for advocating on behalf of full rights for all women worldwide.
But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present. The 19th Amendment to the U.
It took activists and reformers nearly years to win that right, and the campaign was not easy: Disagreements over strategy threatened to cripple the movement more Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton Women gained the right to vote in with the passage of the 19 Amendment.
On Election Day in , millions of American women exercised this right for the first time. These are just a few of the remarkable accomplishments by She came from a privileged background and decided early in life to fight for equal rights for women.
Stanton worked closely with Susan B. Jeannette Rankin was a Montana politician who made history in as the first woman ever elected to the United States Congress. She was also the only member of Congress to cast a vote against participation in both world wars. Unafraid to take controversial positions on several
0コメント