MAN'S WORLD, WOMEN'S NARRATIVES
It is evident,' wrote a young Scot, Marion Kirkland Reid, in 1843, ‘that if woman is a responsible being, there must be a limit to her submission and obedience to man.'1 Reid in her book A Plea for Woman urged women to recognise the ‘system of depression' which stunted their education and their claim to full and equal participation in civil society.
‘Notwithstanding the comparatively happy lot of woman in this country,' she said of Britain, ‘we think it pretty clear that even here she is harassed by needless trammels.' Looking back fifty years, Reid noted the advances in women's condition since the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. Yet, she was aware of the distance still to be travelled by women on the road to equality: ‘Why should we rest contented with the advances we have made, instead of looking earnestly forward to those improvements which are still before us?'2This book covers a century of immense significance in the history of women. It starts with the French Revolution, when European women first became aware that their subordination to men was a product of a concerted ideology that could and should be challenged by their own counter-ideology. It ends with the victories of first-wave feminism, notably women's suffrage, in the shadow of the First World War. In between is a century and a quarter when modern womanhood was constantly being debated and challenged. It is a period when women like Marion Reid discussed, wrote and changed ideas about themselves to an extent before unseen, looking back with little regret and forward with great optimism. This self-reflection was a product of unprecedented tension. This was caused on the one hand by massive structural and ideological change — intellectual, scientific and political revolution, nation-state formation, and industrialisation and urbanisation.
On the other hand, there was an evolution of new ideas about woman's nature and her role — ideas about women as wives, mothers, lovers, workers and feminists. There were seemingly contradictory and at times deeply disturbing messages for nineteenth-century women to negotiate whilst seeking to survive immensely profound social and economic change.Much of the story of this book concerns how changing ideas about sexual difference between women and men informed women's experience in the home, in the workplace and in the world of politics, and about how these ideas were subsequently used by women to claim the privileges previously restricted to men. It is a story comprising much struggle but rather slow yet incremental achievement. Woman's suffrage was achieved or imminent in most countries by the end of the book in 1918, and this seemed for many to be a winning tape — a talismanic success that marked a conclusion to first-wave feminist struggle. Yet we know, a century later, that the vote fell far short of changing women's position in society. There had to be a second wave of feminism from the 1960s which challenged hitherto almost unimaginable and untouchable fundamentals of women's identity. It is in the light of this knowledge that we approach European women's history in ‘the long nineteenth century' from 1789 to 1918.
At the beginning is the French Revolution of 1789 which started Europe's serious engagement with Enlightenment ideas on human equality and the rights of man. At the outset, the Enlightenment and the French Revolution both seemed to offer the possibility that women might be included in the body politic as equals with men. The language of rights and of citizenship enthused radical women to begin to argue for an elevated role for women and the rights — civil and political — that followed. But in all the pronouncements of the predominantly male thinkers of the Enlightenment, there was singularly no gifting of these rights to women — even as a hypothetical right.
Rights were for men, and it was left to women themselves over the succeeding decades to appropriate the language and the legacy of the Enlightenment's intellectual ferment, and to seek amends for the vast democratic deficit the philosophes left to women. The story of European women is dominated by this struggle to achieve the equality denied them by the Enlightenment. The fact must be faced that European nations granted human rights of legal independence to emancipated slaves and most working-class men before it was granted to women. This was ironic of course because it was women who played the key role in the movement to end slavery. Nonetheless, it is legitimate to see women's rights as something attained during this period as women slowly achieved something akin to the status of full European citizenship. It is an optimistic historical view of the century as one of more or less constant women's progress towards emancipation.There is a radically different approach. This view interprets the nineteenth century as witnessing a decline in women's status and opportunities. This decline resulted in part from the failure of the French Revolution to deliver
on women's rights, but more importantly it was in part the product of the rise of a Europe-wide ideology that placed women in the home. This was called the ideology of separate spheres which specified that women should inhabit the sphere of the home and men the sphere of the world (of work, politics and play). The women's element of separate spheres is referred to as domestic ideology, and it is seen as becoming an ideology of imprisonment for many women. For most of the period, European culture witnessed the language of domesticity and of separate spheres predominating over that of women's rights and pervading the world of work, of politics and of intellectual life.
So powerful was domestic ideology that radical women could not simply reject it. They had to struggle — not always with total success — to find a language which resolved the tensions between domestic ideology and the notion of women having rights.
The resolution for many first-wave feminists of the nineteenth century was the concept of ‘equality in difference' — the notion that women were equal to men because they possessed different qualities. ‘The ground on which equality is claimed for all men is of equal force for all women,' Marion Reid argued on the one hand in the middle of our period, ‘for women share the common nature of humanity.' Yet on the other hand she appealed to women's ‘purer, clearer, less embarrassed reason — of a judgement more disentangled from political prejudices' than that of men. This supposition of difference between the sexes — of fundamental difference between male and female in relation to minds, moral construction, capacities and roles — was the Enlightenment's legacy to European women. This notion of difference was to dictate so much of what women experienced, and was to endure with remarkable vigour in European consciousness. As a result, it generated a continuity between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries which shapes much of this book, and which draws upon what is now a very influential ‘narrative of continuity' in women's experience.If historical continuity is a female-led experience, historical change is traditionally seen as a male experience. Few centuries witnessed such profound and manifold transformations as the nineteenth, transformations that are characteristically portrayed in history books as man-made. Men make economies, discover science, make inventions, fight wars, form governments, explore far-off places and write books. Framed by the two ‘watershed' events of the French Revolution and the First World War, the era is packed with the major events that have provided the bread and butter of the traditional history of the nineteenth century: the revolutions of 1789, 1830, 1848 and 1917; European and overseas wars (from the Napoleonic and Crimean to the Great War); the pinnacle of European imperialist expansion in Africa, Asia and the world's island groups; the rise of the Enlightenment, liberalism, Marxism, Darwinism and eugenics; and the industrial revolution, world economic growth, urbanisation, and transformation in the structures of most European societies.
No European state escaped these currents, though the impact might vary from place to place. No century features more prominently in the current-day perception of the past, shaping our nations, their boundaries and constitutions, and giving most European nations their official heroes — Napoleon, Nelson, Wellington, Bismarck, Garibaldi, Mazzini, Parnell, Kossuth and Masaryk. Historians and sociologists regard this period as creating our modern society, modern politics, modern nations, modern boundaries and economic systems.That is the normative story of Europe from 1789 to 1918, and it is a highly male one. Women are more or less absent from that story because they are associated with continuity, the ‘female' aspect of history — the unchanging home with the wife, mother, daughter and cook at its helm, experiencing those unceasing reproductive functions of birth and rearing. According to the majority of mainstream histories of the nineteenth century, the lives of women stayed much the same, largely unaffected by the so-called historical watersheds and having negligible impact themselves on the motors of historical change. In this simplistic and blinkered view, male and female represent change and continuity, the yin and yang of conventional historical narrative. A 1998 student textbook on the history of one European nation during the nineteenth century actually confined women to one paragraph and had the gall to state that ‘they had remained in the background during much of the country's changing history'.3 Despite four decades of intense historical scholarship on women's lives during the nineteenth century, the grand historical narrative has men resolutely filling the stage, with women merely cheering — or shouting angrily — from the sidelines.