THE ORIGINS OF FIRST-WAVE FEMINISM
What is so startling about the emergence of organised feminism in Europe is the fact that it developed in different countries at the same time and took on a similar character. The 1860s saw the growth of women's activism focused on gaining improvements in education and employment, and in the sphere of legal and moral reform, in the Protestant industrial states of Britain and Germany, in Catholic France and Italy, as well as in places where industrialisation had hardly gained a foothold such as rural Scandinavia and autocratic Orthodox Russia (as well as in North America and Australasia).
In England in the 1850s, campaigns began to reform the married women's property laws and to gain women's admission to higher education. In Germany in 1865, Louise Otto-Peters formed the General German Women’s Association to agitate for improvements to women’s education and economic status. Russia in the 1860s saw the emergence of a plethora of feminist organisations such as a Women’s Publishing Cooperative, a Society for Women’s Work and, from 1868, a campaign for access to higher education.5 In Scandinavia, the Danish Women’s Association was founded in 1871, and by 1884 Finland, Norway and Sweden had their own organisations. In Italy the League for the Promotion of Women’s Interests was born in 1881. The Belgian League for Women’s Rights was established in 1892 followed by Austria’s first women’s association in 1893. In 1894 the Icelandic Women’s Association was formed, followed in 1897 by the Central Association of Czech Women. By the end of the century there were women’s organisations in almost every part of Europe, including Bohemia, Hungary, Serbia, Holland, Switzerland and Greece, and by 1918 Spain and Portugal had followed suit.There were a number of common causes for the emergence of first-wave feminism across Europe.6 These were intellectual, economic and political.
Modern feminism had its origins in the intellectual debates spawned by the Enlightenment. As described in Chapter 1, the Enlightenment has traditionally been regarded by women’s historians as a double-edged sword: on the one hand offering radical critiques of traditional institutions such as marriage and the church, but on the other asserting the polarisation of sex roles confining women to the private or domestic sphere. However, there is an alternative perspective which ‘reclaims the Enlightenment for women’. It argues that the woman question was central to the Enlightenment project. Karen Offen sees this philosophical outpouring as a deep reservoir for discussion and debate, ‘for asserting women’s equality to men, for criticising male privilege and domination, for analysing historically the causes and constructions of women’s subordination, and for devising eloquent arguments for the emancipation of women from male control.’7 Feminist ideology had its origins in Enlightenment ideas generated by women intellectuals such as the French writers Madame de Graffigny who, in her 1747 Lettres dune Peruvienne (Letters from a Peruvian Woman) criticised the institution of marriage; the Swedish poet Charlotta Nordenflycht who penned a delightful retort to Rousseau, the salonnieres of Paris, Berlin and Vienna, as well as the more famous Mary Wollstonecraft and Catherine Macaulay. Male and female writers in conversation with one another began to imagine a female role which encompassed authority and morality, justified by the appeal to natural rights and which separated the roles of the sexes.The philosophical debates of the Enlightenment provide only the ideological foundations to the story of feminism since there were no attempts by women to organise a collective movement around a feminist platform at this time. Women who claimed their rights as citizens, who participated in food riots and who made public their plight as female workers, were shaping a female, but not an explicitly feminist, consciousness.
This was not enough for a feminist movement. There was no collective movement of women's rights at the time of the French Revolution.The real impetus to the formation of organised feminism came from political and economic change: it was when the ‘crust of patriarchy' began to crack from 1848 onwards, as outspoken women and men seized the moment to stake a claim for female citizenship rights. As we saw in Chapter 8, during the 1848 liberal revolutions when demands were being made for democrat- isation and parliamentary politics, individual feminists appealed for complete equality in the realm of civil rights. Despite the post-revolutionary reassertion of conservatism in continental Europe, which included the suppression of women's activism, women did not keep quiet. In 1848 at Seneca Falls in the United States, a small group of mainly Quaker women had rewritten the American Declaration of Independence as a Declaration of Sentiments, which boldly stated all the injustices experienced by women and resolved to secure for women ‘an equal participation with men in various trades, professions and commerce'.8 Their outspoken sentiment encouraged European women to continue the struggle, and by the 1860s and 1870s political reform was back on the agenda providing feminists with renewed opportunities to engage in debate although in very different circumstances in each state. In Russia, the emancipation of the serfs in 1861 stimulated discussion about civil rights amongst the urban intelligentsia; in Poland, the land reform of 1864 and the ensuing economic crisis amongst the nobility forced women of this social class to address their changed circumstances, and to begin to consider education and means to an independent existence.9 In Britain, the 1867 Reform Act extended the parliamentary franchise to wider sections of the male working classes; in Italy and in Germany, political unification in 1861 and 1871 respectively had been accompanied by universal manhood suffrage; and in France, the 1871 Paris Commune once more ignited discussion about women's public role.
The modernisation and gradual democrat- isation of the political system across Europe created a space and a language for those advocating women's political rights and public participation in civic society. That is to say, women's rights became a political possibility. In Russia, as a response to defeat in the Crimean War and the more enlightened rule of Alexander II, ideas imported from France — including debates on the woman question — began to find fertile ground. The writings of M.L. Mikhailov (1829—65), who advocated equal education for both sexes and the admission of women to the professions as well as marriage reform, and of Nikolai Chernyshevsky (1828—89) whose 1863 novel What is to be Done? featured a heroine seeking economic independence and personal freedom, constitute a turning point in intellectual conceptions of woman's role in Russia, prompting those who wished to change women's circumstances rather than just debate them to initiate the road to reform.10In 1867, the British Member of Parliament and liberal philosopher, John Stuart Mill (1806—73), inhabiting the most privileged space of all, the House of Commons, used his position to argue that the franchise should be extended to women by changing the word ‘man' to ‘person' throughout the Reform Bill. Two years later, Mill's treatise on The Subjection of Women was to emerge as a timely and truly influential explication of the case for women's rights, widely translated and debated. Mill's eloquent argument was important because it constituted a reformulation of Enlightenment writings on woman's nature. Personal liberty was Mill's watchword; without it, women could not fully develop their character, their true ‘nature'. There was no need for society to force women to marry, to nurture children, to tend to the domestic, and indeed he argued that the very existence of such restrictions on women's opportunities was suggestive of a flawed logic. ‘The anxiety of mankind to interfere in behalf of nature, for fear least nature should not succeed in effecting its purpose, is an altogether unnecessary solicitude.' Rather, the real reason for such constraints on women was men's fear, ‘not lest women should be unwilling to marry, for I do not think that any one in reality has that apprehension; but lest they should insist that marriage should be on equal conditions.'11 If the restraints on women were removed, Mill believed that women would go on to develop their full capacities in education, employment, indeed in all spheres in which they chose to act, and thereby contribute to the development of a civilised society.
Mill did not believe that women and men were the same — rather that difference should not be a bar to equality in marriage or in politics; the family just as much as the political sphere was ‘a school of the virtues of freedom'. After Mill, those who campaigned for women's rights could set aside their claims to education and civil rights based on ‘woman's special nature'. The strength of Mill was his ability to unite arguments resting on ‘equality in difference' with those based on personal liberty and freewill.However, it was women's concrete experience of oppression at a moment of intense economic, social and political change in mid-nineteenth-century western Europe, that predisposed them to listen to and act upon the language of emancipation. For the majority of feminists, personal experience lay at the base of their engagement with the movement, either experience of oppression in their own lives or having observed it in others through their philanthropic work at home or in the empire. Middle-class women started to accept feminist arguments as a protest at domestic confinement. Men of their social class were benefiting from the expansion of the professions, the creation of wealth and freedom in the urban centres and from the influence they derived from political emancipation. But women were not. They, their daughters, sisters and friends saw gross inequalities in the opportunities and choices open — or closed — to women of their class. The ‘surplus of women' problem is sometimes used to explain this concern amongst women themselves to find alternatives to the poorly paid and low-status occupations such as ladies' companion and governess for those who did not marry, and certainly the image of the destitute spinster was used by supporters of reform to garner support. But it was more likely the changes occurring within the middle classes which forced ‘middle class women to redefine their role in society in terms of work and achievement'.12
It made sense, then, for these women to begin to look to legal reform and improvements in female access to education and the professions, especially since the limited number of acceptable and respectable female occupations — nurse, governess, teacher — were declining as those with higher educational attainment — men — sought to protect their occupational identity.
Women began to demand a share of the new middle-class privileges: control over property, the right to divorce, the right to an academic education and an independent existence. Only later did they turn their attention to issues that sat less comfortably with their middle-class sensibilities, such as prostitution and the sex trade, and, of course, the right to vote. For socialist women it was the difficulties facing working women that concerned them: wages and conditions, the double burden of housework and paid work.First-wave feminism was a multifaceted movement operating on many tracks, which diverged and came together at different moments and for different campaigns. It never spoke with a single voice and it is important to remember that organised feminism was, in effect, a host of small, local organisations run by women. In most countries there was never one feminist society or women's campaigning organisation. Germany is unusual in this respect, but even there the umbrella Federation of German Women's Associations incorporated hundreds of small, single-interest groups. In Hanover, for instance, the women's movement consisted of a large number of social, charitable and later professional clubs, including the Women's Association for the Care of the Indigent (founded in 1845), a Women's Educational Association (1877), a Magdalene Society (1877), Association of Christian Spinsters (1889), Association of Prussian Female Elementary School Teachers (1895) and an Association for the Reform of Female Clothing (1900).13 This fragmented and devolved character of the movement is typical. In Edinburgh, women organised themselves into debating societies, anti-slavery organisations, educational associations and later, suffrage societies. In parts of eastern Europe, including Poland and the Ukraine, it has been argued that this form of ‘community feminism' prevailed in contrast with a more ideological feminism of western Europe.14 But in all European countries, women's self-help coexisted with feminist goals.
The women's movement was never unified but it is possible to identify particular strands of thought articulated by its spokeswomen, many of whom speak to us as representatives of this cultural and political phenomenon via women's journals such as the Englishwoman’s Review (founded in the 1860s), Neue Bahnen (1865) in Germany, La Donna (1869) in Italy, and in France Le Droit des Femmes (1869). The movement was disjointed, the ideologies often conflicting, but feminism was international in its connections and scope. The women's movement was inchoate and fluid but it was sustained by selfperpetuating networks of mainly middle-class women who had cut their feminist teeth at the local political level dealing with temperance and sex reform, local politics, education, welfare provision and child care. Their philanthropic activity was a crucial training ground for their engagement with feminist objectives in practical and ideological terms. They gained experience in public speaking, political lobbying and popular campaigning methods. Feminists began to understand that their power to bring about change was hampered by their lack of political representation, but they could not wait for the vote. There were pressing issues to which the women's movement was drawn after 1860: legal reform, education and employment opportunities, and the feminist contribution to the socialist alternative.