A History of the Wife (27 page)

The Revolution catapulted thousands of French wives into situations where they were required to assume male prerogatives and act aggressively. Mme de La Villirouët, like Mme Roland, recognized that the role of being a “woman writer” would leave her open to ridicule; yet she did not hesitate to use her literary talents to save herself and others in her same situation.

Four years later, in January 1799, she was obliged to go beyond writ- ing. At that time she and her husband had been living quietly in Paris, he under an assumed name. When he was arrested as a former émigré and faced the possibility of a death sentence, she decided to appear at his trial as his defense attorney. Of course, this woman had no training as a lawyer, and it was uncertain that she would be allowed to plead his cause. But such were her persuasive powers that she gained permission to represent her husband and had her day in court, where she con- vinced seven judges, “all in full dress, sporting mustaches and great sabers,” to acquit her beloved spouse. The forty-two-minute defense she presented to the court, recounted in her memoirs for her children, suggests she knew how to counter the charges against her husband in a convincing legal manner and that she also knew how to move the judges “as fathers and husbands.” The guards who had brought M. de La Villirouët into the courtroom did not make a move to stop him when he walked over to kiss his wife at the end of her speech, and it took the judges only thirty minutes to announce his acquittal. Mme de La Vil- lirouët had clearly profited from the novelty and pathos of a wife defending her spouse.

Another aristocratic wife propelled by the Revolution into unexpected conduct was Elisa Fougeret de Ménerville. Born into a family of influen- tial magistrates, she was married at eighteen to a man thirteen years older, with a considerable fortune and a good reputation. Typical of women of her class, she accepted her parents’ choice without hesitation.

For the first five years of their marriage she and her husband were to live with her family, an arrangement she welcomed with joy. But before the five years were up, in October 1791, she, her husband, and two young children left France with a wave of émigrés fleeing the Revolution.

They found temporary shelter in Belgium and Holland, before set- tling in England. At each move, the news from France was worse—her mother and sisters were imprisoned, her father guillotined. And the far- ther she and her husband traveled from home, the further their resources dwindled. Finally, in London, Mme de Ménerville, who had started her marriage with gilded carriages and beautiful diamonds, became a working woman. She followed the example of the other émi- gré wives, many of whom were the sole support of their families. In her words: “I painted many fans for a merchant in the City who sent them to Portugal. I did petit point for another who sent it to Russia. I gave French lessons . . . I embroidered dresses, which was the most lucrative occupation... .”
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While most of the upper-class men found it impossi- ble to earn money in a strange country, their wives were more flexible. They had not been trained for the military or the law. They knew only how to sew, cook, and dabble in the arts, but these skills served them well. Whatever hopes had been dashed by the Revolution, some wives took pride in becoming the family wage earners.

In the decade between the beginning of the Revolution and the advent of Napoleon (1789–1799), Frenchwomen acquired a political consciousness they never had before. It is a consciousness that royalists like Mme de Ménerville would gladly have done without. Most wives of her class would have been content to follow the old ways, to let their fathers and husbands think politically for them. But the Revolution forced them into positions where they had to think and act on their own. While they had no official voice in government, they found numerous ways of negotiating a system designed to exclude them. Whatever their political loyalties, royalist or republican (with the possi- ble exception of Mme Roland), their first concerns were for the survival of their families.

NEW ICONS: THE REPUBLICAN MOTHER AND THE MOTHER- EDUCATOR

What were the effects of the slogan “liberté, égalité, fraternité” on

married women after the turmoil had subsided? Did women’s new political consciousness and the memory of their patriotism bear any immediate fruit? The short answer is “no.” Neither American nor French wives benefited, as female groups, from the revolution that had played havoc with their lives. While their husbands became citizens, they remained “the wives of.”

In America, no new legislation fulfilled the hopes of Abigail Adams that wives would be protected from tyrannical husbands. While Amer- icans threw off the shackles of British rule, no new legal system replaced the British common law: a wife was still mandated to serve and obey her husband. Her identity was still submerged, or “covered,” by his.
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And in France, the situation for married women actually regressed. The progressive spirit that had reigned early in the Revolution of 1789 was washed away in the blood of the Terror. The Civil Code, finalized under Napoleon in 1804, quashed all prior efforts to institute princi- ples of equality between husband and wife; basically, it reinstated and strengthened the old inequities. French wives were made wards of their husbands, to whom they owed absolute “obedience” in exchange for “protection.” Most married under the legal regime known as com- munity of property, which did not allow wives to manage or sell their own property, or keep their own income. The husband was formally vested with the administration of all assets belonging to the wife, as well as his own.

Feminist thinkers, articulate and hopeful in the first years of the Revolution, were judiciously silent under Napoleon. The formidable Madame de Staël was sent packing into exile by an emperor who could not tolerate female brilliance. Mary Wollstonecraft’s
Vindication of the Rights of Woman
(1792), with her call to educate young women so they would not be subject to the “slavery of marriage,” was no longer required reading in her native England, or in France and America.
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It is true that there was an attempt to establish a new relationship of women to the polis in what historian Linda Kerber has called “republi- can motherhood.”
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Both American and French women were enjoined to nurture citizens for the republic, and to assume responsibility for their civic education, which gave their domestic responsibilities a polit- ical cast.
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Since girls were educated at home, if they were educated at

all, and boys, too, in their early years, the mother was entrusted with the development not only of literacy, but also of piety and patriotism. Patriotic texts, modeled on the Catholic catechism, were made available to French mothers in order to promote republican virtues. One of the dialogues for “The Good Mother and Her Children” begins with the children asking, “Mother, tell us something about the Republic, that we have been hearing so much about.” To which the mother responds, “The Republic, my children, is a government based on equality . . .” and so forth.
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Long before the flowering of public education, both France and America called upon mothers to instill in their young—and especially in their sons—the social virtues considered necessary for cohesive nations. The valorization of the republican mother, or the mother- educator as she was called in France, would serve as a springboard for some bold French and American women to plunge into social and political activities during the next century.

But another way of looking at republican motherhood—one that is argued by Edith Gelles for the American scene—is to see it as a step backward for women, as an exclusionary device that would keep wives from exercising the new skills they had acquired out of revolutionary necessity.
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Motherhood would remain an intrinsically domestic profes- sion, no matter how much it was linked to ideas of the public good. Like the women of ancient Greece, French and American mothers were, at best, “passive” citizens by virtue of their ability to transmit citizenship to their sons. “Active” citizenship belonged only to men, and would remain an exclusively male prerogative until the twentieth century.

Civic motherhood was a prescriptive ideal that probably bore little relationship to the lives of real women. How many women, American or French, thought of themselves primarily as the educators of future citizens? At the most, a small minority. Most women were likely to con- ceptualize their maternal role within the context of the family rather than the state, that is, if they conceptualized their role at all.

The nurturing rhetoric that often follows periods of revolution and war is a form of reassurance, especially for men, that the nightmare of bloodshed is over. To pun upon a popular psychological concept, it can be said that the ideology of republican motherhood was a form of regression in the service of the male ego.
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I do not see it as a conscious conspiracy to restrict women to maternity and domesticity, but, in the

end, the effects were the same. Wives and mothers, republican or oth- erwise, would be expected to remain at home and leave the public sphere to men.

Yet there is one great European work of art that captures and pre- serves the vision of the wife as an active, courageous, political figure— Beethoven’s opera
Fidelio,
first performed in 1805. Influenced by the original ideals of the French Revolution and by Beethoven’s lofty con- ception of womanhood, it grants to Leonore, rather than to her hus- band Florestan, the heroic role. She is the savior who descends into prison to free her long-suffering spouse from the hands of a tyrannical captor. The soaring climax of the finale (“O, Gott, welch ein Augen- blick!”) is as triumphantly transporting as Beethoven’s better known “Ode to Joy.” And in this case, the triumph has special resonance for wives.

F I V E

Victorian Wives on Both Sides of the Atlantic

But the best of household fairies, Is the wife whose golden hair is

Drooping o’er her husband’s Chair—his Little Woman.

Theo Gift, “Little Woman”
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She rose to his requirement, dropped The playthings of her life

To take the honorable work Of woman and of wife.

Emily Dickinson, “The Wife,” ca. 1863

“Tis next to a chattel slave, to be a
legal
wife.”

Lucy Stone, Letter to Antoinette Brown Blackwell,

June 9, 1850

“I’s sho’ try dis marrin’ business but I ain’t gwine try it no more.”

Eliza Holman, thrice-married former slave
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M
ost social historians agree that modern Western marriage emerged in the period between the Ameri- can Revolution and around 1830. During those fifty years, love became

the most celebrated criterion for choosing a spouse, even if property,

family, and social status continued to weigh heavily in the decision. A young American woman, Eliza Chaplin, expressed the credo of her generation when she wrote to a friend in 1820: “Never could I give my hand unaccompanied by my heart.”
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In many homes, and especially in America, parents accepted the fact that their children would select a husband or wife on the basis of inclination, leaving their progenitors little more than veto power. While love marriages had certainly existed in prior centuries, now they became the popular ideal and perhaps even the norm.
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Many theories have been advanced to explain
why
such a definitive change occurred. Was it a natural evolution of the ideal of companion- ate marriage, as practiced previously by the enlightened bourgeoisie of Great Britain, Northern Europe, and America? Was it the general spirit of revolution that helped release children from their parents’ tutelage and allowed for more independent choices? Was it backlash to the Age of Reason that permitted the passionate torrents of Romanticism to flow among readers of love poetry and fiction? Was it the revival of Christi- anity by Anglo-American evangelicalism, which spread the belief that “heaven-sent” marriages should have the urgency of divine love? Was it the result of nascent industrialization, which removed many young women from the home and placed them in mills and factories, where they were no longer under the watchful eye of parents? Whatever the reasons, the gradual emancipation of young adults from their parents and the primacy accorded love matches solidified during the nine- teenth century.

This chapter considers how the ideal of romantic love meshed with more practical realities in England and America. The letters, diaries, and reminiscences of women who contemplated or experienced wifehood; sentimental poems and romantic novels written by both men and women; and the sober advice offered by self-appointed experts reveal the interplay of idealistic and materialistic aspirations in the making of marital unions. Despite differences in geographical region, social class, race, ethnicity, and religion, a dominant middle-class vision of love-based marriage emerged and then prevailed on both sides of the Atlantic.

LOVE, MARRIAGE, AND MONEY IN GREAT BRITAIN

The Victorian validation of love was by no means construed as

license for unbridled physical passion. However intense the attraction and however intimate the courtship, prospective husbands and wives were expected to abide by a set of social conventions that included deferring sexual intercourse until after they were married. Most mid- dle- and upper-class couples did wait, although there is evidence to suggest that many women, especially those from the lower classes, were pregnant by the time they arrived at the altar. Data from selected En- glish parishes for the period 1800–1849 indicate that between one-fifth and two-fifths of first pregnancies were conceived before the wedding day. Women who gave birth out of wedlock could expect public cen- sure and private hardship, which did not prevent a large number of them, and especially domestic servants, from doing so.
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While it was generally agreed that mutual attraction was desirable, most people also agreed that love was not, in and of itself, all that was needed for an enduring union. Similar social and religious back- grounds, mutual respect and shared values were also reckoned in the choice of a spouse, not just by society at large, but by the young women themselves. It is instructive for us today to read the letters and diaries of nineteenth-century women as they struggled over proposals and tried to determine if an ardent suitor would make a good husband. Or if they themselves had the capacity—emotional and otherwise—to become a good wife.