Women, Resistance and Revolution (7 page)

A False Holiness hid within the Center.

He conceived a new kind of love,

Embraces are cominglings from the Head even to the Feet

And not a pompous High Priest entering by a Secret Place.
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Relationships, Shelley believed, should be freely contracted, and freely dissolved – ‘Love withers under constraint.’ To be bound by the institution of marriage was as intolerable as oppression from other institutions. Indeed, the personal and public were linked. ‘Not even the intercourse of the sexes is exempt from the despotism of positive institution.’
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It followed that you had to try to change your lives as well as political and social institutions. Not everyone tried to do this as literally as Shelley, but, once thought about, such ideas were not easily forgotten. They recur as significant radical impulses later. Despite denunciation from outside and attempts at exorcism from within, the idea of revolution and the idea of freedom in love have enjoyed a remarkably deep and long lasting relationship. The implications for women’s liberation were important.

By the early nineteenth century a most practical device had been discovered and was being discussed in radical circles. A leaflet addressed ‘To the Married of Both Sexes’ appeared in England in 1823 with information about the vaginal sponge. It was almost certainly produced by a radical tailor from Charing Cross called Francis Place. It was disseminated in mysterious brown paper parcels throughout the industrial centres of Britain and distributed by radical workmen like William Longson, a journeyman weaver in Manchester, and young hot-headed radicals like J. S. Mill, who was arrested aged seventeen for giving them out with some friends to maid-servants scrubbing steps and to the wives and daughters of mechanics and tradesmen in markets. Mill wrote birth-control propaganda in the radical paper
The Black Dwarf
, although some radicals like the editor T. J. Wooler were opposed to contraceptives. They connected them with the ideas of Malthus and suspected they would be used as an alternative to the political and social reforms they fought for. We can’t tell how many women were seduced by these stopgap measures. But from amongst the vaginal sponge radicals came a new conception of love. Instead of elevating individual sex love as the criteria of the capacity for human beings to transcend existing society, like Shelley, they attempted to reduce
such irrational emotion to a materialist interpretation of its origins. Shortly after ‘To the Married of Both Sexes’, Richard Carlile published ‘What is Love?’, later called ‘Every Woman’s Book or What is Love?’ As well as giving working women information on contraception he also declared to them, ‘The passion of love is nothing but the passion to secrete semen in a natural way.’
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Unfortunately we don’t know what the women made of this. But this species of mechanical reductionism passed into the revolutionary tradition and connected to ideas about the emancipation of women. At one extreme there was a romantic search for true uninhibited feeling in liberated sexual relationships; at the other there was a matter-of-fact materialism which would take no nonsense from sensual emotion. These two strands were quite contradictory. While the latter was about more control the other wanted to make any control unnecessary. Theoretically they implied very different social arrangement. They were an awkward heritage and continued implicitly to jostle and hustle each other in the revolutionary socialist movement whenever the emancipation of women was discussed.

But by the 1820s at least one of Mary Wollstonecraft’s dilemmas had been dissolved. The followers of Robert Owen were full of ideas for a cooperative society. Some disagreed with Owen’s schemes and worked out others of their own. In these plans for harmony the claims of women were considered sympathetically. In John Gray’s ‘Lecture on Human Happiness’ with articles for a London cooperative society, women are guaranteed complete equal rights within the community, and freedom from domestic drudgery. Jobs like cooking, washing and heating rooms are distributed equally. The emancipation of women was now firmly linked to concepts of an alternative non-competitive society in which the means of production were not individually owned.

One of these early anti-capitalist thinkers, William Thompson, wrote his ‘Appeal of one half of the Human Race, Women, against the pretensions of the other Half, Men, to retain them in Civil and Domestic Slavery’ in 1825 as a reply to a work by James Mill which denied women political rights on the grounds that men could look after women’s rights for them. William Thompson had done battle with the ideas of the middle-class radicals and the new theories in political economy which were enthusiastic about the way in which Britain was becoming industrialized. He was critical of the many
injustices he saw around him, from the fate of Irish peasants to the conditions in the new factory towns. He was one of the earliest economists to argue for the right of the worker to the whole produce of his labour and work out the beginnings of a theory of exploitation. He felt too that the system based on competition and domination penetrated the political and psychological areas of human life. Law and morality were ‘little more than a tissue of restraints of one class over another’.
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Affection and love were claimed by the market. ‘Seldom can natural feelings display themselves … the mere animal part of sexual pleasure is bought by the richer of the dominant sex at the lowest price of competition.’
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Although his thinking inclined him by plain honest radicalism to protest against the oppression of women, he was greatly influenced by his friendship with Anna Wheeler who was part of a circle of women who despite considerable personal suffering were thinking about Mary Wollstonecraft’s ideas of liberation. Thompson pays a long tribute to Mrs Wheeler at the beginning of the book. He says that although he can’t feel as she would because he is a man, he can still state the facts of the case. In fact he did much more. Like Wollstonecraft he refuses to concede that the interest of one group can be entrusted to another. He points out ironically how this argument has been used by conservatives against every group struggling for liberty. Why extend the right to vote outside the narrow confines of privileged society if one section can look after the rights of another? Even if there was the possibility of being happy as a result of permission from masters, and the strong really would care for the weak, it offered little guarantee if the masters became less benevolent in the future.

Thompson located the original subjection of women in their inferior strength and the fact that they bore children. He believed that this subjection was reinforced by their exclusion from access to knowledge and by the existing system of marriage which made them legally and economically powerless.

He doesn’t just argue for rights in the abstract, believing the liberation of women was impossible in a competitive system. Even if women were given completely equal political and civil rights, in existing circumstances they would not be raised to an ‘equality of happiness because unequal powers under free competition must produce unequal effects’.
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They would not only be handicapped
physically but culturally. The real answer was ‘to build up a new fabric of social happiness comprehending equally the interests of all existing human beings’. His alternative is a society based on ‘a voluntary association, or the mutual cooperation of industry and talents in large numbers’.
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Meanwhile he produces a programme of demands for the moment. These will secure at least the removal of restraints though not a ‘positive’ advance, and enable women to play a fuller part in changing society. He criticizes the nature of woman’s education and the legal restraints upon her. The law marks women with ‘the brand of inferiority.… To be a woman is to be an inferior animal, an inferiority … indelible like the skin of the Black.’
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The movement against slavery very quickly led people to draw parallels with the oppression of women. Thompson was contemptuous of the justifications of slave-owners who try to impose their own definition of ‘nature’ on to the slave. This imposed nature was ‘the mere creation of his own ignorant selfishness and injustice’.
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Thompson goes even further and attacks the institution of marriage and the bourgeois family. The statement, ‘Each man yokes a woman to his establishment and calls it a contract’,
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cut right through not only the aristocratic property marriage but the puritan conception of a free contract for companionable domesticity in which the wife had far fewer rights than the man. At a time when the family was beginning to be elevated as a shelter from the cruel competitive world of early capitalism, in which the wife should act as comforter, Thompson exposed the hypocrisy on which this was based. ‘Home … is the eternal prison house of the wife; the husband paints it as the abode of calm bliss, but takes care to find outside of doors, for his own use, a species of bliss not quite so calm, but of a more varied and stimulating description.’
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He understood the power which came from being able to decide what was right and wrong. ‘He has a system of domineering hypocrisy, which he calls morals.’
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He knew too how deeply bound women were by this system, and why they so rarely rebelled against it. The choices were too narrow. The alternatives were simply marriage, the wretched life of the spinster, or the social disgrace of sexual indiscretion. Marriage was obviously the most attractive. ‘Better to be a slave and be kissed than to be a slave without kissing.’
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He admits frankly that the radical movement has neglected to offer women any real alternative. ‘What wonder that your sex is
indifferent to what man calls the progress of society, of freedom of action, of social institutions? Where amongst all their past schemes of liberty or despotism is the freedom of action for you?’ He wonders at the bewilderment of radical men when women show little enthusiasm for their ‘high matters of liberty’, and asks ‘Is their folly or their hypocrisy the greater?’
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Still, in the thirty years between the writing of the
Vindication
and the writing of the ‘Appeal’ there had been significant changes. In 1825 William Thompson can appeal to women to cast off men’s domination by offering them an alternative society to struggle for. Thus he raises points which were to become essential parts of socialist feminist thinking: economic independence and security for women, and communal responsibility for the upbringing of children, social support during pregnancy, the right to work. An important area of hostility would not exist. In the future society, men would be secure in their jobs and therefore wouldn’t dread the economic competition of women.

Thompson argues his case for cooperative feminism with wit and eloquence. More obscurely, similar debates and discussions were going on within the cooperative movement. By offering suggestions for actually effecting a change rather than simply describing and analysing what was wrong, these cooperators and early socialists discovered a new potentiality for feminism. They transformed it from aspiration and ideas and integrated the liberation of women with a social movement which could envisage alternatives to the suffering and waste of early capitalism. From this point the conflict was explicit between the two feminisms, one seeking acceptance from the bourgeois world, the other seeking another world altogether.

Similar connections and a similar division were developing and emerging in France. Although Fourier was to modify his ideas later, his ‘Théories des quatre mouvements’, published in 1808, was an important contribution to socialist feminist thinking and influenced not only the early French socialists, but radicals and cooperators in England and America as well. He attempted a much more sophisticated anthropological/historical description of the development of human society. If you could show how woman’s position had changed along with other changes in social relations, it was easier to imagine a different state in the future. While the details of this attempt are not particularly important now, his insight in taking the position of
women as a gauge of the development of society was to have a lasting impression on revolutionary feminism. ‘The change in a historical epoch can always be determined by the progress of women towards freedom, because in the relation of woman to man, of the weak to the strong, the victory of human nature over brutality is most evident. The degree of emancipation of women is the natural measure of general emancipation.’
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Fourier connected the economic and sexual oppression of women; he ridiculed attempts to pontificate about their ‘natural duplicity’ without understanding the social situation that made dissimulation necessary to them. He accused philosophers of a ‘secret antipathy’ towards women behind their compliments. They maintained an intellectual closed shop, excluding women from access to ideas, and then concluded that women were incapable of thinking. He thought they would be spending their time better in working out social schemes to end women’s oppression.

He had a low opinion of the ‘femmes savantes’, French equivalents of the blue stockings. Instead of contriving the means of delivering their sex he saw them as wedded to ‘philosophical egotism’.
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They closed their eyes to the degradation of their own kind because they had managed to escape the fate of most women.

Not just in the ‘Théories’ but in subsequent writing, Fourier considered the claims of women to a fuller life. In his cooperative communities or phalansteries there was complete equality between the sexes. Women were economically independent of men. The upbringing of the children was the responsibility of the cooperatives not of individuals. Women’s education was not simply for domesticity but for social and political participation in the community.