WOMEN IN XIX CENTURY ENGLAND
It takes a considerable leap of the imagination for a woman of the 21st
century to realise what her life would have been like had she been born
150 years ago. We take for granted nowadays that almost any woman can
have a career if she applies herself. We take for granted that women can
choose whether or not to marry, and whether or not to have children, and
how many.
Women of the mid-19th century had no such choices. Most lived in a state
little better than slavery. They had to obey men, because in most cases
men held all the resources and women had no independent means of
subsistence. A wealthy widow or spinster was a lucky exception. A
woman who remained single would attract social disapproval and pity.
She could not have children or cohabit with a man: the social penalties
were simply too high. Nor could she follow a profession, since they were
all closed to women.
Girls received less education than boys, were barred from universities,
and could obtain only low-paid jobs. Women's sole purpose was to marry
and reproduce. At mid-century women outnumbered men by 360,000
(9.14m and 8.78m) and thirty percent of women over 20 were unmarried.
In the colonies men were in the majority, and spinsters were encouraged to emigrate.
Most women had little choice but to marry and upon doing so everything they owned, inherited and
earned automatically belonged to their husband. This meant that if an offence or felony was
committed against her, only her husband could prosecute. Furthermore, rights to the woman
personally - that is, access to her body - were his. Not only was this assured by law, but the woman
herself agreed to it verbally: written into the marriage ceremony was a vow to obey her husband,
which every woman had to swear before God as well as earthly witnesses. Not until the late 20th
century did women obtain the right to omit that promise from their wedding vows.
In 1890, Florence Fenwick Miller (1854-1935), a midwife turned journalist, described woman's
position succinctly:
Under exclusively man-made laws women have been reduced to the most abject condition of legal
slavery in which it is possible for human beings to be held...under the arbitrary domination of
another's will, and dependent for decent treatment exclusively on the goodness of heart of the
individual master. (From a speech to the National Liberal Club)
Every man had the right to force his wife into sex and childbirth. He could take her children without
reason and send them to be raised elsewhere. He could spend his wife's inheritance on a mistress or
on prostitutes. Sometime, somewhere, all these things - and a great many more - happened. To give
but one example, Susannah Palmer escaped from her adulterous husband in 1869 after suffering
many years of brutal beatings, and made a new life. She worked, saved, and created a new home for
her children. Her husband found her, stripped her of all her possessions and left her destitute, with
the blessing of the law. In a fury she stabbed him, and was
immediately prosecuted.
If a woman was unhappy with her situation there was, almost
without exception, nothing she could do about it. Except in
extremely rare cases, a woman could not obtain a divorce and,
until 1891, if she ran away from an intolerable marriage the police
could capture and return her, and her husband could imprison her.
All this was sanctioned by church, law, custom, history, and
approved of by society in general. Nor was it the result of ancient,
outdated laws: the new (1857) divorce act restated the moral
inequality. Mere adultery was not grounds for a woman to divorce
a man; however, it was sufficient grounds for a man to divorce his
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wife.
Signs of rebellion were swiftly crushed by fathers, husbands, even brothers. Judge William
Blackstone had announced that husbands could administer "moderate correction" to disobedient
wives, and there were other means: as late as 1895, Edith Lanchester's father had her kidnapped and
committed to a lunatic asylum for cohabiting with a man.
As a Marxist and feminist, she was morally and politically opposed to marriage.
Among the rich, family wealth automatically passed down the male line; if a daughter got anything it
was a small percentage. Only if she had no brothers, came from a very wealthy family, and remained
unmarried, could a woman become independent. A very wealthy woman might make a premarital
agreement for her wealth to be held in a trust fund, but in the majority of cases marriage stripped a
woman of all her assets and handed them to her husband.
Fitting in rather uncomfortably, even hypocritically, with this state of affairs was the concept of woman as a
goddess placed on a pedestal and worshipped. This contradiction has been described admirably by R.J.
Cruikshank.
"The Victorians, who tackled many big problems successfully, made a fearful hash of the problem of woman.
Their moral dualism, their besetting weakness of dreaming of one thing and doing another, might be
amusing in architecture or painting, but it involved endless cruelty towards flesh and blood. Woman in the
abstract was as radiant as an angel, as dainty as a fairy - she was a picture on the wall, a statue in a temple,
a being whose physical processes were an inscrutable mystery. She was wrapped by the Victorians in folds
on folds, and layers on layers of clothes, as though she were a Hindu idol. She was hidden in the mysteries
of petticoats; her natural lines were hidden behind a barricade of hoops and stays; her dress throughout the
century emphasised her divorce from reality. She was a daughter of the gods divinely fair and most divinely
tall; she was queen rose of the rose-bud garden of girls; she was Helen, Beatrice, the Blessed Damozel, the
Lady of Shalott. A romanticism as feverish as that could only bring unhappiness to its objects."
From reading Victorian novels and watching television costume dramas it is easy to forget that the vast
majority of women were working class. Born without a penny, they began work between the ages of about 8
to 12 and continued until marriage. A woman's fate thereafter depended on her husband. If he earned
enough to support her she would usually cease work, otherwise she worked all her life, taking short breaks
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to give birth. Anything she earned belonged to him.
Barred from all well-paid work women were forced into a very small
range of occupations. Half were in domestic service and most of the
rest were unskilled factory hands or agricultural labourers. Almost
the only skilled work for women was in the bespoke clothing trade,
but even that was ill-paid and low-status. Seamstresses became a
cause célèbre in the 1840s.
Prostitution was rife in Victorian England, the majority being
"casual", resorted to only when there was no alternative. Without the
safety-net of a welfare system and with all wealth in the hands of
men, it was to individual men that women were forced to turn and to
sell themselves when desperate for subsistence.
Women's clothing symbolised their constricted lives. Tight lacing into
corsets and cumbersome multiple layers of skirts which dragged on
the ground impeded women's freedom of movement. Between 1856 and 1878, among the wealthy, the cage
crinoline was popular as it replaced the many layers of petticoats, but it was cumbersome and humiliating.
Sitting down, the cage rode up embarrassingly at the front. The skirts were so wide that many women died
engulfed in flames after the material caught fire from an open grate or candle.
In 1851 Elizabeth Miller designed a rational costume in the U.S. which was publicized by Amelia Bloomer. It
consisted of a jacket and knee-length skirt worn over Turkish-style trousers. It was regarded as immodest
and unfeminine and was greeted with horror and disdain, despite its obvious utility. A presentation was given
in Hastings, with the speaker Miss Atkins dressed in one of the "Bloomer" outfits.
Women were indoctrinated from birth to accept their lowly status and yet many did rebel, and some
analysed, criticised, and published books on women's situation. An excellent review of these can be found in
Dale Spender's Women of Ideas (Pandora 1982).
During the early to mid-nineteenth century the social order was being challenged and a new philosophy was
emerging, imbued with ideals of liberty, personal freedom, and legal reform. Black slavery was being
criticised and challenged, and was abolished, and working class men demanded that the right to vote be
given to them and not just to a few thousand landed gentry. It was in this climate that women like Barbara
Leigh Smith began to think that women, too, deserved to be emancipated from their enslaved status.
WOMEN IN XIX CENTURY UNITED STATES
Feminist Philosophies
At the end of the 18th century, individual liberty was being hotly debated. In 1789, during the French
Revolution, Olympe de Gouges published a 'Declaration of the Rights of Woman' to protest the revolutionists'
failure to mention women in their 'Declaration of the Rights of Man'. In 'A Vindication of the Rights of Women'
(1792) Mary Wollstonecraft called for enlightenment of the female mind.
Margaret Fuller, one of the earliest female reporters, wrote 'Woman in the Nineteenth Century' in 1845. She
argued that individuals had unlimited capacities and that when people's roles were defined according to their
sex, human development was severely limited.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton was a leading theoretician of the women's rights movement. Her 'Woman's Bible',
published in parts in 1895 and 1898, attacked what she called the male bias of the Bible. Contrary to most of
her religious female colleagues, she believed further that organized religion would have to be abolished
before true emancipation for women could be achieved. (See also Stanton, Elizabeth Cady.)
Charlotte Perkins Gilman characterized the home as inefficient compared with the mass-production
techniques of the modern factory. She contended, in books like 'Women and Economics' (1898), that women
should share the tasks of homemaking, with the women best suited to cook, to clean, and to care for young
children doing each respective task.
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Politically, many feminists believed that a cooperative society based on socialist economic principles would
respect the rights of women. The Socialist Labor party, in 1892, was one of the first national political parties
in the United States to include woman suffrage as a plank in its platform.
During the early 20th century the term new woman came to be used in the popular press. More young
women than ever were going to school, working both in blue- and white-collar jobs, and living by themselves
in city apartments. Some social critics feared that feminism, which they interpreted to mean the end of the
home and family, was triumphing. Actually, the customary habits of American women were changing little.
Although young people dated more than their parents did and used the automobile to escape parental
supervision, most young women still married and became the traditional housewives and mothers.
Women in Reform Movements
Women in the United States during the 19th century organized and participated in a great variety of reform
movements to improve education, to initiate prison reform, to ban alcoholic drinks, and, during the pre-Civil
War period, to free the slaves.
At a time when it was not considered respectable for women to speak before mixed audiences of men and
women, the abolitionist sisters Sarah and Angelina Grimke of South Carolina boldly spoke out against
slavery at public meetings (see Grimke Sisters). Some male abolitionists including William Lloyd Garrison,
Wendell Phillips, and Frederick Douglass supported the right of women to speak and participate equally with
men in antislavery activities. In one instance, women delegates to the World's Anti-Slavery Convention held
in London in 1840 were denied their places. Garrison thereupon refused his own seat and joined the women
in the balcony as a spectator.
Some women saw parallels between the position of women and that of the slaves. In their view, both were
expected to be passive, cooperative, and obedient to their master-husbands. Women such as Stanton, Lucy
Stone, Lucretia Mott, Harriet Tubman, and Sojourner Truth were feminists and abolitionists, believing in both
the rights of women and the rights of blacks. (See also individual biographies.)
Many women supported the temperance movement in the belief that drunken husbands pulled their families
into poverty. In 1872 the Prohibition party became the first national political party to recognize the right of
suffrage for women in its platform. Frances Willard helped found the Woman's Christian Temperance Union
(see Willard, Frances).
During the mid-1800s Dorothea Dix was a leader in the movements for prison reform and for providing
mental-hospital care for the needy. The settlement-house movement was inspired by Jane Addams, who
founded Hull House in Chicago in 1889, and by Lillian Wald, who founded the Henry Street Settlement
House in New York City in 1895. Both women helped immigrants adjust to city life. (See also Addams; Dix.)
Women were also active in movements for agrarian and labor reforms and for birth control. Mary Elizabeth
Lease, a leading Populist spokeswoman in the 1880s and 1890s in Kansas, immortalized the cry, "What the
farmers need to do is raise less corn and more hell." Margaret Robins led the National Women's Trade Union
League in the early 1900s. In the 1910s Margaret Sanger crusaded to have birth-control information
available for all women (see Sanger).
Fighting for the Vote
The first women's rights convention took place in Seneca Falls, N.Y., in July 1848. The declaration that
emerged was modeled after the Declaration of Independence. Written by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, it claimed
that "all men and women are created equal" and that "the history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries
and usurpations on the part of man toward woman." Following a long list of grievances were resolutions for
equitable laws, equal educational and job opportunities, and the right to vote.
With the Union victory in the Civil War, women abolitionists hoped their hard work would result in suffrage for
women as well as for blacks. But the 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution, adopted in 1868 and
1870 respectively, granted citizenship and suffrage to blacks but not to women.
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Disagreement over the next steps to take led to a split in the women's rights movement in 1869. Elizabeth
Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, a temperance and antislavery advocate, formed the National Woman
Suffrage Association (NWSA) in New York. Lucy Stone organized the American Woman Suffrage
Association (AWSA) in Boston. The NWSA agitated for a woman-suffrage amendment to the Federal
Constitution, while the AWSA worked for suffrage amendments to each state constitution. Eventually, in
1890, the two groups united as the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). Lucy Stone
became chairman of the executive committee and Elizabeth Cady Stanton served as the first president.
Susan B. Anthony, Carrie Chapman Catt, and Dr. Anna Howard Shaw served as later presidents.
The struggle to win the vote was slow and frustrating. Wyoming Territory in 1869, Utah Territory in 1870, and
the states of Colorado in 1893 and Idaho in 1896 granted women the vote but the Eastern states resisted. A
woman-suffrage amendment to the Federal Constitution, presented to every Congress since 1878,
repeatedly failed to pass.
Excerpted from Compton's Interactive Encyclopedia
Copyright (c) 1994, 1995 Compton's NewMedia, Inc.
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