World History: Feminism

Campaigners for suffrage in India in the early-twentieth century

Throughout World History we have seen how women have played an important role in shaping the world in which we live - ranging from Cleopatra of Egypt to the Rhani of Jhansi. Also, as we have looked at the nineteenth century, especially the second half, we have seen it as a century of 'isms' - imperialism, industrialism, capitalism, liberalism, socialism, nationalism. Today we are looking at the last great 'ism' - feminism. Across the world in the 1800s women continued long histories of campaigning and resistance in order to challenge inequality in society. Quite often, in Western scholarship feminism has often been looked at through the lens of middle-class white women in Europe and North America, however, various forms of feminism emerged throughout the world. Today we will look mainly at what is known as 'first-wave feminism' which emerged in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.

Early Feminists

Mary Wollstonecroft

When we say 'early feminists' we have to limit ourselves somewhat as women have been breaking gender barriers and norms, and challenging patriarchy as long as there have been gender barriers, norms, and patriarchy. These have ranged from fictitious examples, like that of Hua Mulan in sixth century China who dressed as a man to fight on behalf of her father, to real life examples, like Joan of Arc (c.1412-1431) who led French soldiers into battle against the English in the Hundred Years' War. Many states across history have further been led by women: some of Ancient Egypt's most famous rulers (including Cleopatra and Nefertiti) were women; archaeologists have argued that ancient Crete may have been a matriarchal society; Catherine of Aragon defeated the Scottish when her husband, Henry VIII of England, was fighting in France; and until 1818 the Kingdom of Kanday (in modern Sri Lanka) regularly saw men becoming members of the women's family, not the other way around. Women, furthermore, could exercise great influence at times in the home in rural, or poorer urban, households as more hands were needed to survive on a day to day basis. In England until the coming of the Industrial Revolution could earn their own wages through textile weaving at the home; peasant Chinese women could avoid the practice of footbinding; and in the mid-sixteenth century case of Martin Guerre in France a man claimed to be Martin come back from war, and his wife Bertrande claimed him to be real until a court case revealed it to be false. Wealthier women could subtly influence events, and we have repeatedly seen this throughout World History: Lucrezia Borgia held great sway over the politics of her husband and father; harems in the Islamic world were used by women as a way to influence the patriarchal household head and educate themselves; women were influential in the rule of Shaka Zulu; and Cao Xueqin in Dream of the Red Chamber shows how important women were in organising household life and affairs in Qing China.

If we have to pick a rough origin of modern feminism we have to look to the end of the eighteenth century and the start of the nineteenth century - depends where you stand. Social, intellectual, and political ruptures opened the door for the questioning of patriarchal society. Among some of the prominent early writings were from liberal writers such as John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham who debated the idea that through female emancipation men could be emancipated as part of the Enlightenment. Opposition press depicted Mill hysterical and wearing a dress to delegitimise his views. Famous poet Percy Shelley in 1817 wrote 'Can man be free if woman be a slave?', and in 1808 utopian socialist Charles Fourier wrote 'The extension of women's privileges is the general principle for all social progress'. In 1837 it was Fourier who would coin the term 'feminism'. This was not limited solely to Europe - domestic and external challenges in the Confucian order in China allowed Li Ruzhen to write Flowers in the Mirror (1825) where men visit a world where men are forced into seclusion and their feet being bound. However, the most articulate early feminists were women, and in Europe the twin ruptures of the Enlightenment and French Revolution created an opening. Many came from France, most famously that of Olympe de Gouges' Declaration of the Rights of Women (1791) which criticised male French revolutionaries for ignoring the plight of French women. Gouges disliked how women remained unemancipated when the Jacobins offered the vote to all men. Thanks to her criticisms, and her involvement with the Girondins, she was guillotined. The most influential feminist, meanwhile, was likely Mary Wollstonecroft. Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) used Enlightenment thought to argue for better treatment of women, and her writings would set the stage for later feminists ranging from Simone de Beauvoir to Margaret Atwood. Kumari Jayawardena has argued that one of the major reasons why Indian reformer Raja Rammohan Roy started advocating so strongly for women's rights was due to the writings of Wollstonecroft. Interesting sidenote, her daughter Mary would marry Percy Shelley and write one of history's greatest novels, and what is seen as the first sci-fi novel - Frankenstein (1818). A man curiously also wrote another key feminist text. Henrik Ibsen's play A Doll's House (1879) features a young woman Nora challenging patriarchy, and when her husband refuses to understand her plight she leaves.

Women and Society

Across patriarchal societies women had varying roles, and perceptions about their role. In the capitalist world, first Europe and North America but later Japan, there was the ideas of 'separate spheres'. This was a notion that society was split into two spheres: the public, one of work, politics, and war; and the domestic, of the family, domesticity, and children. Men were seen as belonging in the public sphere whereas women were perceived as belonging in the domestic sphere where they were dominant. However, in practice this was very different from how it was perceived. In factories women and children made up a sizeable percentage of the workforce, and in rural areas women worked many of the same roles as men. Middle and upper-class women could potentially work, but this was rationalised as being an extension of the domestic sphere. E. Patricia Tsurumi has highlighted how young women in Japan were encouraged to work in textile factories before moving on to marriage, and nursing was perceived as the ideal occupation of women. During the American Civil War the American Red Cross regularly hired women, and in the Crimean War Florence Nightingale's nursing station revolutionised medicine and drastically increased the rate of survival for wounded soldiers. However, the Caribbean nurse Mary Seacole has largely been overlooked, despite going straight to the frontline to treat soldiers, has she was seen as overstepping the race and sex line. As the commercial sector increased, and education became more widely available, women in capitalist states were allowed to enter white-collar work, (like receptionists), and primary school teachers.

Women worldwide were often perceived in contradictory and hypocritical terms. The Christian world often depicted women in a 'Madonna-whore' complex - women were both virgins and mothers raising a new generation, but also weak, seductresses undermining society just as Eve undermined Adam. Upon the discovery of anaesthesia in the late-1800s men argued that women should not use it during child birth as the pain they experienced was punishment thanks to Original Sin. Mexico even created a national identity about women being traitorous whores in the form of La Malinche - an abused and raped indigenous woman trying to survive during the Spanish conquest was recast after 1821 to be a traitor to Mexico who seduced and sided with Hernan Cortes. Confucianism in Japan and China similarly offered a way to limit women's activity as it required female subservience to men. Greater Learnings for Women by Kaibara Ekken (1631-1741) in Japan argued that women were too emotional and weak, so had to be controlled by men. Colonial women had to face oppression from both indigenous patriarchy and colonial patriarchy. The colonial mindset was, in the words of Gayatri Spivak, 'white men saving brown women from brown men', so while colonial regimes tried to challenge misogyny in colonised cultures - such as female circumcision in Kenya or sati (widow burning) in India - they imposed a new form of misogyny based on capitalist domesticity. Often, colonial and indigenous forms of patriarchy combined. Diana Jeater has discussed how single women in colonial Nigeria managed to participate in capitalist society by living alone in cities working white-collar jobs, but British officials worked with local leaders to force these women back into rural areas where they could be dominated by men. Feminists had these institutional challenges to face. 

Women's Activity

Seneca Falls Convention

First-wave feminism is often just perceived as the campaign for suffrage, and the work of many feminists included this. However, the campaign for suffrage often worked alongside other reformist campaigns, and built on them. Abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass once stated that 'When the true history of the antislavery cause shall be written women will occupy a large space in its pages'. Feminists in the United States often campaigned for abolition alongside women's rights. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott tried to travel to London for the 1840 World Anti-Slavery Convention but were barred thanks to their sex. In 1848 they would host the Seneca Falls Conference, also attended by Douglass, issuing the Declaration of Sentiments becoming the hallmark of American feminism. Stanton argued that suffrage would make women 'free as man is free' and famously added 'women' to Thomas Jefferson's words in the Declaration of Independence. Stanton and Mott were not the only anti-slavery activists involved in feminism. Emmeline Pankhurst would grow up reading Uncle Tom's Cabin, and became political thanks to the anti-slavery rallies in Britain. However, the most famous feminist and abolitionist was by far Susan B. Anthony. Born to a Massachusetts family in 1820 Anthony became political thanks to her Quaker family becoming involved in the temperance movement. She would become a key figure in both movements taking part in the Underground Railroad, denounced Abraham Lincoln when he considered shipping freed slaves to Liberia, and made overt attempts to show the flaws of patriarchy by trying to vote dressed as a man. It should be noted, however, that most of these women were white and middle-class. Former slave, abolitionist and feminist Sojourner Truth was subjected to dehumanising criticism as accusations were hurled at her that she was not a woman.

A WCTU cartoon

Abolition was not the only cause which women built on. Temperance, anti-colonialism, birth control, and poor relief were all good examples of movements which women channelled their activism. More often than not these issues affected women. For example, temperance movements, especially the US based Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), framed temperance as a way to protect women - families were victimised thanks to abuse and poverty caused by excess drink. A key reason why suffrage was passed so early in New Zealand and Australia was thanks to the temperance movement, although in Australia it was also part of an attempt to deny aboriginal and Asian communities the vote. Margaret Sanger became a big advocate for birth control from 1912 after seeing the destructive consequences of back-street abortions while as a nurse. Sanger linked access to safe abortions and contraception as a way for women to become emancipated - tied to childbirth women were set back and possibly put in danger. However, both the temperance and birth-control movements highlight one of the key criticisms of first-wave feminism - they were overwhelmingly white and middle-class. Temperance was a key issue for poor women, but the focus on temperance meant that campaigns for welfare reforms were often sidelined - it is quite telling that temperance was implemented before women were granted the right to vote in the US. Furthermore, although birth control would protect millions of lives the early movement was deeply tied to white supremacy and eugenics. Sanger herself was a supporter of eugenics seeing it as a way to build a healthier society. Although not a white supremacist, her own privilege as a white woman meant that she never questioned her allies, which by the Second World War included members of the Ku Klux Klan. Access to birth control was seen as superseding the lives of non-white communities.

In the colonised world feminists had to face the double burden of challenging colonial rule and indigenous misogyny. In particular, 'modernising' or colonial states focused on women's education seeing it as a way to bring their states into the 'modern world'. The Tanzimat reforms in the Ottoman Empire saw the first schools for girls opening, or had foreign powers open schools, however, foreign schools were often initially limited to Christians. Reformist movements in India similarly stressed the education of women, but it was initially tied to European domesticity - it was an idea that women had to be educated to become more intelligent wives. The drive for education was shared by all faiths. Syed Ahmad Khan in Tahzibul-Akhlaq wrote that only when women were brought up to the same level as men could Muslim Indians become free, and called for the abolition of polygamy seeing it as an impossibility to ensure equality between wives. Women themselves aided in this - Amina Tyabji started a school for Muslim women in 1895. As early as the 1880s, Indian women began graduating from Indian universities with the first two graduating from Calcutta University in 1883. Women were also important in direct anti-colonial action. As we saw last time, women led peasant revolts against French rule in Vietnam, and directly attacked British soldiers in Cairo during the 1919 Egyptian Revolution. Indian women after 1900 were especially involved in direct action - 17 year old Roopati Jain made bombs for revolutionaries and Kalpana Dutt was deported for taking part in the Chittahong Armoury Raid in 1930. 

Opposition to Women's Movements

Opposition to activity were largely from conservative sections of society - women participating in campaigns were seen as breaking established social norms which had to be opposed. Despite being allowed to attend university in the UK women could not graduate, and the first women to study medicine at Edinburgh University were jeered out of the lecture hall. In some states women's activities were seen as especially dangerous - as Japan after 1868 tried to paint itself as a 'family state' where the emperor acted as the father, women challenging society was seen as an attack on the nation itself. With the staggering popularity of the Freedom and People's Rights Movement, which campaigned for full male suffrage, an increasingly conservative Japanese government became fearful; especially as within the movement labour and women's rights cropped up. In 1894 the Safety Preservation Law was passed which banned women from congregating in groups or attending political meetings to effectively destroy the feminist movement. Women persisted anyway in different forms, mainly through the press. In Britain feminists found a strange ally in the form of the Conservative Party and an enemy with the Liberal Party. Both parties had women's branches, the Primrose League for the Conservatives and Women's Liberal Federation for the Liberals, and their stance on suffrage was purely political pragmatism. The parties knew that only property owning women would get the vote which influenced their views - Liberals feared expanding the Conservative voting base seen as propertied women were more conservative, while the Conservatives wanted to expand it for this reason. It was a strange paradox - Liberal leadership opposed suffrage but rank-and-file members supported it, while with the Conservatives it was the opposite. A similar issue happened in France. Due to the Catholic Church's influence in women's education radicals feared emancipating women in case it allowed a backdoor for the Church's return to influence. 

Campaigns for Suffrage

Sarojini Naidu in 1946

Worldwide suffrage was seen as the main way to bring equality. Some areas it was won with little effort - like in California, Australia, and New Zealand. Although, in Australia and New Zealand it was framed as a way to 'uplift' the indigenous peoples. Suffrage campaigns largely followed the same playbook - initially peaceful pressure groups adopting increasingly radical tactics. Inspired by Indian National Congress feminist Sarojini Naidu the Women's Franchise Union was formed in Sri Lanka in 1927 (succeeding in getting middle-class women the vote in 1931); the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies was formed in the UK in the 1890s; and in 1911 five women founded Bluestocking to advocate women's rights in Japan. These campaigns were initially based upon petitioning and small protests, but there were instances of more direct action. In the 1910s New York a 'bohemian' feminism emerged debating feminist ideals and were willing to break the law - Sanger and other feminists sent contraception and information about it in the mail breaking US law. These movements did see some victories - several Western US states gave women the vote, and propertied women were granted the vote for council elections in the UK. However, women became frustrated that rights to vote and divorce were slow coming so more direct feminist groups emerged. In Sri Lanka the Women's Franchise Union joined the trade unions to directly campaign for labouring women's rights, and Emmeline Pankhurst in the UK co-founded the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) in 1903. Pankhurst was frustrated at suffragist campaigns as they were easily sidelined, so with her daughters decided to adopt more direct action. Calling themselves suffragettes they stormed parliament, through bricks through the windows of politicians, set fire to gardens (including Winston Churchill's), blew up post boxes, and chained themselves to the gates outside Westminster. The WSPU quickly spread outside of London and even the UK - Indian feminists protested in solidarity with their British sisters. 

The suffragettes knew how to get headlines. Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters, Christabel, Adela and Sylvia, caused a crisis for their hunger strikes which other suffragettes soon adopted. The dramatic force-feeding of them caused a national outcry causing the passing of the so-called 'Cat and Mouse Act' in 1913. Suffragettes on strike would be released until they gained enough weight, and then they would be re-arrested. Suffragettes used this to their advantage by campaigning while they gained weight and publicly evading arrest. Some campaigns ended in tragedy. During the 1913 Epsom Derby socialist WSPU member Emily Davidson was ran over by the king's horse and tragically killed - it is still widely debated whether she intended to die or not but most historians now believe that she intended to stop the horse. Davidson was turned into a martyr and thousands attended her public funeral. Enfranchisement in other states encouraged suffragettes elsewhere - Alice Paul of the American Women's Suffrage Association in 1913 started publishing The Suffragist where she turned anti-suffrage arguments on their head. Most famously was her parody of a document which argued why women shouldn't vote based on emotions and instability - she said that men were prone to violence and fighting in wars was evidence of them being prone to emotional outbursts.

Socialists and Feminism

Clara Zetkin, Rosa Luxemburg, and Alexandra Kollontai

As we have already seen, it was socialist Charles Fourier who coined the term feminism, and many other socialists were critical of patriarchy. For example, Friedrich Engels in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884) argued that thanks to capitalism women became property to men, and he famously refused to marry his partners Mary and Lizzie Burns seeing marriage as a way to control women. However, socialist men were infamous for ignoring the plight of women, placing class above gender oppression, or being outright misogynistic. A good example of this was how women were barred from the First International for a year, and even then only one, Harriet Law, managed to attend. Women instead started combining socialism and feminism to fight for their rights. In colonised regions women often played a key role in the fight for women's and worker's rights - it took just two years for a women's branch of the Chinese Communist Party to be founded in 1923 under Xiang Jingyu, and Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya in India became a key figure in the Congress Socialist Party in the 1930s. Women were further crucial in trade unions - the IWW was founded by several women (including Emma Goldman and Lucy Parsons), Elena Caffarena founded a women's union in Chile which campaigned for women's rights in the workplace, and Alexandra Kollontai when in exile helped found the feminist movement in Scandinavia. Under the Bolsheviks Kollontai became the first female minister of government, and pressed for greater women's rights. Furthermore, the Socialist Party of Germany (SPD), had several key women members - most notably Rosa Luxemburg and Clara Zatkin. Luxemburg went as far as to denounce the women's suffrage movement as a bourgeoisie movement ignoring the plight of working women. Anarchist Noe Ito in Japan would combine feminism and socialism in the pages of Bluestocking becoming one of Japan's most foremost leftist figures - so much so that in the 1920s the state used a devastating earthquake as an excuse to arrest and assassinate her with many other leftists. Ida Field Chew in the UK managed to create a women-workers alliance with the Labour party, but this quickly broke down after the First World War. Sylvia Pankhurst became a communist and anti-war activist while her mother became a member of the Conservative party - even telling her that she wished that Sylvia would just go to Australia. While Emmeline was happy that only propertied women got the vote, and supporting the First World War, Sylvia bitterly disagreed. Sylvia would become a major writer for left communism, and would even trade public critical letters with Lenin.

World War One and Feminism

When war broke out the feminist movement saw a rupture. More radical feminists, including Sylvia Pankhurst and Rosa Luxemburg, wanted to adopt a policy of opposing the war seeing it as an imperialist war that would hurt women even more. With men fighting and dying overseas, feminists styled this as devastating the family as the primary breadwinner was lost. This was especially the case in Japan where feminists had been making this argument since the Sino-Japanese War of 1895. However, most feminists supported the war effort and encouraged other feminists to support the war. Women began filling in the roles that men had vacated, or they served as nurses and clerical workers - 22,000 women from the US went to Europe to serve in this way. Scottish doctor Elsie Inglis was barred from serving as a doctor in France so she organised fourteen women teams to go by themselves to do so anyway, in 1915 she did this again in Serbia. Back at home women worked in factories, on the buses, and on the farms. Emmeline Pankhurst herself did manual work, and encouraged women to do the same. Most famously, the WSPU encouraged women to give men not at war white feathers to publicly shame them into enlisting - this did cause some controversy when they gave white feathers to injured men. However, women's presence in manual work offered undeniable proof that women were just as capable as men, so several states granted them the vote after the war. Another big part of this was a fear of an inevitable resurgence of women's activity if votes weren't awarded after the war. However, women lacked the vote in many countries - it took until after World War Two for French and Japanese women to get the vote - and equality in education and marriage took even longer to achieve. For example, divorce was only made legal in Ireland in 1995.

Conclusion

First-wave feminism began a process that continues to this day for equal rights between men and women. Second, third, and fourth wave feminisms would build on the actions of the first-wave feminists in order to expand on women's issues to include issues not expressed by the first-wave - employment, reproduction rights, sexuality, trans rights, sexual violence. The pitfalls of first-wave feminism, such as it being largely middle-class, would impact later feminist movements and is still an issue today. However, by looking at why these issues emerged, and by trying to move out fro Europe and North America, we can possibly use first-wave feminism to find the answers. Since the rise of second-wave feminism anti-feminists have claimed that they supported the first-wave, but by looking at first-wave feminism, and how women struggled for rights, we can better challenge these narratives.

Thank you for reading. The sources I have used are as follows:

-Karen Offen, (ed.), Globalizing Feminism, 1789-1945, (New York, NY: 2010)

-Martin Pugh, The March of the Women: A Revisionist Analysis of the Campaign for Women's Suffrage, 1866-1914, (Oxford: 2000)

-Sara Hunter Graham, Woman Suffrage and the New Democracy, (Yale, CT: 1996)

-Bonnie Smith, (ed.), Women's History in Global Perspective, (Chicago, IL: 2004)

-Geneviere Fraisse and Michelle Perrot, (eds.), A History of Women in the West: Vol. IV. Emerging Feminism from Revolution to World War, Trans. Arthur Goldhammer, (Cambridge, MA: 1993)

-Renate Bridenthal, Claudia Koonz, and Susan Stuard, (eds.), Becoming Visible: Women in European History, (Lawrencville, NJ: 1987)

-Kumari Kayawardena, Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World, (London: 1986)

-Eric Foner, Give Me Liberty! An American History, Fourth Edition, (New York, NY: 2014)

-Atsuko Fukuda, 'Japan's Literary Feminists: The "Seito" Group', Trans. Pauline Reich, Signs, 2:1, (1976), 280-291

-Mary Wollstonecroft, A Vindication of the Rights of Women, (1791)

-Rosa Luxemburg,  "Rosa Luxemburg: Women's Suffrage and Class Struggle (1912)". Marxists.org. Retrieved 22 February 2018.

-E. Patricia Tsurumi, "Problem Consciousness and Modern Japanese History: Female

Textile Workers of Meiji and Taisho", Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, 18:4, (1986)

-Alexandra Kollontai, The Autobiography of a Sexually Emancipated Communist Woman, marxists.org, 2001

Thank you for reading and I hope you found this interesting. For other World History posts please see our list here. Our next World History posts will look at the Meiji Revolution in Japan. For future blog updates please see our Facebook or catch me on Twitter @LewisTwiby.