‘From the tyranny of man, I firmly believe, the greater number of female follies proceed … Asserting the rights which women in common with men ought to contend for, I have not attempted to extenuate their faults; but to prove them to be the natural consequence of their education and station in society. If so, it is reasonable to suppose, that they will change their character, and correct their vices and follies, when they are allowed to be free in a physical, moral, and civil sense … Let woman share the rights, and she will emulate the virtues of man …’
This plea for justice and equality for the ‘oppressed half of the species’ is made in the closing paragraphs of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, published in 1792 to a reception of mixed shock and admiration. The 32-year-old firebrand – a ‘hyena in petticoats’, in the opinion of a dyspeptic Horace Walpole – railed against a restrictive system of education and upbringing that produced in women a ‘slavish dependence’, a ‘weak elegancy of mind’, and no other ambition than to attend to their looks and please men. If only women were allowed the same opportunities as men, she insisted, they would prove to be no less intelligent and no less able. Although there had been isolated female voices in the long-running and often rather genteel ‘debate about women’, Wollstonecraft injected it with a new passion and urgency: she had given notice that an authentic feminist consciousness was emerging.
It is a testimony to the achievements of the feminist movement that, in Western countries at least, a high degree of equality between the sexes (though not yet complete equality) is generally taken for granted. It is easy to forget that less than a century ago the lives of women were severely restricted, socially, economically and politically. A woman’s place truly was in the home – although she would generally have been denied the right to own it.
‘I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute.’
Rebecca West, English writer, 1913
Votes for women In the century after Wollstonecraft’s death in 1797, the clamour for change grew steadily louder. In the middle years of the 19th century, the movement gained an energetic supporter in John Stuart Mill, who argued in The Subjection of Women (1869) that ‘the legal subordination of one sex to the other … ought to be replaced by a principle of perfect equality, admitting no power or privilege on the one side, nor disability on the other’. In both the USA and Europe the cause of women’s emancipation was given impetus by the struggle to abolish slavery, as it brought home to female abolitionists the unpleasant irony that the political status and rights they were demanding for black people were in many respects superior to those they enjoyed themselves.
Over the following half-century feminist energies throughout the Western world were devoted almost exclusively to the business of winning the right to vote. Lobbying that started off polite and ladylike ran up against deeply entrenched establishment opposition and turned more and more militant, as suffragettes on both sides of the Atlantic launched a campaign that included boycotts, demonstrations, arson and hunger strikes. Such tactics – establishing the tradition of political activism that was to become a hallmark of feminism – eventually paid off as laws extending the franchise to women were passed in Britain (1918 and 1928) and the USA (1920).
The second wave Victories in winning the vote notwithstanding, Western societies were still riddled with sex-based inequalities in almost every area of life. At the very first women’s rights convention in the USA, held at Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848, a resolution was passed demanding that women be granted ‘equal participation with men in the various trades, professions and commerce’; more than 70 years later, it was painfully obvious that little progress had been made towards economic equality. Yet while it was clear that much work still had to be done, the sense of common purpose created by the struggle for women’s suffrage quickly dissipated once that objective had been achieved. Loss of focus, worsened by the distractions first of world depression, then of world war, left the women’s movement deflated and fragmented for decades.
Just as it had taken the fervour generated by the abolitionist movement to galvanize the so-called ‘first wave’ of feminism, so now it took a new period of hope and crisis in the 1960s – the era of civil rights, Vietnam, the hippie revolution and student protest – to kick-start the ‘second wave’. All at once a thousand new initiatives, aimed at a thousand perceived injustices, sprang up everywhere. But this renewed and widespread activism brought to the surface differences and divisions that had long existed within feminism.
Mainstream, or liberal, feminists tended to take a pragmatic line, aiming for strict equality with men in every area. For them, the primary task was reform that prevented any form of discrimination: removing formal or informal barriers that stopped women breaking through the ‘glass ceiling’ in the workplace; providing adequate maternity-leave rights and childcare arrangements; ensuring that equal educational and training opportunities were available for women.
There had always been more radical voices within feminism. As early as 1898, the leading US anarchist Emma Goldman had scoffed at the idea that liberation could be won merely by winning the vote; a woman could gain true freedom only ‘by refusing the right to anyone over her body; by refusing to bear children, unless she wants them; by refusing to be a servant to God, the state, society, the husband, the family’. Later feminists questioned whether strict equality with men – rather than protective legislation that explicitly defended women’s interests – was what they should really be fighting for. Was it right to measure progress in overturning the historical subordination of women by their success in gaining access to power and privilege in a patriarchally organized world – in a system that was founded on the assumption of male dominance? For many, outdoing men on their own terms, playing them at their own games, was not enough. As the Australian feminist Germaine Greer commented in 1986: ‘I didn’t fight to get women out from behind vacuum cleaners to get them onto the board of Hoover.’
Underpinning these concerns was an extensive theoretical debate on the nature and origins of women’s oppression. Central to this was a distinction between sex and gender that was based on the idea that femininity is a social construction; the notion, prefigured by Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex (1949), that ‘woman is not born but made’ and that she is ‘the Other’ – a person who is defined, asymmetrically, in relation to male norms. In this radical critique the subordinate position of women is so inextricably wound up in the texture of patriarchal society that nothing short of a revolutionary reshaping of that society will suffice.
the condensed idea
Equal, not the same