Feminism: The Essential Historical Writings

by Miriam Schneir

New York: Vintage Books, 1992

ISBN 0-679-75381-8

24 March 2002 10:22am

Miriam Schneir's Feminism: The Essential Historical Writings collects articles, book excerpts, and thoughts from feminists of the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries. As a collection, it is reasonably complete. As an appetizer, it somewhat succeeds. Its problem is context: each of the works are prefaced only by a few paragraphs describing the author's life and times, with perhaps another one or two thrown in describing her relationship with other feminists of that era.

The book lacks a common story, a framework to tie the thoughts together. Almost every excerpt included in the book is required reading, and if bundled with a short history of feminism, the compilation itself would obtain that recommendation as well.

"At the very first woman's rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York, no woman present dared to take the chair and preside; a man had to lead the meeting" (xv).
Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797): "So ludicrous, in fact, do these ceremonies appear to me, that I scarcely am able to govern my muscles, when I see a man start with eager, and serious solicitude, to lift a handkerchief, or shut a door, when the lady could have done it herself, had she only moved a pace or two" (15).
Frances Wright (1795-1852), seemingly foreshadowing affirmative action: "It is with delight that I have distinguished, at each successive meeting, the increasing ranks of my own sex. Were the vital principle of human equality universally acknowledged, it would be to my fellow beings without regard to nation, class, sect, or sex, that I should delight to address myself. But until equality prevail in condition, opportunity, and instruction, it is every where to the least favored in these advantages, that I most especially and anxiously incline" (20).
Frances Wright: "...that we could learn that what is ruinous to some is injurious to all; and that whenever we establish our own pretensions upon the sacrificed rights of others, we do in fact impeach our own liberties, and lower ourselves in the scale of being!..." (22).
Harriet H. Robinson (1825-1911), a textile mill worker: "In Massachusetts, before 1840, a woman could not, legally, be treasurer of her own sewing society, unless some man were responsible for her" (55).
Margaret Fuller (1810-1850), citing those in society against women representing themselves: "'That can never be necessary,' cry the other side. 'All men are privately influenced by women; each has his wife, sister, or female friends, and is too much biased by these relations to fail of representing their interests; and, if this is not enough, let them propose and enforce their wishes with the pen.. The beauty of the home would be destroyed, the delicacy of the sex would be violated, the dignity of halls of legislation degraded, by an attempt to introduce them there. Such duties are inconsistent with those of a mother;' and then we have ludicrous pictures of ladies in hysterics at the polls, and senate chambers filled with cradles" (66).
Margaret Fuller: "We would have every arbitrary barrier thrown down. We would have every path laid open to Woman as freely as to Man" (68).
"According to Sir William Blackstone, author of the Commentaries on the Laws of England (first published in 1765), 'the husband and the wife are one person in law; that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during her marriage, or at least, is consolidated into that of her husband'" (72).
William Lloyd Garrison (1805-1879) — Had an anti-slavery paper, The Liberator. (86). In response to those who said that the oppressing of women was "done without thinking, without calculation...", etc.: "There is such a thing as intelligent wickedness, a design on the part of those who have the light to quench it, and to do the wrong to gratify their own propensities, and to further their own interests" (87).
Sojourner Truth (1795-1883) in 1851 spoke at the Akron, Ohio women's convention; her "Ain't I a Woman?" (93) speech should not be missed.
"Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902) originated the Seneca Falls convention and went on to become the leading woman theorist and writer of the movement" (110). In her address to the New York State Legislature in 1860, she spoke, "Just imagine an inhabitant of another planet entertaining himself some pleasant evening in searching over our great national compact, our Declaration of Independence, our Constitutions, or some of our statute-books; what would he think of those "women and negroes" that must be so fenced in, so guarded against? Why, he would certainly suppose we were monsters..." (119).
Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony opposed the 1866 Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution which gave Negroes the right to vote (and introduced the word "male" into the Constitution for the first time) because it guaranteed suffrage to black men but not to women. They "both believed that this position was the only one consistent with their feminist principles" (128-129).
Elizabeth Cady Stanton was elected the first president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association in 1890, even though she thought fighting only for suffrage was too restrictive of a goal: "It is germane to our platform to discuss every invidious distinction of sex . . . covering the whole range of human experience" (155).
Elizabeth Cady Stanton: In contrast to the calculation of a woman's value, "In discussing the sphere of man we do not decide his rights as an individual, as a citizen, as a man, by his duties as a father, a husband, a brother, or a son, relations some of which he may never fill" (158).
John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), who wrote the essay, The Subjection of Women, "was taken into custody by London police at the age of seventeen for distributing birth-control information" (162).
John Stuart Mill: "What is now called the nature of women is an eminently artificial thing—the result of forced repression in some directions, unnatural stimulation in others.... [I]n the case of women, a hot-house and stove cultivation has always been carried on of some of the capabilities of their nature, for the benefit and pleasure of their masters. Then, because certain products of the general vital force sprout luxuriantly and reach a great development in this heated atmosphere and under this active nurture and watering, while other shoots from the same root, which are left outside in the wintry air, with ice purposely heaped all round them, have a stunted growth, and some are burnt off with fire and disappear; men, with that inability to recognize their own work which distinguishes the unanalytic mind, indolently believe that the tree grows of itself in the way they have made it grow, and that it would die if one half of it were not kept in a vapour bath and the other half in the snow...." (170).
Friedrich Engels (1820-1895), in his 1884 Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, claims that, "Sex-love in the relationship with a woman becomes, and can only become, the real rule among the oppressed classes, which means today among the proletariat....," because this class has "no property" (197). This seems unlikely, as John Stuart Mill had already noted, "...the possession of power [over women]... is in this case not confined to a limited class, but common to the whole male sex.... The clodhopper exercises, or is to exercise, his share of the power equally with the highest nobleman" (165).
Engels sums up the Marxist view of the family under communism: "With the transfer of the means of production into common ownership, the single family ceases to be the economic unit of society. Private housekeeping is transformed into a social industry. The care and education of the children becomes a public affair; society looks after all children alike, whether they are legitimate or not" (201-202).
Engels does not explain the questionable assertion that "sexual love is by its nature exclusive" (203), when arguing that the loosing of sex-love restrictions would naturally result in pairings.
Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929), "born on a Minnesota farm, of Norwegian parents" (212), in The Theory of the Leisure Class claims that the dress of women (restrictive, inefficient skirts and long hair) has developed to illustrate the woman's job of consuming goods and being leisure, displaying her dependence on her husband for meaningful work. "It may broadly be set down that the womanliness of woman's apparel resolves itself, in point of substantial fact, into the more effective hindrance to useful exertion offered by the garments..." (220). This should be compared with statements attributed to St. Paul concerning the purpose of a woman's dress and long hair.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935) "viewed economic dependence as the main barrier in the way of progress" of women (230). She, a non-Marxist socialist, wrote Women and Economics and "advocated socialization of housework" (230).
Eating is an individual function. Cooking is a social function. Neither is in the faintest degree of a family function. That we have found it convenient in early stages of civilization to do our cooking at home proves no more than the allied fact that we have also found it convenient in such stages to do our weaving and spinning at home, our soap and candle making, our butchering and pickling, our baking and washing (243).
Anna Garlin Spencer (1851-1931) disagreed with "Charlotte Gilman's suggestion that the domestic responsibilities of women be taken over by professional specialists" (268). In Woman's Share in Social Culture she "outlined the contributions of women from primitive to modern times in the evolution of civilization and their role... in industry, education, the arts, and other aspects of national life" (268). Wrote she, concerning the denial of admission to women at many universities: "You can't come in, the trustees respond, until you produce a Shakespeare or a Milton. The demand that women shall show the highest fruit of specialized talent and widest range of learning before they have had the general opportunity for a common-school education is hardly worthy of the sex that prides itself upon its logic" (269). She notes that many men have been "of supreme genius," but have not "been fortunate enough in their biographies to get their names on the chief lists of the second rank." She concludes that women are even more likely than men to "have suffered hasty eclipse for want of adequate mention in the permanent records" (270).
Spencer claims that, in the Methodist Episcopal Church, there were very many "lay-preachers, later called 'licensed exhorters,' among whom were many gifted women... When however, through an effort to raise all the standards of leadership to the plane of an 'educated ministry,' this lay service was crippled and finally abolished, women were shut out of the Methodist ministry altogether" (278).
Spencer says that women were not allowed to study in the Medical department of the London University until 1872, "and when they were declared eligible for its medical degree many indignant men-graduates of the institution protested that their 'property rights had been invaded by this action'; that for women to be able legally to practise medicine 'lowered the value of their own diplomas, and, therefore, the University had violated its contract with men by allowing women to share its privileges.' All this was without reference to the intellectual standing or practical efficiency of the women graduates. The mere fact of women entering the profession meant, in the minds of these protestants, degradation of the men already in it! Earlier than this, in 1859, the Medical Society of the County of Philadelphia passed 'resolutions of excommunication' against every physician who should 'teach in a medical school for women' and every one who should 'consult with a woman physical or with a man teaching a woman medical student'" (282).
Spencer: "No book has yet been written in praise of a woman who let her husband and children starve or suffer while she invented even the most useful things, or wrote books, or expressed herself in art, or evolved philosophic systems. On the contrary, the mildest approach on the part of a wife and mother, or even of a daughter or sister, to that intense interest in self-expression which has always characterized genius has been met with social disapproval and until very recent times with ostracism fit only for the criminal" (285).
Cary Chapman Catt (1859-1947) was Susan B. Anthony's "hand-picked successor", serving as president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association from 1900 to 1904 and again from 1915 to 1920. She sided with the convention delegates in 1896 "disclaiming any connection between the Association and Elizabeth Cady Stanton's recently published book, the Woman's Bible." Anthony disagreed, declaring that, "When this platform is too narrow for all to stand on, I shall not be on it" (286).
During Catt's tenure as president, "Southern white supremacist women and well-to-do Northern liberals were accommodated within the National American Association; radicals, black women, and immigrant working-class women in any but token numbers were not. Also excluded were militant feminists. The organization Catt fashioned later became the League of Women Voters" (286-287). Schneir explains that "Catt was pragmatic rather than ideological" (286).
At Catt's speech in 1911 to the International Woman Suffrage Alliance in Sweden, she replied to the question, "what does this great body of men and women do?" with, "They do everything which human ingenuity can devise and human endurance carry out, to set this big, indifferent world to thinking" (289).
"Emmeline Goulden Pankhurst (1858-1928) led the militant English suffragist from 1903 until the outbreak of World War I" (293). She explained her motivations thus in Hartford Connecticut on November 13, 1913:
If I were a man and I said to you: "I come from a country which professes to have representative institutions and yet denies me, a taxpayer, an inhabitant of the country, representative rights," you would at once understand that that human being, being a man, was justified in the adoption of revolutionary methods to get representative institutions. But since I am a woman it is necessary in the twentieth century to explain why women have adopted revolutionary methods in order to with the rights of citizenship (296).
Margaret Sanger (1883-1966) believed that birth control was the most important part of the struggle to liberate women (325). In Woman and the New Race, first published in 1920, she talks about a clinic she opened in Brooklyn:
There 480 women received information before the police closed the consulting rooms and arrested Ethel Byrne, a registered nurse, Fania Mindell, a translator, and myself. The purpose of this clinic was to demonstrate to the public the practicability and the necessity of such institutions. All women who came seeking information were workingmen's wives. All had children. No unmarried girls came at all. Men came whose wives had nursing children and could not come... Women brought their married daughters... For ten days the two rooms of this clinic were crowded to their utmost. Then came the police. We were hauled off to jail and eventually convicted of a "crime" (332-333).
"Clara Zetkin (1857-1933) was one of the founders of the German Communist Party and for many years led the international communist woman's movement" (335). In recounting in 1925 her meeting with Lenin, she quoted him as recognizing that, "Very few husband, not even the proletarians, think of how much they could lighten the burdens and worries of their wives, or relieve them entirely, if they lent a hand in this 'women's work.' But no, that would go against the 'privilege and dignity of the husband.' He demands that he have rest and comfort. The domestic life of the woman is a daily sacrifice of self to a thousand insignificant trifles. The ancient rights of her husband, her lord and master, survive unnoticed" (341).
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), an English novelist and critic, had a way of offhandedly writing about seemingly unrelated subjects in a clever, tongue-in-cheek way, when these subjects were part and parcel to her main point. Particularly enjoying to read, from A Room of One's Own, published in 1929: "There was another ten-shilling note in my purse; I noticed it, because it is a fact that still takes my breath away—the power of my purse to breed ten-shilling notes automatically. I open it and there they are. Society gives me chicken and coffee, bed and lodging, in return for a certain number of pieces of paper that were left me by an aunt, for no other reason than that I share her name" (348).
Most of the writings of Mary Ritter Beard (1876-1958) on the history of women "appeared during the 'dark ages' of American feminism—after the decline of the old feminism and before the rise of the new" (356).