The Undivided Past (26 page)

Since then, the collective mobilizations of women have been virtually confined to the Western world, generally emerging in
industrialized,
urbanized, and developed countries, where married and
well-educated women already played a significant part in the labor force and sought to assert themselves further on the basis of rising rather than falling expectations.
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The so-called
first wave of feminism that crested during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the United States,
Australia and
New Zealand, and much of
Protestant Europe was largely reformist, and it was mainly (but not exclusively) concerned with winning legal and political rights.
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At a time when more men than ever were able to
vote, extending the
franchise to women was both important in itself and was also seen as the necessary precondition for further reforms. Many of the women who campaigned
for the franchise were benefiting from the greater educational and career opportunities that were opening up by the final quarter of the nineteenth century, and they organized on an unprecedented scale. In 1897, more than fifty campaigning associations in England joined to form the
National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies. In
France, all women’s groups united into a feminist council, which grew from twenty-one thousand members in 1901 to nearly one hundred thousand in 1914. The following year, the
National American Woman Suffrage Association, which had been established in 1890 by merging two rival
organizations, boasted two million members.
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These were large, national organizations, and the next step was to create an international women’s suffrage association. The
International Council of Women was established in America in 1888 on the fortieth anniversary of the
Seneca Falls Declaration, and in 1904 the
International Women’s Suffrage Alliance was set up in Berlin to function as a coordinating and policymaking group, pushing national organizations toward effort and cooperation.
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For just as the campaign for women’s suffrage was both national in focus yet also international in scope, so the winning of votes for women required national legislation yet also contained an international pattern, beginning in late-nineteenth-century
Australia and
New Zealand, and ending on both sides of the Atlantic in the immediate aftermath of the
First World War. Of all “Western” countries, New Zealand was the first to grant the vote to women in 1893, and the confederation of Australia did so from the time it was established in 1901 (though not to
Aborigines). In Europe, Finland led the way by granting full female suffrage in 1909, and the rest of Scandinavia soon followed: Norway in 1913,
Denmark and Iceland in 1915, and Sweden in 1921. By then, women had been given the vote in the United Kingdom and the United States, and also in many of the new nations of central Europe that were created from the ruins of the prewar German,
Russian, and
Austro-Hungarian empires.
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Here was a remarkable achievement, involving unprecedented numbers of women being mobilized into gender consciousness; but there were serious limitations and qualifications. Those who were campaigning for suffrage were a minority of all women, and
they often disagreed on the arguments they should put forward, as they found themselves caught (for the first time, but not the last) on the horns of the “dilemma of
difference.” Some suffragists campaigned for the vote on the grounds that women were the same as men and in all ways
equal to them, so the extension of the franchise was a matter of universal rights and natural justice. But others contended that while women were equal to men and in no way inferior to them, they were also different, and it was that very difference which would enable them to make a unique and necessary contribution to the political life of the nation. In the United States, the concept of equal rights for men and women had been active from the time of the
Seneca Falls Convention, but by the 1900s the unique qualities of women were being increasingly emphasized: “womanly women, stamping the womanliness of our nature on the country,” as one campaigner put it.
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In the United Kingdom, the arguments in favor of difference carried more weight, and most supporters of suffrage stressed the specific contributions women would make to political culture: they were domestic, and would help soften the hard masculine world of Westminster; they were more moral than men, and would elevate the substance and the tone of politics; and they were anxious about the welfare of women, children, and the poor, whose concerns they would bring before Parliament.
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There were other ways in which campaigning women disagreed. Should the vote go to single, propertied women (primarily widows and spinsters), or to all women, whether
married or unmarried, propertied or propertyless? Should the means of getting the vote be gradualist, reformist, peaceful, and in collaboration with men, or (as in the case of the suffragettes in
England)
radical, aggressive, noncollaborationist, publicity-seeking, disruptive, even violent?
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There were other divisions concerning level of commitment, marital status, party affiliation, region, religion, employment, class, and race.
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Married women with households to run and children to bring up had less time than single and childless women. Many campaigners were
liberals, but there were more conservatively inclined feminists than has often been recognized, as well as radicals drawn to the
socialist parties that were expanding across much of Europe at this time.
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Moreover, many
regional suffrage organizations were only loosely affiliated with their
national headquarters, and were often exclusively organized around
religious or professional affiliations. In
Britain women campaigning for the vote tended to be more
radical in large
industrial cities like Manchester than they were in London, and a similar pattern was marked in the United States, where suffragists were more conservative in
Henry James’s Boston than
Edith Wharton’s New York.
Cross-class alliances encompassing patrician and plutocratic ladies, middle-class graduates, and
working women were always inherently unstable, while in the United States,
Australia, and
New Zealand there was also the vexed question of whether the vote should be extended to women of color.

But it was not just that the campaigners were divided among themselves, for while they often claimed to be advancing the cause of womankind as a whole, they could not plausibly speak on behalf of all women. Some committed
feminists did not think that winning the vote was the most important matter, and they preferred to work on substantive rather than (as they saw it) symbolic issues, in particular with reforming the divorce laws (which in terms of property and procedure and child custody were strongly weighted in favor of men) or with repealing legislation concerning
sexually transmitted diseases (because they made clear the connection between women’s sexual and political subordination).
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Some women were opposed to giving the vote to
any
members of their sex, among them Queen
Victoria, who thought the whole cause of women’s rights was “mad, wicked folly”; the novelist
Mrs. Humphry Ward, whose essay
“An Appeal Against Female Suffrage” was signed by many prominent women; and large numbers of
Catholic women, which explains why feminist movements were weak in
non-Protestant countries such as France,
Spain, and
Italy.
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And working-class women, who often felt patronized by college-educated middle-class feminists, were more committed to the collective advancement of their class than of their
gender—with getting the vote for working-class men (often still unenfranchised) than for comfortably well-off women, or in campaigning for improved pay and better working conditions.
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There were also the competing claims of international gender loyalty versus national solidarity comprising both sexes. As a
global movement, “first wave” feminism was far from cohesive: it was divided between the moderate
International Council and the more radical
Suffrage Alliance; its congresses and meetings expressed only the vaguest of aims; and the competing claims of nation in the end proved more appealing. When the First
World War broke out, the majority of feminists pledged their loyalty to their homelands: even the most determined British suffragettes abandoned their disruptive campaigns for the duration of the conflict. To be sure, a small minority preferred global pacifism to nationalist belligerence, and they met at the International Congress of Women at The Hague in April 1915 to persuade the bellicose male powers to end the war. They did not succeed.
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By then, what remained of first-wave feminism was long past its peak, and the granting of the vote to women in many countries in the years 1918–20 effectively brought it to an end. There is little evidence that the massive extensions of the franchise to women during those years was the result of feminist lobbying; it had more to do with the need to reconstruct large parts of Europe in the aftermath of the First World War or to buttress the increasingly beleaguered position of white, middle-class, Anglo-Saxon
Protestants in the United States. At that point, the issue of votes for women largely stalled, and it was not until after 1945 that the franchise was extended to them in most of Latin America, in
France,
Italy, and
Portugal, in eastern Europe and Communist
China, and in the newly independent states created out of the rapidly dismantling European empires.
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From the 1920s to the 1950s, little effort was made to address women’s issues beyond the franchise, as the Western world was preoccupied with depression, war, and recovery.
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But just as first-wave feminism had developed in the West in response to the unprecedented prosperity of the second half of the nineteenth century, so “
second-wave” feminism was the offspring of the unprecedented affluence of the consumer society that came into being in the years of peace after 1945. Developing some of the arguments first advanced by
Simone de Beauvoir in
The Second Sex
,
Betty Friedan depicted the world of 1950s American suburbia as a terrible time and place of female enslavement to the separate, segregated sphere of
domesticity: while their husbands
were at work, women were incarcerated in the “comfortable concentration camps” of home, suffering “a slow death of mind and spirit” because of the limited opportunities for
education and a career. Yet in reality, second-wave feminism, for which
The Feminine Mystique
was such an inspirational book, was brought about not so much by frustration at the diminishing opportunities and circumscribed freedoms as by the hopes and challenges of rising expectations. For in many ways, Friedan exaggerated the plight of her housewives: during the 1950s, middle-class American women had more money and more leisure than ever before, being a homemaker consumed less time and less energy than it had in earlier decades, and as life expectancy increased, women faced many active years after child-rearing was over. What were they to do with them?
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These issues and questions were beginning to surface by the early 1960s, and they gained momentum from the popular disturbances that erupted during that decade among
blacks and students. The resulting
Civil Rights Act of 1964 banned
discrimination not only on the grounds of
race, but also on the grounds of
gender. It also generated its own feminism as black and white women activists were
radicalized by the received condescension of male colleagues, for whom they were often mere cooks, secretaries, and camp followers. The experience of what would be termed “male chauvinism” in the student protests of the time had a similar effect on many women undergraduates, who were more engaged by
Germaine Greer’s radical
The Female Eunuch
than by Friedan’s reformist
Feminine Mystique
, and who also drew inspiration from the teachings and the categories of
Marx and
Engels. Some even came to believe they could make a
revolution of their own in which bourgeois
patriarchy would be overthrown by women who proudly proclaimed themselves to be both feminists and
socialists.
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This in turn led to the creation of new American
organizations expressing female solidarity and promoting women’s collective identity, including the
National Organization for Women (NOW) in 1966, of which Betty Friedan was the first president, and the
National Women’s Political Caucus in 1971. The previous year, the
Women’s Equity Action League began filing class-action suits against the discriminatory practices
of graduate and professional schools, and the impact was immediate: women entrants to medical school rose from 9 percent in 1969 to more than 20 percent in 1975.
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Here was the mobilization of women in America on an unprecedented scale, as “
consciousness-raising” sessions (a phrase and a concept also derived from
Marx and
Engels) enabled them to break out of the domestic isolation that
Beauvoir and Friedan had vividly depicted and deplored, to discover a shared sense of collective identity and
gender solidarity, and to join up with crusading and campaigning feminist organizations.
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One result was congressional passage of the
Equal Rights Amendment in 1972 (although it would never be ratified by the states); another was the
Supreme Court decision the following year in
Roe v. Wade
to legalize abortion on demand during the first three months of pregnancy. By then, the
contraceptive pill had also become widely available to women and the last state laws banning either its use or sale had been repealed or struck down. By the early 1970s, Ivy League schools had opened their doors to women, which meant their numbers in previously all-male professions soon grew, developments further assisted by the provision of daycare centers for
working mothers, and a gradual but growing awareness of issues of sexual harassment in the workplace. “Sisterhood is powerful,” proclaimed
Robin Morgan in one of the most resonant slogans and influential books (“conceived, written, edited, copy-edited, proofread, designed and illustrated by women”) of the time, and by the end of the 1970s, women had organized themselves in many western European nations, where they campaigned successfully for abortion and the pill, for greater access to higher education and the professions, for equal pay, and for improved rights and facilities at work.
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