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  Feminism: A Very Short Introduction

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  Margaret Walters

  FEMINISM

  A Very Short Introduction

  1

  3

  Great Clarendon Street, Oxford o x 2 6 d p

  Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.

  It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in

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  by Oxford University Press Inc., New York

  © Margaret Walters 2005

  The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published as a Very Short Introduction 2005

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organizations. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above

  You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available

  ISBN 0–19–280510–X 978–0–19–280510–2

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Typeset by RefineCatch Ltd, Bungay, Suffolk

  Printed in Great Britain by

  TJ International Ltd., Padstow, Cornwall

  Contents

  List of illustrations ix

  Introduction 1

  1

  The religious roots of feminism 6

  2

  The beginning of secular feminism 17

  3

  The 18th century: Amazons of the pen 26

  4

  The early 19th century: reforming women 41

  5

  The late 19th century: campaigning women 56

  6

  Fighting for the vote: suffragists 68

  7

  Fighting for the vote: suffragettes 75

  8

  Early 20th-century feminism 86

  9

  Second-wave feminism: the late 20th century 97

  10

  Feminists across the world 117

  Afterword 137

  References 142

  Further reading 149

  Index 151

  This page intentionally left blank

  List of illustrations

  1

  Quaker women preaching

  8 Emily Davison throws

  in the 17th century

  12

  herself under the

  © 2005 TopFoto.co.uk

  King’s horse, 1913

  82

  © 2005 TopFoto.co.uk

  2 Margaret Cavendish,

  Duchess of Newcastle 22

  9 Poster showing a

  © 2005 TopFoto.co.uk

  suffragette being

  3 Mary Wollstonecraft

  37

  force-fed, 1910

  84

  © 2005 TopFoto.co.uk

  © 2005 TopFoto.co.uk

  4 Florence Nightingale

  51

  10

  Margaret Sanger

  92

  © Mary Evans Picture Library

  © Bettmann/Corbis

  5 Song-sheet of ‘ The March

  of the Women’, 1911

  76

  11

  Simone de Beauvoir 100

  © 2005 TopFoto.co.uk

  © Photos12.com/Keystone

  Pressedienst

  6 The Pankhursts lead

  parade, 1911

  79

  12

  Betty Friedan

  103

  © Hulton-Deutsch

  © J. P. Laffont/Sygma/Corbis

  Collection/Corbis

  7 Emmeline Pankhurst

  13

  Demonstration against

  arrested outside

  the Miss America beauty

  Buckingham Palace,

  pageant, Atlantic City,

  1914

  81

  1969

  109

  © J. P. Laffont/Sygma/Corbis

  © 2005 TopFoto.co.uk

  14

  Women’s Liberation

  17

  South African women

  march through

  protest against the

  London, 1971

  111

  death sentence of

  © Bettmann/Corbis

  Amina Lawal, 2003

  126

  © Juda Ngwenya/Reuters

  15

  Women’s Liberation

  18

  Sundanese Muslim girl

  rally, New York, 1970 113

  with inked finger,

  © Ellen Shumsky/The Image

  proof of having voted 128

  Works/2005 TopFoto.co.uk

  © Chris Stowers/Panos Pictures

  19

  Protest by a women’s

  16

  Anti-female circumcision

  rights group, Jakarta,

  poster, Sudan

  124

  2000

  132

  © Sven Torfinn/Panos Pictures

  © Darren Whiteside/Reuters

  The publisher and the author apologize for any errors or omissions in the above list. If contacted they will be pleased to rectify these at the earliest opportunity.

  Introduction

  ‘I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is’, the writer Rebecca West remarked, sardonically, in 1913. ‘I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute.’ The word was a comparatively new one when she wrote; it had only appeared in English – from the French – in the 1890s. Interestingly, the earliest examples of the word in the Oxford English Dictionary carried negative meanings. In 1895 the Athenaeum sneeringly referred to a piece about a woman whose ‘coquetting with the doctrines of feminism’ are traced with real humour. ‘In Germany feminism is openly socialistic’, the Daily Chronicle shuddered in 1908, and went on to dismiss out of hand ‘suffragists, suffragettes and all the other phases in the crescendo of feminism’.

  In those years, some writers used an alternative term –

  ‘womanism’ – with the same
hostility. One long-forgotten writer was roused to angry sneers in his memoirs when he recalled meeting an intellectual woman living in Paris (she comes across, despite his prejudices, as lively and interesting) whose writings reflected ‘the strong-minded womanism of the nineteenth century’.

  Curiously, one of the sharpest attacks on the word ‘feminism’ came from Virginia Woolf, whose A Room of One’s Own is such an effective and engaging plea for women. In Three Guineas, written in 1

  1938 in the shadow of fascism and of approaching war, and probably nervous about any ‘-ism’, she rejects the word out of hand.

  No one word can capture the force ‘which in the nineteenth century opposed itself to the force of the fathers’, she insists, continuing: Those nineteenth century women were in fact the advance guard of your own movement. They were fighting the tyranny of the patriarchal state as you are fighting the tyranny of the Fascist state.

  They were called, to their resentment, feminists, she claims (she is historically inaccurate – the word was unknown in the previous century), and she goes on to insist that we must destroy an old word, a vicious and corrupt word that has done much harm in its day. The word ‘feminist’ is the word indicated. That word, according to the dictionary, means ‘one who champions the rights of women.’ Since the only right, the right to earn a living has been won, the word no longer has a meaning. And a word without a minism

  meaning is a dead word, a corrupt word.

  Fe

  But though Virginia Woolf ’s ‘right to earn a living’ was, and remains, central to feminism, getting on for a century after she wrote it is clear that its attainment by no means solved all women’s problems. Women’s work – despite the much-publicized earnings of some high-fliers in the business world – remains lower paid; or, in the case of housework, not paid at all. When Woolf was writing in the 1920s, feminists had hardly begun to articulate, let alone address, women’s special problems: issues to do with childbirth and child-rearing, or the strain on women who had to combine housework and/or childcare with work outside the home.

  Over the centuries, and in many different countries, women have spoken out for their sex, and articulated, in different ways, their complaints, their needs, and their hopes. As this is a Very Short Introduction, I have concentrated on feminism in one country, 2

  England, and have tried to explore its development through time.

  While women in other countries have had different experiences and definitions, in England, right up until the 1960s at least, the word

  ‘feminist’ was usually pejorative. Very few women, however deeply engaged in fighting for women’s rights, would have described themselves as ‘feminists’. When women began to organize again in the 1960s and 1970s, the movement called itself Women’s Liberation (borrowing the term from black, Third World, and student movements). This was often shortened, sometimes affectionately, sometimes in a derogatory way, to ‘women’s lib’. But those years also saw the word ‘feminism’ being brought back into general use, and its meaning was extended. Though there was still a justified concern that civil and legal equality had not been fully achieved, the new movement tended to concentrate on problems specific to women in their reproductive and social roles. In those years, too, feminists in Britain made an attempt, at least, to reach out across national boundaries and discover what they had – or did Introduc