Feminism Page 2

  not have – in common with feminists abroad.

  tion

  But how often, still, do we hear women anxiously asserting ‘I’m not a feminist but . . . ’ as they go on to make claims that depend upon, and would be impossible without, a feminist groundwork? The American feminist Estelle Freedman argues that right from its origins, the word has carried negative connotations; that surprisingly few politically engaged women have styled themselves feminists. In the 1990s some feminists in England and the United States identified and warned against a ‘backlash’ against feminism and its undoubted achievements. Juliet Mitchell and Ann Oakley, for example, called their third collection of essays Who’s Afraid of Feminism? , with a cartoon of a big bad wolf on the original jacket cover. They argued that ‘attacks on feminism frequently merge into a wider misogyny’; ‘the feminist’ is now the name given to the disliked or despised woman, much as ‘man-hater’ or ‘castrating bitch’, ‘harridan’ or ‘witch’, were used before the 1960s. They added that women also have to expose and eradicate the misogyny inherent in feminism itself.

  3

  Just as troubling is the caution that the term ‘feminism’ seems to arouse in many younger women, a surprising number of whom seem to shy away from the concept. One English tabloid recently published a double-page spread entitled ‘Is Feminism Dead?’, which managed, neatly enough, to sit on the fence; equal space was devoted to arguments yes and no, to those who felt the term was still urgently relevant, and to those who were sure it was dated, even embarrassing, and should be retired. The piece was illustrated with a photograph of ‘militant women’s libbers’ picketing a Miss World demonstration. (In fact, everyone in the photo was laughing.) Faintly embarrassed, I recognized my much younger self, with long hair and long skirts, clutching a distinctly uninspired placard announcing that ‘women are people too’. I had almost forgotten that the Miss World contests still existed (in those bad old days it was on prime-time television), until in 2002 the event received unexpected publicity, first when Nigerian militants demonstrated violently against its ‘parade of nudity’, which they thought would encourage promiscuity and Aids, then when several contestants minism

  refused to participate because a young Nigerian woman, sentenced Fe

  to death under Islamic sharia law for having become pregnant outside marriage, was reprieved – but only until she had weaned her baby. The beauty queens’ gesture was both courageous and effective, though interestingly, one insisted, with a hint of anxiety, that she took up her stand, certainly not because she was a feminist, or even because she was a woman, but because she was a human being.

  When I recently asked some women in their early 20s – some of whom were university-educated, others working, and all, clearly, beneficiaries of earlier battles for women’s rights – whether they considered themselves feminists, or indeed had any interest in feminism, most of them replied, flatly, no. The very term itself, one woman claimed, sounds stuffy and out of date. Feminism, she felt, has become, on the one hand, a playground for extremists – she termed them ‘fundamentalists’ – who had nothing useful to say to women like herself. On the other hand, she argued, feminism has become ‘institutionalized’, and she compared it to communism: it 4

  demands commitment, not simply to ideas, but to a generalized ideology. Moreover, she added, it is nowadays just another academic subject. You can get a degree in ‘gender studies’ and that, she felt, is the real kiss of death: proof, if any were needed, that feminism is no longer urgently relevant. Perhaps these younger women will feel differently in ten years or so, when they find themselves juggling family, housework, and a job; perhaps they will find that they need to re-invent feminism to suit their own experience. But in a way, I hope they will not need to.

  Introduc

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  5

  Chapter 1

  The religious roots

  of feminism

  Some of the first European women to speak out for themselves, and for their sex, did so within a religious framework, and in religious terms. It is perhaps not always easy, in our secular society, to bring them back to life: to recognize fully their courage, or to understand the implications, or the extent, of their challenge to the status quo.

  For centuries, and all over Europe, there were families who disposed of ‘unnecessary’ or unmarriageable daughters by shutting them away in convents. For some, this must have felt like life imprisonment; but for others, conventual quiet seems to have facilitated genuine fulfilment: it allowed some women to develop a talent for organization, and some were able to read and think, and discover their own distinctive voices. Hildegard of Bingen, who was born at the end of the 11th century and became a nun, and later the abbess, of a small Rhineland convent, has long been known as a remarkable and impressive writer; recently, her great musical talent has been rediscovered and celebrated. But she was sometimes plagued with doubts about her ‘unfeminine’ activities, and wrote to one of the leading churchmen of the time, Bernard of Clairvaux, asking if she – an uneducated woman – should continue with her writing and with composing. He encouraged her, and within a few years she was known and honoured all over Europe. When she was 60 years old, she embarked upon preaching tours all through the 6

  German empire, even though at that time only priests were allowed to preach.

  Like other medieval women, when seeking to imagine the almost unimaginable, and to communicate her understanding of God’s love, she turned to womanly, and specifically maternal, experience, and wrote of the ‘motherhood’ of God. ‘God showed me his grace again’, she writes, ‘as . . . when a mother offers her weeping child milk.’ Some religious women imagine, with maternal tenderness, the infant Jesus. A Flemish Beguine meditates on what the mother of God must have felt:

  for three or more days [she] held Him close to her so that He nestled between her breasts like a baby . . . sometimes she kissed Th

  him as though he were a little child and sometimes she held Him on e religiou

  her lap as if He were a gentle lamb.

  s roots of feminism

  ‘Just because I am a woman, must I therefore believe that I must not tell you about the goodness of God . . . ?’ asked the Englishwoman Julian of Norwich in the early 15th century. She marvelled that ‘he who was her Maker chose to be born of the creature that is made’. Moreover, she argued:

  our Saviour is our true mother in whom we are eternally born and by whom we shall always be enclosed . . . We are redeemed by the motherhood of mercy and grace . . . to the nature of motherhood belong tender love, wisdom and knowledge, and it is good, for although the birth of our body is only low, humble and modest compared with the birth of our soul, yet it is he who does it in the beings by women it was done.

  Whereas other women had made the analogy briefly, Julian of Norwich goes on to spell out the comparison very directly. Christ is like

  the kind, loving mother who knows and recognizes the need of her 7

  child, and carefully watches over it. The mother can give her child milk to suck, but our dear mother Jesus can feed us with himself, and he does so most generously and most tenderly . . .

  Margery Kempe, a contemporary of Julian’s who travelled from her Essex home to visit her, produced an account of her own life –

  probably dictated to a scribe – that has been described as the first autobiography in English. Her life story reveals, only too clearly, why her self-preoccupation and her melodramatic acting out of her own miseries infuriated so many people who came into contact with her. But her story is also, unexpectedly, a deeply touching one; and more than that, it is impressive simply because she insists on taking herself and her experiences seriously. Margery came up against the painful and terrible aspect of the motherhood that had inspired the celibate Julian. She was miserably ill all through her first pregnancy, and after a prolonged and very painful birth, was left exhausted and depressed: ‘what with the labour she had in childbirthing and the sicknesse going before, sh
e despaired of her minism

  life’. At times, she came near to killing herself. She was comforted, Fe

  she recalls, by a vision of Christ, in the form of a handsome young man sitting at her bedside; he informed her that ‘you may boldly, when you are in bed, take me to you as your wedded husband’. But it was only years later, and after 14 pregnancies, that Margery finally managed to negotiate a deal with her demanding mortal husband: if he stopped insisting on sex, she would pay off his debts, and forgo her strict Friday fast to eat and drink with him. He agreed, though with a hint of sarcasm that echoes nastily across the centuries: ‘May your body be as freely available to God as it has been to me.’

  With remarkable energy and determination, Margery then set out across Europe on a pilgrimage, and though her constant weeping and wailing so infuriated her fellow pilgrims that they abandoned her en route, her courage – and obsessive determination – enabled her to reach Jerusalem, and eventually to get as far as Constantinople.

  8

  By the late 16th century, increasing numbers of women were beginning to argue their case more consistently and more aggressively, though still within a religious framework. The Reformation enabled more women to receive an education. In 1589, in what one historian has called ‘the earliest piece of English feminist polemic’, Jane Anger took up a challenging position by insisting that Eve was superior to Adam: a second, and hence improved, model. Whereas Adam was fashioned from

  ‘dross and filthy clay’, God made Eve from Adam’s flesh, ‘that she might be purer than he’, which ‘doth evidently show how far we women are more excellent than men . . . From woman sprang man’s salvation. A woman was the first that believed, and a woman likewise the first that repented of sin.’ Anger then descends crossly, and comically, to everyday domestic life. It is Th

  women, she reminds us, who make sure that men are fed, clothed, e religiou

  and cleaned: ‘without our care they lie in their beds as dogs in litter, and go like lousy mackerel swimming in the heat of s roots of feminism

  summer’.

  But any woman wanting to defend her sex had to tackle powerfully negative scriptural images of women: Delilah was treacherous, Jezebel murderous, while Eve was directly responsible for the Fall of the human race: ‘the woman tempted him and he did eat’. Saint Paul was regularly invoked against any woman who spoke out, or asked awkward questions about the Church’s attitude to women:

  ‘Let your women keep silence in the churches, for it is not permitted to them to speak’, he instructed the Corinthians. And again, in the epistle to Timothy, ‘if they will learn anything let them ask their husbands at home: for it is shame for women to speak in the church’.

  Gradually, a few women found the confidence to defy these scriptural prohibitions. Some offered dissenting interpretations of Genesis, arguing that Adam was, after all, as much to blame for the Fall as Eve. So, in 1611, Aemilia Lanyer reminded her readers that Christ

  9

  was begotten of a woman, born of a woman, nourished of a woman, obedient to a woman . . . he healed women, pardoned women, comforted women . . . after his resurrection, appeared first to a woman.

  And Rachel Speght sardonically remarked in 1617: If Adam had not approved that deed which Eve had done, and been willing to tread the steps which she had gone, he being her head would have reproved her, have made the commandment a bit to restrain him from breaking his master’s position.

  Others insisted that God had signalled his forgiveness by making Mary, a descendant of Eve, the mother of Christ.

  In the course of the troubled 17th century, particularly among the sects, the many and various small groups that rejected the established Church in favour of purer forms of worship, women minism

  found more freedom. Some, at least, felt inspired to preach or to Fe

  prophesy. Modern historians have pointed out the important role of women among the religious separatists who fled persecution in late Elizabethan England by emigrating to America or to Holland, as well as their activity as preachers. Women were active, too, among the small dissenting groups that managed to survive underground in England, until, during the Civil War and Interregnum, they emerged dramatically and vocally. Keith Thomas lists some of these independent congregations: Brownists, Independents, Baptists, Millenarians, Familists, Quakers, Seekers, Ranters. Whatever their theological differences, they all believed the necessity for spiritual regeneration in every individual. The experiencing of what Quakers called the ‘Inner Light’ was more important than external observance – and that light knows no sexual distinction. As one contemporary writer claimed, ‘one faithful man, yea, or woman either, may as truly and effectually loose and bind, both in heaven and earth, as all the ministers in the world’.

  10

  Various independent congregations had, for some time, been allowing women to debate publicly and to vote on matters of Church business; by the 1640s some, particularly among the Quakers, were going further. In 1659, the Quaker Fox argued that

  ‘Christ is in the male as in the female, who redeems from under the Law . . . Christ in the male and female, who are in the spirit of God, are not under the Law.’

  ‘Might not the spirit of Christ, that is begotten of God in the female as well as the male . . . speak?’ asked Katherine Evans and Sarah Chevers. Increasingly often, women felt moved, divinely inspired, to speak in meetings and even at service, though they were often greeted with bitter opposition. They were criticized for being ‘puffed up with pride’ and ‘vainglorious arrogance’, and even worse, for Th

  ‘usurping authority over men’. In 1646, for example, John Vicars e religiou

  complained bitterly about ‘bold impudent housewives . . . without all womanly modesty who take upon them . . . to prate . . . most s roots of feminism

  directly contrary to the apostle’s inhibition’.

  John Bunyan was totally opposed to this active participation by women, arguing that Satan, inevitably, tempts the weaker Eve, rather than Adam: ‘the man was made the head in worship, and the keeper of the garden of God’. He referred to women as ‘that simple and weak sex’. Citing the first epistle to the Corinthians, he argued that women are ‘not the image and glory of God as the men are.

  They are placed beneath.’ He disapproved of separate women’s meetings, which did nothing but encourage ‘unruliness’. ‘I do not believe they [women] should minister to God in prayer before the whole church,’ he insisted, adding sarcastically, ‘for then I should be a Ranter or a Quaker.’ In any public gathering, ‘her part is to hold her tongue, to learn in silence’.

  Even in the 1670s, that courageous Quaker Margaret Fell still felt the need to defend women’s independence of conscience, and their right to play an active part in worship. In a tract called Women’s Speaking Justified, she argued emphatically: ‘Those that speak 11

  minism

  Fe

  1. The scene is viewed with a hint of satire – though is it directed at the earnest speaker or at the inattentive audience? One is actually sleeping, others demonstrate disapproval.

  against . . . the spirit of the Lord speaking in a woman, simply by reason of her sex . . . speak against Christ and his Church, and are of the Seed of the Serpent.’

  The prophet Joel was sometimes cited as an answer to Saint Paul’s prohibition spirit upon all flesh:

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  . . . and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions: And also upon the servants and upon the handmaids in those days will I pour out my spirit. And I will shew wonders in the heavens and in the earth, blood and fire, and pillars of smoke.

  Joel’s ecstatic vision seemed, to many, particularly relevant during the great upheavals caused by the Civil War and the Interregnum; there was a widespread feeling that apocalypse was, indeed, imminent. The sect who styled themselves Fifth Monarchists, for example, believed that the world’s four great secular empires –

 
Babylon, Persia, Greece, and Rome – having passed away, the fifth –

  Christ’s Kingdom and the rule of the saints – was close at hand. In this feverish and volatile climate, prophets, many with Th

  revolutionary ideas, flourished.

  e religiou

  In this area, a woman’s supposed passivity, her receptivity to s roots of feminism

  outside influence, could, ironically, be claimed as an advantage: she might prove more receptive, more open, to becoming a channel for the voice of God. The Belgian prophet Antonia Bourigue, who was widely read in England, produced a disconcerting and double-edged justification: ‘they ought to let God speak by a woman, if it be His Pleasure, since he spoke in former times to a Prophet by a Beast’.

  But the line between prophetic inspiration and lunacy, between possession by God and by the devil, was a narrow one. In 17th-century England, women were still being tried for witchcraft.

  Moreover, female prophets could easily be dismissed as merely crazy. Lady Eleanor Davis, for example, had been claiming divine inspiration for years; early one morning in 1625, she heard ‘a Voice from Heaven, speaking as through a trumpet these words, There is nineteen years and a half to the Judgement Day’. She went on to publish tracts that were interpreted as predicting, amongst other things, the death of Charles I. Her husband burned her books; and she was often the butt of jokes. An anagram of her name – Dame 13

  Eleanor Davis: Never so mad a ladie – was gleefully circulated. But her visionary fervour put her at real risk; even her rank could not protect her from charges of treachery. In 1633, after being charged before the High Commission that ‘she took upon her (which much unbeseemed her sex) not only to interpret the Scriptures . . . but also to be a prophetess’, she was fined and imprisoned in Bedlam.

  But she came into her own during the Interregnum, when many of her prophecies seemed to have been realized. She went on to publish at least 37 tracts between 1641 and her death 11 years later.