Socialism, labour, evangelical reform and public speaking
Socialism, labour, evangelical reform and public speaking
In socialism women could find a promise of equal treatment unavailable in republican womanhood. CHARLES FOURIER decried the revolutionaries in France for failing to carry new divorce laws to the logical conclusion of eliminating marriage altogether, and
he is often noted for having declared in Theory of the Four Movements (1808) that one could determine a society’s level of progress by looking to the condition of its women. His plan to treat all members of his phalanxes as individuals promised women economic autonomy denied them under either the Napoleonic Code or the Common Law. Fourier shared his disdain for marriage with ROBERT OWEN; both saw it as a system in which women prostituted themselves, exchanging sex for financial support. In Owen’s New Moral World, as in Fourier’s Harmony, co-operative housekeeping would free women from the drudgery of house-work, and communal nurseries would assume the burdens of childcare. Women could choose for themselves the work they found most fulfilling. Similarly, the Saint-Simonians encouraged recognition and cultivation of the talents of individuals, including women in their movement’s leadership hierarchies.
Women joined enthusiastically in the Owenite, Fourierist and Saint-Simonian movements, engaging in propaganda, lecturing, communities, co-operatives and trade unions. And in many instances, these activities brought them face to face with the limits of socialist egalitarianism. In Owenite and Fourierist communities, women often found their workloads increased rather than decreased, as they replaced caring for the needs of their families with seeing to the needs of their entire communities. Sexual divisions entered the Saint-Simonian movement when Prosper Enfantin ascended as its leader in 1831. Under Enfantin, Saint-Simonian ideas about women’s rights narrowed to sexual liberation and notions that men should be responsible for women’s emancipation.
All three socialist movements suffered from gender assumptions they shared with the dominant cultures they sought to replace. The individualism at the core of Owen’s and Fourier’s theories shared with Rousseauian republicanism an underlying masculine ideal of the individual. In contrast, the Saint-Simonians saw the individual as a dual being with
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masculine and feminine halves, epitomized by the heterosexual couple. They therefore endorsed complementarity between women and men, but notions of gender difference inherent in such complementarity led them back to a paternalism that alienated many women from their movement.
Women’s participation in socialist movements coincided with expansion of their opportunities for economic autonomy. By the second quarter of the nineteenth century, economic changes were creating new employment opportunities for white women of the emerging working and middle classes. Factory labour or needlework offered alternatives to domestic service for working-class women, and teaching became the first profession open to middle-class women. Such opportunities ran counter to prevailing notions of women’s dependence on men and to definitions of masculinity that were founded on such notion. Cultural anxieties—among the emerging middle class about the amoral nature of
a market-place in which self-interest was necessary for success, among the emerging working class about men’s status as providers and heads of household, and among free people of colour about men’s authority in the face of racial discrimination—led to distinctive, class- and race-inflected gender ideologies that defined women’s place as in the home.
White working men’s dilemma provides perhaps the best-known example. At the same time that demand for cheap labour increased women’s employment opportunities, entrepreneurialism threatened the status of skilled working men, who sought to hold onto their artisan identity and craft privileges by opposing women’s employment.
Working men argued that women’s wage labour drove down their own wages, making it impossible for them to support their families. Such arguments ignored the fact that, in most industries, women and men already worked in a gender-segregated labour market. Tailoring was one of the only trades in which women’s cheapened labour threatened men’s employment. Men continued to dominate in construction and mechanical trades for the next 150 years. Nevertheless in both Britain and the USA, trade unions promoted a new working-class domestic ideal associated with a so-called family wage, which would enable male breadwinners to become their families’ sole support. In their efforts to promote the interests of working men as heads of household, trade unionists presumed that all women lived in male-headed households, and new working-class gender ideologies thereby overlooked the situations of female heads of household, widows and single women. Similarly, middle-class domestic ideals belied families’ reliance on the paid labour of women to fund education that would ensure sons’ upward mobility and white-collar careers. Free black women encountered even more complex pressures, as the stability of their incomes made them primary wage earners in many male-headed households and their communities often expected their so-called feminine behaviour to counter the racial assumptions of the white majority.
In the USA, tensions were also mounting over the question of women’s right to speak in public before mixed or ‘promiscuous’ audiences of women and men in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. Women had spoken in religious settings, especially in prayer groups and Quaker meetings for at least the past 200 years. The first to do so outside of religious contexts was Scottish Owenite and freethinker Frances Wright. After the collapse of Nashoba, her Owenite community in Tennessee, Wright moved to New York City, where she worked with Robert Dale Owen to promote workers’ rights and free thought. Wright’s out-spoken advocacy of anti-slavery, free thought and marriage
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reform turned her name into a metaphor for the impropriety of women’s public speaking by the end of the 1820s.
Similar criticism descended on Maria Stewart when she tried to inspire the women and men of her free black community in Boston in the early 1830s. Stewart, the first US-born woman to speak before mixed audiences of women and men, was also a friend of David Walker, militant advocate of racial justice and author of David Walker’s Appeal…to the Coloured Citizens of the World (1829). After Walker’s untimely death, Stewart felt a religious calling to continue his work. She encountered sympathetic audiences when she spoke of the injustices and limited opportunities faced by free black women. When, however, Stewart echoed Walker’s Appeal and called on black men to act as men and defend their rights and those of black women, she violated the standards of her community. Her audacity in publicly impugning the masculinity of black men resulted in such harsh denunciations that Stewart gave up public speaking in 1833, less than two years after she had begun.
Concerns about women’s economic independence, their public speaking and the notion of women’s rights in general also came into open conflict with emerging gender ideologies when textile workers went on strike in Lowell, Massachusetts, in the mid- 1830s. As they struggled to define their position, the strikers saw themselves less as dependent women than as part of the republican tradition of independent workers. They referred to themselves as ‘daughters of freemen’, invoking the memory of the American Revolution and claiming equality with mill owners and managers. In their references to freemen, they also invoked the working man’s claim to property in his labour, implying that mill owners and managers threatened their competency, the means of support on which freemen based their voting rights. Thus, far from seeing themselves as dependent members of male-headed households, the striking mill workers made their claims in their own right, as self-supporting workers. But local newspaper editors saw them differently, as women stepping out of their place. The editors compared the mill operatives to Mary Wollstonecraft, recalling not only her work as the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman but also her embrace of sexual freedom, including the fact that she had borne a child outside of marriage. The editors thus not only suggested that the mill workers advocated inappropriately radical ideas about women’s rights, but they also impugned the operatives’ sexual respectability. The latter became an increasingly common tactic used against women who dared to enter the public sphere.
Anti-egalitarianism was as evident in political reforms as in the class- and race-based gender ideologies encountered by Wright, Stewart and the Lowell strikers. Neither the July Revolution in France nor the English Reform Bill of 1832 extended the franchise to women. In the USA, political reforms resulted in the extension of the franchise to most white men and the elimination of most property qualifications for voting. At the same time, most free black men lost the franchise, and women of all classes and races went unmentioned. And the aims of the Chartist movement in England tended more to emphasize the interests of male heads of household than to engage with questions of women’s rights.
Along with the experiences of socialists, working women and women who spoke in public, another strong source of both separate-spheres ideology and claims for women’s rights lay in evangelical religion and reform. Whereas certain biblical interpretations led ministers to promote subordinate roles for women in their churches and families,
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evangelicalism also emphasized the duty of the individual believer to lead others to salvation. And in combination with women’s longstanding responsibility for such benevolent activity as sewing societies, orphan asylums and relief for indigent women, evangelical teachings ushered many white women of the emerging middle class into intensified efforts on behalf of their society’s most downtrodden.
Such evangelical ideas led some anti-slavery activists to conclude that the only moral course lay beyond gradualism, in the immediate abolition of slavery. British anti-slavery advocate Elizabeth Heyrick introduced this concept in Immediate, not Gradual Abolition (1824), and US editor William Lloyd Garrison took it up when he began to publish his Liberator in 1831. In her Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans (1833), US author Lydia Maria Child presented a comprehensive picture of US laws on slavery, discussing emancipation movements in the rest of the Western hemisphere, and noting the complicity of northern capital in the southern institution. Child also wrote of the sexual exploitation faced by enslaved women, touching on a subject that respectable white women were not to discuss, according to middle-class gender ideals. Her colleague, Maria Weston Chapman, argued in the Liberator that women had a special obligation to support the anti-slavery cause. White women did join the cause in large numbers, gathering signatures on petitions to Congress and raising money for lecturers through anti-slavery fairs.
Compassion for women suffering sexual exploitation also contributed to the movement for moral reform, in which white evangelical women sought to mobilize their alleged moral superiority to attack the double standard of sexual morality, hoping to eliminate both prostitution and the demand for it. Employing only women as agents and staff, Magdalene societies focused on the sexual vulnerability of young white women who left their fathers’ homes to earn their living in mill towns and growing cities. Numerous local moral reform societies spread throughout the northeastern USA in the 1830s, located in urban and rural communities that found themselves most affected by economic change. Agents of the societies visited brothels to reform prostitutes and to collect the names of patrons, which they then threatened to publish in such periodicals as the Advocate of Moral Reform. The moral reform movement attacked masculine immorality with unprecedented militancy, but the movement faded after the early 1840s, as clergymen urged moral reformers to refocus their efforts on moral education within the home.
But the clergy could not control all of the women who used religious arguments to defend their public activism. When Sarah and Angelina Grimke, members of a slaveholding family from South Carolina and converts to the Society of Friends, toured New England communities as agents of the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1837, Congregational ministers responded by issuing a pastoral letter in which they warned against women who forgot their place. The ministers declared that women’s power lay in their dependence and that they should restrict themselves to praying and running Sabbath schools. Further, the ministers denounced women who presumed to present themselves as lecturers or teachers and who spoke about such sexually suggestive material as the particular burdens of enslaved women. Sarah Grimke, who had proven her theological prowess in her Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Women (1837), responded that women should look only to God when they undertook public reforms and concern themselves only with whether they did His will. Grimke’s view was grounded in
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beliefs regarding women’s ministry within the Society of Friends. She believed that women were responsible for their own actions, and she did not think they were required to heed the chiding of ministers who sought to impose restrictions on their discharge of their moral obligations.