Reform feminism

Reform feminism

Whereas Anthony held to a broad notion of individualism, equality and human rights as the foundation for her suffrage activism, in the final three decades of the century other women’s rights advocates began to focus on issues that emphasized the differences between women and men. The reform feminism of this period emphasized women’s supposed moral nature and led to many campaigns aimed at correcting or cleaning up mistakes allegedly made by men. Settlement houses, the peace movement and clean- government campaigns in cities were examples of such reform feminism, as were efforts to change sexual practices through the social purity movement’s attempts to create laws to protect women from men.

The lectures that British activist Josephine Butler presented in response to the Contagious Diseases Act of 1869 (CDA) offer one example of reform feminism and its concern with protecting women. The CDA introduced to Britain a French system to regulate prostitution and police the sexual health of prostitutes. Under the CDA, prostitutes would be examined regularly for signs of venereal disease and, if found to be infected, hospitalized until they were found to be free of disease. Upon release, they

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would continue to be required to submit to regular physical examination. Butler and other anti-CDA activists objected to the CDA on numerous grounds, not least that it reinforced

a sexual double standard, encouraging prostitution by purporting to make illicit sex safe for male patrons and then punishing prostitutes as carriers of venereal disease. Butler claimed that since the act allowed the police to arrest women on suspicion, whether or not they had a record of engaging in prostitution, the CDA put all British women in danger of this assault on their freedom. Perhaps the most effective argument that Butler and other anti-CDA activists made lay in their opposition to the ‘instrumental rape’ of women arrested under the CDA with specula, examples of which the speakers displayed at their lectures. In 1871, Butler and her colleagues presented a petition to Parliament, protesting the CDA. The Contagious Diseases Acts were repealed in 1886.

Similar political action was the goal of English women’s rights advocate Frances Power Cobbe. In ‘Wife-Torture in England’ (1878), Cobbe identified the injustice of women’s position within marriage as the root of domestic violence. Claiming that the practice was at its worst among the labouring classes of the industrial north, Cobbe blamed negative cultural attitudes towards wives, especially the notion of the wife as property of the husband, for the phenomenon. Such attitudes were reflected in legal traditions that classified acts of wives against husbands as petty treason. The seventeenth- century principle that men could use any ‘reasonable’ instrument to chastise their wives, Cobbe noted, had remained a part of English law until 1829. She called for a bill to make divorce easily accessible to women of all classes, to grant custody of children to women and to require husbands to pay for the maintenance of their ex-wives and children.

Before the 1870s, only the temperance movement had offered an arena for mention of domestic abuse, and even there such discussion had been couched in more general rhetoric about the sufferings of the drunkard’s family. After 1874, the temperance movement again opened the way to women’s activism on numerous issues. The Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) was founded in that year in Chicago, and, after Frances Willard became its leader in 1879, the WCTU grew into the premier women’s organization, both nationally and internationally. Under Willard, the temperance movement became a prime example of reform feminism, a women’s movement that focused on sex difference as the main argument for suffrage. Enlisting ideas of home protection and maternalism, the charismatic Willard chose as her motto ‘Do Everything’, and under her leadership the WCTU expanded beyond anti-alcohol campaigns to a much broader agenda, which included departments focused on peace, labour reform, social purity, health and city welfare work. Members could participate at the local, state or national level, and after Willard joined with British temperance leader Lady Henry Somerset to found the World Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WWCTU) in 1884, they could focus on the international level as well. An ardent suffragist, Willard used the notion of home protection to persuade women that they needed the vote in order to defend their homes and families from the evils of drink. Most temperance workers were suffragists, and the WWCTU promoted women’s suffrage efforts throughout the world, especially in New Zealand and Australia, the first two countries to grant women’s suffrage at the national level.

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