Woman in Political Evolution

by Joseph McCabe

Thus the fire of the Renaissance burnt itself out in Italy and Spain within two or three centuries, and its inspiration led to little direct result in France, and still less in England. The history of French culture contains a number of names of brilliant women during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but the records of English literature are relieved by few feminine names until we reach the age of Queen Victoria. But the educative movement started by the Renaissance had great importance. It had provided a brilliant disproof of the prevailing belief that woman was of a lower order of intelligence than man. The position of men like Cornelius Agrippa and Defoe was one of unanswerable common sense. Inequality of culture between the sexes there assuredly was; but to ascribe this to native inequality of resource, instead of to the glaring inequality of education, was sheer folly. Grant woman the opportunity of attaining culture, and then one may sensibly begin to speculate on her capacity. And from every part of Christendom in which the opportunity was granted there came a report of brilliant and scholarly women. The extension of female education in our day has completed that first breach in the medieval superstition of woman’s inferiority.

If the older notion of woman’s incapacity on the speculative side were thus proved to be unsound, it might very well be that the corresponding belief in her practical capacity or political judgment was equally unsound. It might turn out that, when the opportunity for cultivating her political sense was offered, the result would be the same as when opportunities of education were given. In this way the cultural movement that issued from the Renaissance prepared the way for the political struggle. But before this struggle could set in two other profound and far-reaching changes were to take place. The capability of exercising political power is one thing: the right to exercise it another. Until the close of the eighteenth century the second point was hardly raised. Then there opened a period of economic and political change that made the raising of it inevitable.

I will describe here the dawn of the new era in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, and deal with the nineteenth in the next chapter. By the beginning of the eighteenth century the cause of woman had made a substantial advance in many respects. In Germany the advance was almost purely cultural, though the names are not wanting of women who wielded some political influence by the indirect method of influencing rulers or statesmen. In England, again, there were women of culture and women of influence, as all know; but there was a singular retrogression in the political position of women generally. Mrs. Stopes (British Free Women) has so recently and fully discussed the change that I need do no more than summarise it. For two reasons England had promised to be the first theatre of the struggle for political enfranchisement. Not only was it the first country of the modern era to set up parliamentary representation, but it had been the latest of the Teutonic races to retain the old ideal of respect for woman. The Norman Conquest had greatly lowered the prestige of woman, but there were still high offices (such as that of sheriff) that women could inherit and fill. On the other hand, the Norman kings had been forced to grant a permanent representation of the third estate (or Commons) five hundred years before the French Revolution, and during the great Civil War the power of the Commons had enormously increased. The old Anglo-Saxon feeling persisted in the fact that the privilege of electing the borough-representatives was not confined to one sex.

The peculiarity of England’s development is that in its case we seem to have the only exception to the law I formulated—that the position of woman improves with the growth of culture. From the fourteenth to the seventeenth century culture enormously advanced, and the position of woman steadily deteriorated. In the early decades of the seventeenth century we find an Englishwoman, Anne Clifford, struggling against the monarch for the hereditary right to a high office. Women burgesses and landowners could still share the election of parliamentary representatives; but at the beginning of the seventeenth century this right was taken from them, and the sex-disability was imposed. Sir Edward Coke, relying chiefly on St. Paul’s injunctions to women, successfully removed the last trace of the old Teutonic ideal.

Here, at first sight, is an apparent exception to our alliance of feminism and culture; but, in reality, we have a number of modifying circumstances. The long lawlessness of the Middle Ages had made men less and less disposed to see women in office or in public life. The head, even of a manor, needed to be a soldier in those days. Women often proved capable enough of inspiring and directing their followers, but it is quite intelligible that there was a strong tendency towards discouraging or preventing women from holding office in such turbulent times. And with this tendency was joined the even worse influence of the canon law of the Church. When we find a great lawyer like Sir Edward Coke refusing the testimony of women, on grounds of sex, we see at once how this fatal sentiment had been gradually permeating the mind of England. It had put woman in a deplorable legal position—or, rather, a position outside the law—and it inevitably fostered the notion of woman’s inferiority and incapacity. Before the end of the eighteenth century we find legal writers classing women with “infants, idiots, and lunatics” in illustrating “natural incapacity.” In this way the growth of culture came to be, in England, associated with a deterioration in the position of women; but the circumstance does not invalidate our law, as the retrogression was plainly due to such extraneous causes as the permeation of our life with the spirit and letter of the canon law, as Sir Henry Maine has shown.

Under these reactionary influences the women of England seemed, in the eighteenth century, to have entirely lost their birthright, and fallen into line with the women of the world. The eighteenth century is, indeed, a dramatic moment in the whole story of feminism. The earlier power of English women was generally forgotten; the ambition and struggle of women in older civilisations were quite unknown; the fire of the Renaissance had sunk again, leaving only a few women scattered over Europe with a zeal for culture. The world over woman was subordinate and submissive. Then there broke out a series of political eruptions that changed the face of the world, and awakened a fresh ambition in women that would never again be stilled.

The first of these great disturbances was the Declaration of Independence on the part of the American colonies. I have said that certain fundamental changes took place during the nineteenth century that made the raising of the feminist claim quite inevitable, and at the same time made the refusal of the claim more illogical and unjust than it had ever been before. The first and chief of these changes was the democratisation of politics. The mass of the women laboured under no political sex-disability in the eighteenth century, because the mass of the men had no political power at all. In England, under a corrupt and degenerate Parliamentary system, a proportion of the men had a semblance of power; in other countries the mass of the men had not even the shadow of it. France had not summoned its States-General, in which the Third Estate had a nominal representation, since 1614. The world was ruled by castes of priests and nobles, and the higher and wealthier women often had the satisfaction of ruling their rulers. When this system altered, when political power began to spread over the middle class and working men, the woman question would arise spontaneously and command attention.

America inaugurated the change. The Declaration of Independence, in 1776, set up the first modern democracy—the Swiss Cantons were essentially aristocratic until the nineteenth century—and prepared the way for the suffrage controversy. From the very first moment the women of America denounced the injustice of a male electorate. Mercy Otis Warren had fostered the rebellion in her drawing-room, where the leaders often met, and Abigail Smith Adams (wife of the first President) was no less active. They and others demanded the admission of women to the new constitution. While it was being prepared, Mrs. Adams wrote to her husband that “if the position of women was not thoroughly considered they would rebel, and not consider themselves bound by laws that gave them no voice or representation of their interests.” The first assault failed, only two States being willing to grant the justice of the plea. We will return presently to the resumed agitation in America, but must revert to Europe for the second exception, that was to stir the lethargy of women by putting a specific sex-disability on them.

The appeal of Montaigne’s daughter had raised no echo in the France of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The women of the nobility had ample power of the familiar, irregular kind, and the women of the people were no poorer than their husbands in political rights. Then Rousseau set up the ideal of the Rights of Man, and France moved towards the great Revolution. The influence of the philosophers in preparing the Revolution has been exaggerated, and in point of fact most of them were decidedly anti-feminist. Voltaire and Montesquieu slighted their demands and capacities. Rousseau contrived to reconcile a doctrine of the equality of human beings with the old-fashioned ideal of woman’s place. But they, at least, stimulated thought and encouraged education in women, and women learned to correct their logic. Then came the news of the struggle in America, and the feeling against England made it extraordinarily popular. Ladies wore “American Independence hats,” and discussed deep constitutional questions during the recently imported function of tea. Nobles volunteered for service, and brought back stirring stories of democracy.

The American episode had nearly lost interest when the Revolution broke out. There can be no doubt that it was not without permanent influence, but the more demonstrative zeal had been manifested by the upper class, and the form that democracy now took in their own country very quickly extinguished it. Of the first French Revolution in itself I need say little. The later and less picturesque Revolutions were more permanently effective. Freeman has observed, however, that the face of Europe was changed for ever by the first Revolution, and it is well taken as the pyrotechnic inauguration of the modern era.