Little direct encouragement was given to women by the revolutionaries. A few men like Sieyès and Condorcet, who had founded a Lyceum for women in 1786, recognised that women were human beings when they spoke of “the Rights of Man.” The majority, led by Mirabeau, and afterwards by Danton, refused to listen to the appeal of women like Mme. Condorcet; even revolutionary women like Mme. Roland agreed with them. Hence the share that women took in the Revolution cannot occupy a place of any prominence in such a study as this. Their campaign for the recognition of their rights came to naught. They showered petitions on the National Assembly, founded political clubs all over the country, and published a journal, L’Observateur féminin. But the Jacobins were inexorable, and they guillotined the most fiery of their speakers, Olympe de Gouges (reputed daughter of Louis XIV.), for her fearless opposition. And, eventually, the three great waves washed over the work of the Revolution and obliterated its traces. The Directory suppressed Jacobinism, Napoleon superseded Directorism, and Metternich and Wellington annihilated Napoleonism. A group of statesmen, sitting round a table in the Foreign Office at Vienna, set up again the broken model of aristocratic Europe, and democracy was unceremoniously buried.
But political evolution had set definitively in the direction of democracy, and in another generation it would rise again. With this development, which of itself sufficed to lay bare the foundations of political power and press forward the woman question, was associated an industrial development that made an equally fatal breach in the old order. How these and other far-reaching changes have irresistibly forced on us the feminist controversy of our time will be shown in the next chapter.
CHAPTER VIII.
THE STRUGGLE IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
In ancient Greece there was a certain symbolic ceremony of a very picturesque character in connection with one of the great festivals. A lighted torch was to be conveyed to a distant altar, and a series of horsemen had to discharge the ceremony. Along the line of frantic riders, from the exhausted hand of one horseman to the fresh grasp of the next, the fiery symbol was handed, until the last of the procession placed it in triumph on the destined altar.
Our story of the evolution of woman’s position recalls this old ceremony. For nearly three thousand years, at least, the torch has passed from rider to rider, and the altar is in sight. The struggle of the later Egyptian women re-appears in Greece, crosses the sea to Italy, is raised again in the revival of ancient culture, passes on to France, when the Italian States decay, and reaches at length the vigorous hands of England, Germany, and the United States. In one respect, however, the parallel fails. It is true that the cause has moved onward through the ages, but there have been years, even centuries, when the torch was almost, if not quite, extinct. There have been times when the distant altar seemed to be forgotten, and women sank back into uncomplaining subjection. Such a period was the appalling stretch between the fifth and the twelfth centuries, between the murder of Hypatia and the living death of Heloise. The eighteenth century, compared with the promise of its predecessors, is another such period, in most countries. The first quarter of the nineteenth century is another, and the last. Then the torch flames out again, and, for reasons I will give presently, can never more be extinguished until it is laid on the altar.
After the fall of Napoleon in 1815 Europe closed the mouth of the pit, as it thought, and dreamed soft dreams of continued despotism. The Holy Alliance had a sharp ear for murmurs of rebellion against any received ideal, and enforced submission everywhere at the point of the bayonet. It would be futile for women to chafe at their bonds in that world. Happily, the world was wider than the sphere of the Bourbons, the Hapsburgs, and the Pope. England contemplated their “white terror” with instinctive resentment; though England had shuddered at Jacobinism, and in the main was more disposed than before for coercion and subjection. But the United States maintained its theoretic scorn of despotism, and little British colonies which dotted the blue southern ocean promised the same spirit of independence.
It was in the United States that the modern struggle for the enfranchisement of nations began. The appeals of Mercy Warren and Abigail Adams were almost forgotten, and the masculine ideal was firmly incorporated in the American constitution, when a young Scotchwoman, Frances Wright, used the comparative freedom of the country to start a brilliant and fiery campaign for the rights of women. How she was presently joined by the talented Polish Jewess, Ernestine Rose, and the devoted Quaker women, Abby Kelly and the Sisters Grimke; how the democratic Americans jeered and howled at them, and the clergy branded them, and the little company grew larger and larger—all this may be read in Mrs. Cady Stanton’s History. By 1837 the great American poet, Whittier, took up arms for them against their clerical opponents. They had proved their capacity for public life by their share in the anti-slavery campaign. They did not take the view of Carlyle.
In the meantime the second Revolution had taken place in France, and the second democratic wave passed over Europe. Its chief expression was the passing of the great Reform Bill in England in 1832. With singular logic the men who had prepared forests of pikes to withstand Wellington, the men who had met in gatherings of 200,000 to sing “Hail, dawn of liberty,” and threaten to march on London, now turned on their less militant women and expressly excluded them from political life. James Mill had laid it down in 1825 (Essay on Government) that women’s interests were bound up with men’s, and so Radicals could justly exclude them from the franchise. In their resentment of the notion that a superior class should dictate to them how they were to be represented, the men of England had sacked cathedrals, challenged the troops, and trampled on the portrait of the king; then they turned about and dictated to the women, who would not do these things, how they were to be represented. The Reform Bill made the electorate exclusively male for the first time in the history of England; and the Reformed Parliament went on, in 1835, to exclude women from the enfranchising clauses of the Municipal Corporations’ Act.
I have already described the influences that had for centuries been undermining the older English ideal, but this open violation of it, at the very time when streams of oratory were flowing all over England on liberty and the value of representation, naturally led to a reaction. The agitation for the Reform Bill had itself re-awakened in women the desire of sharing in public life, and the injustice shown by the reformers would not allay it. There were not wanting gospels for the new cause. Mary Wollstonecraft had published a Vindication of the Rights of Women in the height of the French Revolution (1792), and a political writer who had great influence with Liberals, William Godwin, had supported her. William Thompson had issued a spirited reply to James Mill in 1825. Robert Owen, who had immense influence in England by 1840, adopted the same view. Women also joined in the Corn Law Agitation, and some of its chief leaders acknowledged that they proved their capacity for public life. Cobden and Villiers favoured their claim. W. J. Fox, one of the most brilliant of the Free Traders, minister of South Place Chapel (London), warmly espoused their cause. About 1850 pamphlets and magazine articles began to appear, advocating the enfranchisement of women.[12]
By the middle of the century there was a strong feeling in England and the United States for the enfranchisement of women. The number of agitators was very small, but the life of the world was now developing rapidly, and the new tendencies were putting an entirely new complexion on the question of woman’s position in the State. It will be convenient to note these tendencies here—warning the reader that they increase in later decades—in order to understand the real logical strength of the modern movement.