WOMEN IN MODERN HISTORY:



WOMEN IN MODERN HISTORY:

COMMON MISCONCEPTIONS AND HOW WOMEN HAVE ATTEMPTED TO SURPASS THEM

COMMON ATTITUDES OF MEN TOWARDS WOMEN

MISOGYNY­ literally hatred, or distrust of women. The concept is as old as the Greeks who coined the term and, no doubt, a good deal older.

RELIGIO MEDICI­ a book published in 1642 that expounded Thomas Browne’s attitudes.

“The whole world was made for man; but the twelfth part of man for women: man is the whole world, and the breath of God; women the rib and crooked piece of man.”

*NOTE­ equality among the sexes continued to appear an eccentric notion for a long time after 1405. Bearly audible murmurs in favor female emancipation are scarcely to be heard until the eighteenth century;explicit arguments in favor of it only surface in the nineteenth century. The Enlightenment did revive certain Renaissance ideas, not least that of female access to wisdom and virtue. Of greater importance was the fact that among the upper classes, influence and status depended more on birth (and wealth) than on sex.

WOMEN AS PROMOTERS OF EQUALITY AND THEIR NEMESES

LOUIS SEBASTIAN MERCIER ­ published in 1770 a utopian novel about what Paris life would be like in the year 2440:

The Bastille has been replaced by a temple dedicated to Clemency; religion is rational, and the Supreme Being is worshipped in a temple roofed with glass, through which His creation can be appreciated better than through stone arches; politics and economics are rational and just, with no one idle and no one exploited; libraries, public and private, have been expurgated, corrupted or worldly works burnt, history banned altogether. Marriage customs, too, have altered, with love the only basis for a union, dowries abolished and divorce legalized. But the fate of the women has scarcely improved. Mercier is sentimental, moralizing, and pretentious. His portrait of women in an ideal age reflects his intellectual standards, which would be those of several generations.

OLYMPE DE GOUGES­ wrote a Declaration of the Rights of Women in 1791. It came to nothing. Its author died under the guillotine two years later, not for her feminism, but for having taken the defense of the king, Louis XVI. Following are the first three articles of the preamble of the Declaration of the Rights of Women:

ARTICLE I­ Woman is born free and lives equal to man in her rights. Social distinctions can be based only on the common utility.

ARTICLE II­ The purpose of any political association is the conservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of women and man; these rights are liberty, property, security, and especially resistance to oppression.

ARTICLE III­ The principle of all sovereignty rests essentially with the nation, which is nothing but the union of women and man; no body and no individual can exercise any authority which does not come expressly from it [the nation].

PETITION DES FEMMES DU TIERS­ written in 1789 by the women of the French Revolution.

“ We ask for Enlightenment and jobs, not to usurp man’s authority, but to rise in their esteem and to have the means of living safe from misfortune.”

EMMANUEL ABBAYE DE SIEYES­ spokesman for the third estate during the French Revolution wrote:

“Woman, at least as things now stand, children, foreigners, in short those who contribute nothing to the public establishment, should have no direct influence on the government.”

MARY WOLLENSTONECRAFT wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Women in 1792.

“Women are told from their infancy, and taught by the example of their mothers, that a little knowledge of human weakness, justly termed cunning, softness of temper, outward obedience, and a scrupulous attention to a puerile kind of propriety, will obtain for them the protection of man, and should they be beautiful, everything else is needless, for, at least, twenty years of their lives. Youth is the season for love in both sexes, but in those days of thoughtless enjoyment provision should be made for the more important years of life, when reflection takes the place of sensation... The woman who has been taught to please will soon find that her charms are oblique sunbeams, and that they cannot have much effect on her husband’s heart when they are seen every day, when the summer is passed and gone. Will she then have sufficient native energy to look into herself for comfort, and cultivate her dormant faculties?”

A. WALKER­ wrote in 1840 Woman Physiologically Considered as to Mind, Morals, Marriage, Matrimonial Slavery, Infidelity, Divorce.

“It is evident that the man, possessing reasoning faculties, muscular power, and courage to employ it, is qualified of being a protector; the woman, being little capable of reasoning, feeble, and timid, requires protection. Under such circumstances, the man naturally governs; the woman as naturally obeys... It would be as rational to contend for man’s rights to bear children, as it is to argue for woman’s participation in philosophy or legislation.”

JOHN STUART MILL ­ wrote The Subjection of Women in 1869.

“...We may safely assert that the knowledge which men can acquire of women, even as they have been and are, without reference to what they might be, is wretchedly imperfect and superficial, and always will be so, until women themselves have told all that they have to tell.”

CHARLES DARWIN­ confirmed the conclusion that the on average the female inclines to passivity, the males to activity. In his view, males are stronger, handsomer, or more emotional, because ancestral forms happened to become so in a slight degree. In other words, the reward of breeding success gradually perpetuated and perfected a casual advantage.

SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR­ wrote The Second Sex in 1949. In it she traced the role of women in societies that kept them dependent, married, pregnant, tied to children, home and men.

“Men control society, condemn women to secondary status, and prevent them from becoming autonomous individuals capable of claiming equality with them.”

LETTER ON WOMEN­ written by the Catholic Church in 1988. The Church remains one of the great institutions with a say on women’s image and self­image.

“Women not only continue to carry the bulk of everyday work in the parish; they are also renewing the church’s traditions of feminine spirituality as a source of inspiration and growth. Women of scripture and recognized saints are important in their personal and spiritual renewal.”

KEY CONCEPTS (You fill in the blanks)

1. Role of women in revolution

1789—Women march on Versailles to persuade King and Queen to accept the Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen and to demand bread

1917—A women’s protest march in St. Petersburg against the scarcity of bread and its resulting high price is joined by soldiers and workers and becomes the spark that sets of the Russian Revolution (abdication of the Tsar Nicholas II)

2. Impact of Protestant Reformation on women

Women’s roles are domestic but they now are taught to read and write as the reading and interpretation of Bible is an individual matter. Man rule the roost, but women are given increasingly greater responsibility for its management.

3. Impact of Napoleon on French women

Napoleon is a military man. He is conservative. He needs to stabilize France after the Revolution and Terror. He undoes any changes in women’s legal rights authorized under the rule of Robespierre (having mostly to do with right to inherit property) and puts women back in what is now seen as their traditional role.

4. Impact of Industrial Revolution on women

In the first industrial revolution, as families move to city, traditional role sharing among men and women of the agrarian class running the home, providing, producing and raising children are disrupted. Urbanization turns women into members of the new working class. They are wage earners. The nineteenth century reform acts, especially in Britain, will shorten their working hours and limit the types of labor they can perform.

In the second industrial revolution which concentrates on heavy industry thought not to be appropriate for women, women will find roles in the corporate bureaucracy as secretaries. Department stores will hire them as shop girls. Schools, now that there is compulsory education, will provide them with opportunities as teachers. At the same time, technology is beginning to make homemaking easier, although it still is a while to the home of the dishwasher, washing machine, and self-cleaning oven among other labor lightening inventions.

5. Women and the vote (suffrage)

Think Mary Poppins. The women’s suffrage movement was a movement of middle class women. They were educated. And if married and had children, they could afford nannies to watch them as they went off to protest. Men protested that politics was not a women’s world. It was too rough and tumble. Women, hysterical though they may be, provided ballast in stormy seas BECAUSE they were not directly involved. These arguments proved to hold no water (get the joke?) and by the end of WWI, women in Britain got the vote. Continental Europe, with the exception of Spain, Switzerland and a few other unenlightened nations, soon follow suit.

6. War and women

While there have been notable women warriors,war has been an engine of change—for better and worse—for women.

The Thirty Years War contributed to the “witch hunts” of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Certain women – widows; women who looked, spoke, acted differently; wealthy, land owning widows; widows who lived on the outskirts of society; midwives who were able to bring the pains of labor under control and bring children successfully into the world and were seen as competitors to less competent physicians—were persecuted as witches.

The Crimean War (1850’s) saw women as nurses thanks to the example set by Florence Nightingale.

World War I saw women as nurses. It also saw a significant number of women enter the work force in jobs traditionally held by men. Women went to the front as nurses.

The inter-war period saw women see themselves in a new light. The War had changed everything included how women looked and dressed. They were also able to enter new professions – lower executive positions, journalism, law, medicine—although at low levels. They got the vote. The Great Depression was more favorable to women’s employment than men’s, given that working men were more likely to be engaged in heavy industry.

World War II saw women everywhere: riveting airplanes in factories, nursing on the front, cracking codes in secret locations. After the war, women were urged to return to the home to make room for returning soldiers and bolster the birth rate that had declined since WWI. Thanks, or no-thanks, o voices such as Simone deBeauvoir who saw women as society’s “Other” and felt it was time they stopped depending on men for their “liberation” a new form of feminism was born. Modern feminism (the post war term for the women’s rights movement) says that women can get their way in the world without the permission of men. They can break through the “glass ceiling” on their own. DeBeauvoir’s message resonated with women throughout the Western world, particularly in the US and Great Britain where women went on the march and in march cases emerged victorious. Note, post-War feminism, like its suffrage predecessor was a middle class movement. Working class women have always worked and have always had to wear multiple hats. What has changed is the nature of the nuclear family. The grand-parents, traditional “baby sitters” are now retired to warmer climes (there are European equivalents of Florida and Arizona). This has meant greater reliance on other forms of childcare. In some European states, this is provided by the state. The impact on the child of this extra-parental, grand-parental care has still to be determined. The next chapter on feminism is still being written.

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