Significant Sisters Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Margaret Forster

  Feminist progress in context of general changes

  List of Illustrations

  Dedication

  Title Page

  INTRODUCTION

  1 LAW

  Caroline Norton 1808–1877

  2 THE PROFESSIONS

  Elizabeth Blackwell 1821–1910

  3 EMPLOYMENT

  Florence Nightingale 1820–1910

  4 EDUCATION

  Emily Davies 1830–1921

  5 SEXUAL MORALITY

  Josephine Butler 1828–1906

  6 POLITICS

  Elizabeth Cady Stanton 1815–1902

  7 BIRTH CONTROL

  Margaret Sanger 1879–1966

  8 IDEOLOGY

  Emma Goldman 1869–1940

  CONCLUSION

  Appendix

  Notes

  Index

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Significant Sisters traces the lives of eight women, each of whom pioneered vital changes in the spheres of law, education, the professions, morals or politics: the first woman doctor, the pioneer of birth control, a radical journalist, and suffragists. Each forged her own particular brand of feminism, yet all fought bravely to make real, lasting differences to women’s lives, and make us redefine our own notions of feminism today.

  About the Author

  Margaret Forster is the author of many successful novels, including Lady’s Maid, The Memory Box, Diary of an Ordinary Woman, two memoirs, Hidden Lives and Precious Lives, and several acclaimed biographies, including Good Wives.

  ALSO BY MARGARET FORSTER

  Fiction

  Dame’s Delight

  Georgy Girl

  The Bogeyman

  The Travels of Maudie Tipstaff

  The Park

  Miss Owen-Owen is At Home

  Fenella Phizackerley

  Mr Bone’s Retreat

  The Seduction of Mrs Pendlebury

  The Battle for Christabel

  The Bride of Lowther Fell

  Marital Rites

  Private Papers

  Have the Men Had Enough?

  Lady’s Maid

  Mothers’ Boys

  Shadow Baby

  The Memory Box

  Mother Can You Hear Me?

  Diary of an Ordinary Woman

  Non-Fiction

  The Rash Adventurer: The Rise and Fall of Charles Edward Stuart

  William Makepeace Thackeray: Memoirs of a Victorian Gentleman

  Elizabeth Barrett Browning

  Daphne du Maurier

  Hidden Lives

  Rich Deserts & Captain’s Thin: A Family & Their Times 1831–1931

  Precious Lives

  Good Wives: Mary, Fanny, Jennie & Me 1845–2001

  Poetry

  Selected Poems of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Editor)

  Feminist progress in context of general changes

  Specifically feminist issues are indicated thus; titles in italic. Unless otherwise stated all political acts, laws, unions, etc., are for Great Britain: it is not possible on a chart of this limited scope and size to list all the important counterparts in America because of the way progress developed from State to State. Only major events mentioned in the text are shown.

  List of Illustrations

  1. Caroline Norton

  2. Elizabeth Blackwell

  3. Florence Nightingale

  4. Emily Davies

  5. Josephine Butler

  6. Elizabeth Cady Stanton

  7. Margaret Sanger

  8. Emma Goldman

  for

  ALISON HOOPER

  who has fought the feminist fight

  throughout her life

  Significant Sisters

  The Grassroots of Active Feminism 1839–1939

  Margaret Forster

  Introduction

  FEMINISM IS FULL of riddles. One of the most intriguing is why it has not attracted an enormous rank-and-file following among women themselves, why it is still as necessary as it was in the nineteenth century to have to ask a woman if she is a feminist. The plain truth is that not only do large numbers of women feel apathetic but many more actively hate feminism. This is because right from the invention of the word1 it has been both misrepresented and misunderstood. Undeniably, this was the fault of men, because men controlled the outlets for the spreading of new ideas, but it was also the fault of the feminists themselves. They were too honest, expressed too openly and fully their fears and worries and, most of all, their resentments. The result was that feminism became frightening in its implications.

  But in fact there is nothing to be frightened of. Feminism, both for men and women, is the most attractive and peaceful of doctrines. It is quite wrong to see it as an aggressive, destructive movement which aims at making neuters of us all. It is not really one movement at all. Its history, which has been until recently greatly neglected and is still far too little known, shows clearly enough that there has been no one movement progressing steadily throughout the decades. Sometimes feminists did indeed group together to achieve a particular goal but these groupings were always episodic. When that goal was achieved, the “movement” disappeared. Feminism, because of this, is not like a political belief. You cannot join the feminist party, for example, as you can join the Labour party (although you can join all kinds of women’s organizations) and you cannot say you are a feminist in the same way that you can say you are a Socialist. Nor is feminism a religion, like Christianity. There is no church, no visible structure. You cannot say you are a feminist in the same way you can say you are a Catholic or a Methodist. The only way to clear away the utter confusion surrounding the meaning of feminism is to start regarding it first of all as a kind of philosophy, as a way of looking at and thinking of life for all women.

  It will immediately be obvious that this produces a problem: life for one woman is not the same as life for another. Even further, life in one place for one woman is not the same as that life in another place. An English feminist was never the same (and still is not) as a German feminist. All feminists think they want “self-fulfilment” for women but since that “self” changes dramatically from country to country, from class to class, and from age to age, this ambition is almost meaningless. What is “self-fulfilment”? Are there certain fundamental principles upon which all feminists can agree regardless of social, cultural and political differences? The history of feminism shows that there are but that it took a long time for them to be recognized. The trouble was that feminists did not know where to begin. They had the greatest difficulty in deciding why woman’s lot was so much worse than man’s even before they moved on to deciding how it could be improved. Long before active feminism arose, the theorists debated the situation and came to different conclusions. Some thought education was the key: women were not educated for anything but subordination. Change their education and their expectations in life would change. Others thought it was a matter of biology, that nature was the real enemy, and these were the most depressed theorists of all, for what could be done about nature? But while all this intellectual debate was going on, while the tracts and pamphlets on the condition of woman were appearing throughout the eighteenth century, the first stirrings of active feminism were being felt. At last, at the start of the nineteenth century, feminists were beginning to do something to change how women were obliged to live their lives instead of merely fretting about their position. Why feminism became active when it did is still not entirely explained (the main theories lay heavy emphasis on economic changes) but wh
at can be very precisely explained is how this activity proceeded.

  The history of feminism has appeared to be one of stops and starts. It seems to resemble a sequence of parallel lines, with all the different strands forging ahead, often quite separate from each other. The element of separation was to some extent deliberate.2 It was considered dangerous to one cause to mix it with another and so Emily Davies kept out of politics until her educational aims were achieved and Josephine Butler dropped out of the front line in the educational field in case it became tarnished by her prominence in the battle to get the Contagious Diseases Acts repealed. Because of this concentration on keeping different issues “clean” the leaders became even more significant than they would otherwise have been. If, early in its history, feminism had become one international movement fighting on many fronts but with some central control, then the cult of personality would never have been so strong. As it was, all the different causes were firmly linked with particular women, each an inspiring figurehead looked up to and relied upon and thought of as absolutely indispensable, however efficient and hardworking the committees and organizations behind her. Feminism seems to have needed this kind of identification with heroines and the heroines themselves had no illusions about their importance. Josephine Butler reckoned, without false modesty, that if she had not led her particular cause nobody else would have done so and, for all the sterling worth of all those others equally interested, it would have foundered. Florence Nightingale despaired at her own uniqueness. Nobody, she vowed, would have undertaken what she undertook and she despised her own sex for its cravenness. She simply could not contemplate dying because she was so vital. Elizabeth Blackwell wasted no time wondering why no one had gone before her. It was obvious to her that the way was too hard and nobody but she could have blazed that particular trail at that particular time. Caroline Norton loathed putting herself through what she had to endure and swore nobody else would have had the guts. Emily Davies, driven to distraction by the sheer tediousness of her task, stuck to it because, she said bitterly, nobody else would have the patience. And so on. Each woman saw herself and was seen by others as extremely significant and their claims need hardly be disputed.

  But even more significant for feminist history than the actual leadership these women gave was their approach to feminism. All their approaches were different, all made their own way, none of them would have agreed that their goal was the same. Four of the women in this book claimed at one time or another in their lives they were not feminists (Caroline Norton, Florence Nightingale, Elizabeth Blackwell, Josephine Butler); one (Emily Davies) acknowledged only a limited feminism; only three (Margaret Sanger, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Emma Goldman) were proudly feminist. They all meant different things by the word. Each had her own particular brand of feminism even if it went by other names and each forged it through direct personal experience. None of them was an abstract theorist. They were all activists brought to active feminism by the way they lived their lives. In every case they were reacting violently against particular circumstances. Neither class nor money made the kind of difference it might be expected to make: being a woman transcended other differences. Caroline Norton, brought up at Hampton Court, raged against her lot as a woman just as much as Margaret Sanger, brought up in poverty in a New York suburb. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, daughter of a wealthy judge, felt as humiliated by her sex as Emma Goldman, daughter of a poor Jewish-Russian inn-keeper. As women, they had things in common from which they suffered and which they wanted to change for all women.

  Yet it is another aspect of the history of feminism that solidarity among women, in spite of their common experience, was never really embraced. The concept of solidarity has indeed caused more trouble than any other single factor. What made so many women think they were not feminists was their hostility to the idea of being against men. If feminism meant being anti-male then they had no time for it. Not a single one of the women in this book believed in uniting against the male sex. None of them saw men as monsters, only some men; none of them wanted a society without men, even if it were possible, nor a society in which men were made the subordinates as women had been for so long. All of them wanted better relationships with men, all of them wanted a better deal for both sexes. It panicked Elizabeth Blackwell to hear that men had been excluded from some meetings about suffrage in America. She thought it a dangerous precedent and cautioned her sister to have nothing to do with it. Josephine Butler preferred mixed audiences even when she was talking about the most intimate details of prostitution. She thought men as involved in and as concerned with reform as women. Elizabeth Cady Stanton said she was constantly reprimanded for being too friendly towards men and Margaret Sanger, although she wanted birth control in female hands, repudiated the notion of keeping male doctors out of the movement. Yet, unfairly, the image of a feminist as a man-hater grew and with it the belief that men and men alone were at the root of all women’s troubles.

  Although all the women in this book recognized the drift of this appealing argument it was only Emma Goldman who saw the real damage being done. She prophesied in 1910 that, if feminism continued as it was doing, very soon there would be no man worthy of modern woman. Women, she said, were making themselves unliveable with. They were suppressing and even forgetting one half of their natures, the half that wanted to love and be loved, the half that was “feminine” in a way they were being taught to despise as feeble. Women were becoming terrified of acknowledging their own desires. Working in a New York beauty parlour, Emma Goldman pitied the new “emancipated” woman. She thought her life was awful. Instead of being a drudge at home she was a drudge at work and home. She was so proud of her “independence” that she had sacrificed her happiness. Women, Emma Goldman decided, needed to be emancipated from emancipation. Certainly they must attack institutions like marriage which made women slaves in the form in which it existed but they should not attack love itself. She even dared to suggest that women might need love more than men and in a different degree from men. Love seemed to complicate a woman’s life so much more than a man’s, almost as though its very presence produced a chemical change. Love challenged ambition in women, but the answer was not to abolish it but to come to terms with it. This did not mean agreeing with the mid-nineteenth-century medical experts who had confidently asserted women were biologically inferior to men, but it did mean agreeing that love affected women differently and allowing for the difference in any plans for her future. Nor was Emma Goldman thinking only of sexual love. She thought mother love even more insidious. Once a woman had a child she changed in a way a man did not. Children, in her opinion, undermined a woman’s confident progress through life even more than a lover did, which was one of the reasons she never tried to have any herself. She thought any understanding of what actually happened strictly limited and wanted more attention paid to it rather than less. What she did not want was true femininity either denied or ignored. There was no place within feminism for any doctrine that dispensed with the need women had for men.

  Modern feminism, alarmingly, has found a place for that doctrine, but it is as yet a very small place. There are other more important problems to grapple with. But, although this is a history stopping considerably short of even the beginnings of contemporary feminism, it is the attitude to men which provides the link with it. From the early active feminists onwards women have worried about what they want their relationships with men to be based upon. This in turn has made them grapple with their own natures. Those who have been most honest have even felt, like Emma Goldman, that there is indeed something craven in them that wants to “give in” to a man. To say that this is because their role has been conditioned by society has not satisfied them. It is the easy but not the whole answer. Much more difficult is for women to look inwards and try to analyse why it appears to be so hard to be a feminist. All the women in this book found it a problem. None of them sprang from their mother’s womb feminist in thought, word and deed. They all betrayed their own idea
ls over and over again, sometimes without realizing it, because the conflict between being feminine and feminist seemed unavoidable and feminism could not always win without asking them to pay a price they thought too high. Being true to themselves meant hurting others and so they gave way, in anguish, and subdued their own instincts. Elizabeth Cady Stanton said that being a wife and a mother should not be put before being a person, but that was thought feminist idealism gone mad. The three could not be separated and this “person” inevitably was submerged. She herself would have liked to be a full-time journalist on Tribune but with seven children she knew she was only dreaming: even if the person in her would have approved, the mother, if not the wife, would never have sanctioned it. Women, especially feminists, had to be realists too. The history of feminism shows women making the same bargains with themselves over and over again with monotonous regularity. The most ambitious of them have always wanted everything – career, husband (or lover) and children.

  Some of them naturally managed it with more success than others. When they did, it was invariably due to a man’s feminism. Josephine Butler was the only one of the eight in this book who was very happily married with children and followed an exacting campaign of work which corresponded to a career. She only managed to do so because her husband George backed her in everything she did. While Josephine travelled round Europe lecturing and investigating he held the fort at home, encouraging her to believe her work was not just as important as his but more so. He simply pitied those who thought the only place for all women was in the home. Elizabeth Cady Stanton was not quite as fortunate. Her husband, Henry, backed her almost all the way but unfortunately stopped short of encouraging her in what interested her most, which was full political rights for women. They argued, often in public, and as time went on their closeness was threatened. Elizabeth Cady Stanton was never as happily married as Josephine Butler partly because Henry was not as thorough a feminist as George.