MIA > Archive > Draper > Draper > Women & Class
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According to the mythology of much feminist history, advocacy of women’s rights was the doing of certain enlightened intellectuals almost exclusively – Mary Wollstonecraft, John Stuart Mill, and so on. An accompanying tenet, implicit or explicit, has it that resistance to sexism can come only from the “educated classes,” while the working classes necessarily remain a hotbed of male chauvinist attitudes and practices.
It is beyond question, of course, that most sectors of both the upper and the lower classes have been rife with sexist prejudices. It is the counterposition that is in question. Note that this counterposition contrasts enlightened individuals of the bourgeoisie with the mass ranks of sexist proles, whose enlightened individuals are seldom mentioned.
This is methodologically invalid. One reason for this pattern is that the aforesaid enlightened individuals in the lower classes, however numerous, have not tended to write and publish books (which after all is the mode of existence of intellectuals virtually by definition). Wollstonecraft and Mill published books. The influence of the others must be sought in other activities, if it is not to be misleadingly ignored.
The name of Wollstonecraft deserves special honor precisely because there was not even a tiny minority of her class that constituted a simulacrum of a movement for her ideas. From her class’s point of view she was a pariah; this very fact adds to her stature historically, for all her limitations. We have seen that in revolutionary France there was no social tendency in the upper classes that spoke up in support of Condorcet, and that Olympe de Gouges was another pariah among her kind; while in contrast the women of the sansculottes took a large measure of revolutionary equality-in-action into their own hands en masse, that is, as a whole social stratum. For a short period the Revolutionary Women could be upborne on their surging movement as a vanguard, and represent a power even in high politics.
This contrast is instructive in the following way. In practice, the women of the people in Paris were far in advance of their educated “betters” not in the first place because their state of consciousness and enlightenment was higher, but because their actual social situation pushed them to assume equality in struggle. The social struggle itself was far more enlightening than any consciousness-raising lecture could be.
Historical experience (when it is not suppressed) tells us this: that when exploited classes and sectors of society emerge into view from below, take the public stage in times of crisis and upset, there also tends to be a sharp upsurge in the social forces militating against sexism. Under conditions of social upheaval, all social ideas have a question mark placed over them; and the state of women’s rights is no exception. Upheaval must be understood literally: the social ground is heaved up and exposed to the eye; it is overturned; it is this social overturn that reveals what was concealed before from the sight of historians. In “normal” times, which means non-revolutionary times, the dominant ideas are the only ones usually heard aloud because they are the dominant ideas of society. This is why revolutions are not simply suspensions of normality but tests of what has been going on molecularly in the invisible depths of the social order.
If we assume that in normal times the vast majority (of all classes) internalize the conventional sexist patterns, then as soon as cracks start appearing in the social fabric, in what strata of society do women’s interests in sex equality begin to show up most prominently? This, of course, is a subject on which serious work still has to be done. This chapter has only a contribution to make. It concerns the hidden history of early working-class feminism in England.
When William Thompson died in 1833, a period of intense working-class struggle was under way that would shortly lead to the organization of the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union, the English workingmen’s first attempt at general union. It was an effort that momentarily swept even Robert Owen into the movement. Cruel exploitation in the mills and workshops was producing millionaires and misery, vast masses of capital and vast reservoirs of distress. The workers started organizing trade unions for elementary resistance.
One of the centers of trade-unionism in the early 1830s was Birmingham, where the key group was the Builders’ Union. From 1831 on, it grew rapidly and was on the road to becoming a national organization. The leading voice of this workers’ movement was a painter by trade who had made himself what would later be called a “worker-intellectual” (so called by intellectuals). In September 1833, with strikes breaking out everywhere, James Morrison founded The Pioneer, or, Trades’ Union Magazine. Of the trade-union organs that sprang up, this was probably “the best of the bunch” (to quote G.D.H. [A] Cole). It quickly grew in influence as the authentic spokesman of the embattled workers.
In view of what we are going to find out about Morrison and his Pioneer, it must be emphasized that it was no hole-in-the-corner operation by some pariah intellectual. On the contrary. Morrison was hip-deep in the regional life of the working-class movement. Besides being himself a member of the Painters’ Union (a component of the Builders’ Union), he had been active in the cooperative movement, in workers’ education, and in the unstamped press agitation. Naturally he considered himself a disciple of Owenism, which had no rival in England within the framework of the New Order ideas; he had been active in swinging the Builders’ Union to support Owen’s ideas.
The Pioneer got so warm a reception regionally that in a couple of months Morrison moved his center of operations to London. Beginning in February 1834 his paper became the official organ of the newly founded “Grand National.” This brought Morrison in direct conflict with Robert Owen himself, for to Owen the spirit of tradeunion militancy that filled the columns of the Pioneer was anathema.
True, Morrison wrote sincere editorial statements in favor of class collaboration and peace between Masters and Operatives, as a consummation devoutly to be wished. He wanted to convince employers to make such collaboration possible by voluntarily moderating the excessive brutality of their exploitive practices. It would be easy to show that Morrison’s ideas were not much more revolutionary than Owen’s. [1] There is a lesson here on the relation between ideas and social struggle; for with similar ideas, formally speaking, Owen deprecated militant trade-union struggle while Morrison helped carry on such struggle, as a journalist. He transmitted journalistically the pressures that heated up the workers’ life-situation.
At any rate, by the summer of 1834, Owen, whose prestige was still unchallengeable in the leading councils of the Grand National, got Morrison’s Pioneer dropped as official organ, after Morrison had rejected the cool proposal that he simply hand over his paper to the Grand National leadership. The Pioneer came to an end in July. Soon the Union started to break up too. Morrison came out of this racking experience broken in health. He died suddenly in August 1835, only 33 years old.
Among the most frustrating of historical accidents are the two premature deaths we have had to record in the last pages: namely, the deaths of William Thompson and James Morrison, who both might have been able to offer a healthier alternative to Owen’s leadership of the new socialist movement, and who did in fact start to offer this alternative. They died soon after coming into conflict with Owen, who lived on long after his positive impetus to the movement had turned into a fetter on it.
Let us make an interim contrast.
If one judges by a typical work such as W.L. Blease’s The Emancipation of English Women, socialist feminism did not exist. Blease is more interested in admiring such giant strides toward women’s freedom as the conquest of the right to ride a horse sitting astride, i.e., the great Right to Be Bifurcated. Naturally, this achievement was relevant only to rich women. Yet, despite this bifurcation in historical concerns, it is possible to find out that the working-class and socialist movements of the early nineteenth century were centers of the advocacy of women’s equality.
This sort of feminism arose, as it had done in France, out of a life-situation of struggle. Women workers began to organize in the first trade unions as the century got started; women demonstrators were killed, along with men, in the 1819 Peterloo massacre; women operatives in the mills formed Female Reform Societies about the same time, for electoral reform. Women went on strike along with men or by themselves; and in the trade-union movement, when resolutions and decisions were up for consideration, they voted. Women’s suffrage began inside the working class, just as it had begun inside the sansculotterie of the French Revolution. If we compare these workingwomen with the image of “Woman” portrayed in Wollstonecraft, we might be on a different planet.
Since this working-class feminism was not a theory or ideology but an accompaniment of real life, it could and often did coexist with conservative notions about “woman’s place” and about the family. In a way the case is similar to the two sides of Morrison’s ideas on class struggle and class collaboration: we are not dealing with intellectuals caught in the act of cerebrating, but with ideas and attitudes under pressure that were not necessarily congruent or consistent. In the real social struggles that went on, feminism was not primarily an ism but a condition.
This point, as it happens, was made in his own way by G.J. Holyoake, an Owenite organizer in the 1830s, who later authored a fat history of the movement from a standpoint hostile to socialism. He testified:
To the honour of co-operators [Owenites], they always and everywhere were friendly to the equal civil rights of women. The subject is never obtruded and is never long absent. It continually recurs as though women were an equal part of the human family and were naturally inclined in Co-operation.
There was no comparable state of mind about women’s equality in any other section of society. This happened not primarily because the Owenite workingmen were Advanced Thinkers, as Wollstonecraft had been an Advanced Thinker even among bourgeois women. It happened because the women were in fact involved in the social movement of struggle on an equal basis.
It did not happen because of Owen himself. Owen spent his life opposing the social and political powers that be and, in addition, fighting against the religious institutions of society; and this is enough courageous oppositionism for any one person. But he never made the woman question – the special oppression of women, and the program of women’s equality – a part of his various crusades.
However, we must add that Owen did challenge the conventional marriage institution, with its underlying sexual prudery and its double standard. (Read, for example, his Lectures on the Marriages of the Priesthood of the Old Immoral World, 1835.) He was much concerned to plan for the emancipation of women from household drudgery; and he attacked the family as a basically evil institution. Thus he made it easier for elements in the Owenite movement to go beyond his own limited views.
There is no record, in any case, that Owen ever advocated social and political equality now in the field of women’s rights, as William Thompson had done in 1825 under Anna Wheeler’s influence. But the more advanced ideas, having been loosed, were rife in the movement that went by Owen’s name – at a time when histories of feminism view these ideas as virtually unknown except among some marginal litterateurs.
To find even a marginal advocacy of something approaching thoroughgoing support to equal rights, we must look ahead to John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women of 1869. It is no derogation of the great importance of this work, especially for bourgeois feminism, to reveal where the younger Mill got his ideas. Certainly not from his father, as we have seen! But he also knew the man who had attacked his father ... Holyoake’s history added the following to the passage quoted above:
Mr. J.S. Mill frequented their [the Owenites’] meetings and knew their literature well, and must have listened in his youth to speculations which he subsequently illustrated to so much effect in his intrepid book, Subjection of Women.
This passage in Holyoake’s history took off from a mention of Mrs. Anna Wheeler’s advocacy of women’s participation in political affairs. But in fact the young Mill’s youth was even better spent than Holyoake remembered. Mill tells in his Autobiography that he, together with a circle of young Benthamite-Utilitarian disciples whom he frequented, regarded his father’s article on “Government” as “a masterpiece of political wisdom,” but disagreed with its paragraph on women’s rights. (A good trick, and not the product of pure logic, since this paragraph laid the basis for the rest, as we have pointed out.) He recalls that Bentham himself also disagreed, though at the time none of them ever disagreed publicly, this absence of dissent being one reason why Thompson undertook his own book.
Half a chapter away from this passage in the Autobiography, we learn that precisely in 1825 – evidently soon after the publication of Thompson’s Appeal – this Benthamite youth section led by the junior Mill sallied into the meetings of the Owenite society in London and engaged in a series of debates, faction against faction, over a period of some months. Mill’s memoirs tell us:
... the principal champion on their side [the Owenites’] was a very estimable man, with whom I was well acquainted, Mr. William Thompson, of Cork, author of a book on the Distribution of Wealth, and of an Appeal in behalf of women against the passage relating to them in my father’s Essay on Government.
So, over four decades before he wrote his own book on the subject, John Stuart Mill was very well acquainted indeed not only with the Thompson-Wheeler pioneer work but also with Thompson’s personal conversation and argumentation on the subject. Besides the debates mentioned in the Autobiography, there was a more personal connection; for the very estimable Thompson was not only a personal friend of Bentham’s but had lived at Bentham’s house for several months up to the spring of 1823. One may wonder whether the young Bethamites’ disagreement with the “masterpiece of political wisdom” on women’s rights preceded or followed Thompson’s demonstrations-in-debate that it was a masterpiece of antidemocratic muddle-headedness.
Given these educational experiences of the young Mill, and the nature of his relations with the Owenites, one can perhaps assume that he must have also read what Morrison’s Pioneer was writing on the woman question. These were writings about sex discrimination and sexism such as Mill himself could not rival even when he screwed his courage to the sticking point and published his opinions in 1869, that is, on the eve of their becoming respectable.
To this remarkable organ of trade-unionism we now turn.
The weekly Pioneer lasted for only forty-four issues, from September 7, 1833 to July 5, 1834, and so the relatively large amount of material devoted to the woman question hits the reader’s eye as a substantial proportion of the whole. Nor did this emphasis blossom in early issues and fade away as the paper’s scope enlarged. Just the reverse: the first seven numbers had little of this material, and the subject grew in importance as the paper went along.
In February a “woman’s page” was announced, described as “a page for women’s rights,” not as a page “of interest to women”; and this department was continued to the end. It was first entitled A Page for the Ladies, but in April Morrison criticized this designation (as quoted below), and adopted the rubric Woman’s Page.
Morrison’s first substantial statement came in No. 8 as he greeted the formation of a women’s union in Leicester. Apparently this union had had to be organized at first in secret, and he congratulates the women on how well they carried it through: “you have shewn your self-styled lords and masters, that you can keep a secret as well as they can.” He generalizes:
It is in this, as it is in everything appertaining to general improvement; for after all the boasted refinement of higher society, the working classes are the first to cast away long standing prejudices.
You will be called “blue-stockings,” Morrison warns the Leicester women, but this epithet “which has been thrown at every intelligent woman who happened to have more sense than her stupid husband, has not deterred the ladies of Leicester from uniting to obtain the advancement of themselves and their kindred.”
Morrison makes a criticism: the Leicester lodge consists entirely of women, with the exception of two posts occupied by men, that of “protector” (sergeant-at-arms?) and secretary. You should not make these exceptions, Morrison advises: “you are able to fulfil those duties yourselves.” Again he generalizes:
Then do, we beg of you, feel the pride of your own strength, and lose the habit of leaning so much on the judgment of the other sex ... [W]e would recommend that the women of Leicester do assert their own dignity, and have a secretary of their own sex, and be self-protected. Do not let us for ever see woman looking up to man for anything which needs so small acquirement. The very habit of doing a little duty like this for themselves, will create a spirit of independence which will rise to things of greater magnitude, and when women acquire freedom their children will never more be slaves.
It is much to be regretted, that you have so long succumbed to the insolent despotism of man.
This is remarkable advice, indeed amazing – for the 1830s! It is far more hostile to the mind of the contemporary society than the advocacy of this or that programmatic point, though Morrison was not behindhand on program, as we will see. He did not merely advocate equality for women; he advised them to take equality – and there is a great difference.
Before we go on to Morrison’s main writings, a possible misunderstanding must be anticipated. I have emphasized that we are not dealing here with an isolated individual who is so far ahead of his times that he or she can be admired for uniqueness. Morrison’s articles were published as the official editorial expression in an organ of a mass working-class movement. One must wonder: these editorial attacks on the “insolent despotism of man” and exhortation of women to quit listening to men as masters – these sentiments which notoriously fly in the face of the stereotype of working-class sexism – didn’t they elicit indignant protest and resentment from most of Morrison’s readers and subscribers, upon whom he had to rely for the paper’s very existence, namely, the men?
There is no sign that this was much of a problem for the paper. The Pioneer solicited and published critical dissents from its worker readers; it particularly solicited dissent from its views on the woman question, and it sounded as if it had trouble getting as much of it as it wanted for discussion purposes. Morrison did print, and discuss, a dissenting critique by a master tailor, as we will see.
But where was the storm of indignation that should have greeted the Pioneer’s militant undermining of male supremacy in the family and everywhere else? Did editor Morrison conceal the onslaught that came in, that is, suppress its publication? There is not the least indication, direct or indirect, that anything like this happened. There were no overt or covert references to any such problem. Certainly Holyoake’s memory, while not favorable to Owenism, held no such recollection. Morrison’s enterprise came to grief in London, not in Birmingham; and not from lack of support by his base, but rather from the rebuff administered on top, by the Owenite leadership.
In fact, the internal evidence argues that Morrison continued to write along these lines of feminist militancy just as if he felt that this line was reason for the paper’s popularity, not a source of weakness. Announcing the woman’s page, he wrote congratulatingly that
The men have done their duty in throwing to the dogs the barbarous prejudices that women had no right to meet in council, nor take a mental part in human life; and from this movement greater goodwill will ultimately follow than any other step the men have taken.
To be sure, I doubt that all the barbarous prejudices were thrown to the dogs; the point is that the militant pro-feminist viewpoint of the Pioneer constituted not a pariah obsession but the accepted public opinion of this workers’ movement. In any other milieu in England at this time or in any other country, an editor who published this stuff in issue after issue would have been fired, stoned, or institutionalized. These facts stand on their head the whole traditional stereotype of where the class roots of pro-feminism lie.
Morrison wanted his woman readers to use the Pioneer as their own outlet; he printed a rather large number of letters from women, especially woman unionists, inspired by his own articles. He first broadcast an appeal for letters in the Leicester article quoted above. “We hope then to hear from the sisterhood: but now ladies, mind and write it yourselves ...”
... we [men] do not know how to write like you; our thoughts are not your thoughts, nor our ways your ways. – A man cannot feign a woman’s feelings; – he does not know her wrongs; – he wrongs her most himself. – He is the tyrant, – she the slave. – How can he portray her smothered thought, or write her anxious wish? Write yourselves, then, write yourselves.
A few months later, Morrison devoted a whole Woman’s Page to this same theme, beginning with the sentence: “Ah no! we cannot write as women feel!”
The letters from women published in the Pioneer are often of great interest, and I scant them here with reluctance. They tell us a great deal about the women’s trade-union activities that were going on. Women wrote in announcing the formation of militant women’s groups, mostly trade-unionist. From Derby, scene of a bitter turnout/lockout struggle, a woman’s letter appealed for the formation of a “female union”: “Let the first lispings of your innocent offspring be union! union!” A “London Mechanic’s Wife” made a point that historians should take to heart:
Shall the idiot-like, the stupid and usurious capitalists, tell us to look to our domestic affairs, and say, “these we understand best,” we will retort on them, and tell them that thousands of us have scarce any domestic affairs to look after, when the want of employment on the one hand, or ill-requited toil on the other, have left our habitations almost destitute ...
A woman’s letter echoed Fourier’s great thesis, perhaps without having heard it before. Arguing for the proposition that “both sexes shall enjoy an equality of rights and privileges,” she added: “Certain it is, no change for the better can take place in society, unless the emancipation of women is agreed upon ... [I]n proportion as woman is made a full sharer of the benefits of ‘Union,’ in such proportion will man discover his ultimate success will be hastened or retarded.”
But now let us focus on Morrison’s own writings.
Instead of pasting together a series of excerpts from Morrison’s essays and exhortations, let us ask the following question: Suppose Morrison had edited his writings on the woman question into a pamphlet or fly sheet, wouldn’t it be one of the great landmarks in the literature of the subject? Let us imagine that he did so: selected passages to make his various points, avoided repetition, eliminated some excess verbiage, emphasized his main themes, and, of course, not bothered to show excisions and jumps with suspension points and bracketed interpolations.
In the following “synthesized” essay, every sentence and every word is Morrison’s own. I have added or changed nothing; only rearranged. I have altered the language in no respect, not even in spelling or punctuation. I have interpolated no comments or interpretations of my own. Let us imagine that it is entitled –
Does man think, or does woman think, that women are free, because they can go out to church or market, lecture-room, assembly-room, theatre, or ball-room at pleasure? They are as much domesticated in all these places as they are at home.
What do they hear at church? A man haranguing the two sexes; and though he did address himself to woman only, what does he know about woman, of whose feelings he has no experience? If woman go to market, a theatre, a ball-room, a lecture-room, these everlasting men are for ever around her. They are her teachers, her counsellors, her politicians, her pastors, her agents, her every thing.
In fine, the whole business of society is so evidently in the hands of man, that a queen is almost necessitated even to look upon her own footman as her superior, merely because he is a man; and man is enabled, merely by the deceitful spell of this nominal supremacy, to exercise a species of control over woman, which does not result from real superiority of intellect or morals, but, like the spiritual authority of ancient priests, from some fancied excellence, which is supposed to be peculiarly and exclusively the inheritance of the male.
Men have their public meetings, their social meetings, their newspapers, their magazines, their male speakers, and their male editors, and men with men correspond in all quarters of the world; but woman knows nothing of woman, except through the medium of man – a dense medium, which distorts her native character, and bedaubs it with the false colouring of the sex whose feelings, on a thousand delicate subjects, must be the very reverse of her own.
How can woman redeem herself from such shackles of ignorance and mental slavery? By application to man? Fool she must be, if she apply to man to get a knowledge of herself, and the interests of her own sex. Men have nothing to do with women; they are two distinct animals altogether; they have each a sphere of their own, with which the other cannot, without creating mischief, interfere. Therefore, we say, let woman look to herself; allow no male to enter her meetings, until she has obtained sufficient skill and experience to act in public, and then let her assembly rooms be thrown open.
Some women say they are free; they do not want to be redeemed. But if they be free themselves, will their freedom bestow liberty upon the rest of their sex? Yet where is the woman who can say she is free? Why are the ladies so very reluctant to go out alone? Because, by going free, they subject themselves to reproach. But we do not call that freedom which carries reproach along with it.
Is woman free to speak or to act as her feelings prompt her? But the laws of the land have doomed her to inferiority and political annihilation! The very being or existence of a woman is supposed to be extinct during marriage; she is called a “femme covert” – that is, a woman whose being is not acknowledged – an invisible woman – a species of ghost, who haunts her husband, and only becomes half solidified when he is no more.
An unmarried woman is a ghost as well. Thus, for instance, if an unmarried woman should be so unfortunate as to have a child, that child can inherit nothing, because, as the law says, “he is the son of nobody.” Now nothing can be more clear than this: “a woman is nobody.” And when she has a husband, he is her all in all; she takes his name; she becomes his property; she cannot inherit individually; she is his subject; he is her sovereign.
Think of this, till your spirits are roused to a determination to compel the law to regard you as somebodies. But how will you do this, for the law won’t hear you? You have no voice, no vote, no influence on legislation. Then make a legislation for yourselves, a woman’s law. We shall no longer trample upon your rights; we shall acknowledge your equality; we shall divide the kingdom with you; and, each embracing that species of employment which is suited to the sex, with no political distinctions of first or last, greater or less, we shall remove the curse which was inflicted upon woman, “Thy desires shall be unto thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.”
Woman is an endearing, social name; but lady has something shockingly aristocratic and unequal about it; it conveys the idea of superiority and control; it is the counterpart of lord. Whatever was its original meaning, it implied the same kind of inequality which is included in the counter-title “lord”; and it almost looks as if it was bestowed upon woman as a kind of soothing, flattering title, to atone for the deprivation of the real authority which the name implies. Man is the lord, without assuming the title. Woman has got the title, but wants the authority.
A tailor has been rebuking us very severely for our preposterous absurdities about the women. This unionist scouts the idea of women’s rights and privileges, and of their associating together to demand them of the male, and he says, that though not a profligate himself, if his wife were to go to legislate, it would be a certain way of making him a profligate. It is out at last. This is the spirit of the male. We wanted to draw it out, in order that it might be exposed.
The working-men complain that the masters exercise authority over them; and they maintain their right to associate, and prescribe laws for their own protection. But speak of any project which shall diminish the authority of the male, or give him an equal, where once he found an inferior, and then the spirit of Toryism awakes that has long been dormant. All men are Tories by nature. Even the unionists themselves, who rail against tyrants and oppressors, have the blood of the aristocrat flowing in their veins.
Our correspondent says that according to the Bible, women must be “discreet, chaste, and keepers at home, not gadding about or busy bodies; and how can this be exemplified if they go out to legislate?” This is the opinion of a male unionist. It only belongs to men to gad about and be busy bodies. Women have nothing to do but to keep at home, and remain in ignorance of everything but cooking, washing, scrubbing pots, &c. Now the Bible, which has been quoted against the women by a master, may be quoted with equal authority against the men. It says, “Servants, be subject to your masters with all fear.” If our opponents quote from the master’s page, let them quote from the servant’s page also, or we shall do it for them.
We do not want to set women a-gadding, but to prevent their gadding and their tattling. What is it that makes woman a tattler and a busy body, but the confined sphere in which she moves? She is individualised by the narrowness of her knowledge and experience. What is it that makes a villager less liberal than an inhabitant of the city? His confinement certainly. The only way to cure women of tattling and gadding is the way by which men are cured, enlarging their views and widening their sphere of activity.
Our correspondent would have each woman subject to her own husband. He may go to a coffee-house every night. He has a right to do this, for he makes the money. But what is the woman doing? She is working from morning till night at house-keeping; she is bearing children; she is cooking, and washing, and cleaning. And all this for nothing; for she gets no wages. Her wages come from her husband; they are optional. If she complain, he can damn and swear. And it is high treason in women to resist such authority, and claim the privilege of a fair reward of their labour!
Good God! if we thought that the sex woman could patiently endure such a yoke of bondage, we should hate her most heartily! But how is she to prevent it? Why, by the very same means by which the men will prevent the tyranny of the master. Women will save themselves abundance of labour by association.
Because we advocate the cause of female associations, do we therefore advise woman to cast off her feminine character, and assume the effrontery of man? If union is to produce such a corrupting effect, then, for heaven’s sake, let the men beware of it; for man and woman are one nature, and are refined or corrupted by the same means.
We assure our correspondent we are more and more convinced, that he has too much of the spirit of the master in him; a spirit which we are determined to resist, wherever we find it. But it is degrading to human nature to admit the superiority of one being over another, merely because the gender is different. What is this but aristocracy? If we admit the right of man to rule over woman, merely because he is man, then we may, upon the same principle, admit the authority of one man to tyrannize over another, merely because he is of noble blood, high born.
Certainly, nothing can be more unjust than that law of public opinion and of political jurisprudence which gives a fool (merely because he is a man) a political and domestic authority over a woman, who may, in every other respect except the circumstance of sex, be his decided superior. It is a tyrant’s law, and is destined, for the good of both sexes, to be for ever annulled. Now is the day of general redemption for all. Black slaves and white slaves, male slaves and female slaves, must all be freed.
We warn all our sisters against every attempt in the male to scatter women and prevent their communion. Men will attempt it under every guise – the guise of love, of modesty, of religion, of chastity; in fine, every guise under which the male contrives to woo the female. But what is the consequence of your yielding to their insinuations? Why, you see the consequences already. The practice has had a fair trial. Woman is a slave, a servant to man. We burn, we weep to see her, as she appears to us daily. We know how to cure the evil; but man, man, and she herself, deceived by men, resist our endeavours, and cry out, like the landowners and the clergy, against all innovations.
Man is stronger than woman by nature. What is the conclusion to be deduced? Is man therefore demonstrated superior to woman? Then, by a parity of reasoning, a black bear or a wild buffalo is superior to man. But it is by this argument of the strongest alone that the doctrine of male superiority is defended. Yet man must admit that, if superior to woman in physical strength, there is a delicacy about the female character to which the male can never attain; in fine, that there is a characteristic difference between the two sexes, so peculiar to each that the one would suffer deterioration by being invested with the character of the other.
Now the query is, which of the two characters is the most valuable? A fine artist is much more highly regarded than a sturdy artizan; but the selfish male has not yet learned to apply the principle of action to his treatment of the female. A woman’s wage is not reckoned at an average more than two-thirds of a male, and we believe in reality it seldom amounts to more than a third (and wives have no wages at all). Yet, is not the produce of female labour as useful?
There are many departments of the arts which are peculiarly suited to the female hand, which is much lighter in execution; and by the skillful combination of the properties of each sex, the finest results in the department of human industry may be accomplished. But the discovery of this sexual difference of handicraft will only tend to bring the two sexes to an equality.
This is the grand conclusion to which we must finally attain – that the two sexes are each distinct in their kind; that an equal proportion of both is necessary for the perfection of social happiness, and that the industrious female is consequently well entitled to the same amount of remuneration as the industrious male.
The women have always been paid worse for their labour than the men; and, by long habit and patient acquiescence, they have been taught to regard this inequality as justice. The consequence is, that men are either obliged to work for women’s wages, or lose their work. It is to prevent this diminution of wages that the male tailors have declared war against the female tailors. They do not want to deprive the women of their means of living; they would have a woman’s work to be valued by the same standard as that of a man’s, and equally well paid. This at least is the professed reason which the tailors give for their proposed system of exclusion. Were this to have the effect of raising the wages of the women, and still preserving to them their employment, we should give the tailors our hearty support; but where they wantonly throw out of employment a number of females, merely because they were women, we think this an encroachment on the liberties of humanity, which is too much to be tolerated.
Has woman a right to reduce the wages of man, by working for less than man? Certainly not, were women considered equal to man, and did she enjoy the same rights and privileges; but since man has doomed her to inferiority, and stamped an inferior value upon all the products of her industry, the low wages of woman are not so much the voluntary price she sets upon her labour, as the price which is fixed by the tyrannical influence of male supremacy; therefore any attempt to deprive her of labour, because she works at a reduced price, is merely punishing women for the cruel and pernicious effects of male supremacy. To make the two sexes equal, and to reward them equally, would settle the matter amicably; but any attempt to settle it otherwise will prove an act of gross tyranny.
If the principle of resistance be justifiable in the male, it cannot be reprobated in the female. If women are compelled by want to leave their homes, and give their services for money, we cannot see that any law of sound morality or legislature can put an interdict upon them. Such an interdict is a war against liberty itself, and though it may do partial good to some, the general good can amount to nothing.
Arbitrary laws will never save us. The last smuggler will survive the last exciseman, and if the women be prohibited from producing wealth, they will speedily become outlaws, and raise a sexual war. If women be prevented from making clothes, binding shoes, spinning, weaving, &c., what shall they do? They must haunt the street and prowl for prey, and then be reprobated by pious magistrates and other godly censurers of public morals, who devour their own children in punishing the crimes which they themselves create.
We have to reproach women for many of our young faults. They encourage the masculine habits, as they are called, of the boys, and train them from infancy to domineer over poor little miss. Now, if women were uniformly to check this spirit of control when they have the little rogues under their immediate direction, it would encourage a respect for the sex, which in time would grow into a fixed habit; and if they treated the seducer with as much cruelty and bitter persecution as they do the seduced, they would save thousands of the sex from the horrors of prosecution.
We have little esteem for unfeeling prudes: they are the occasion of more vice than the unhappy frail ones, for they are often the cause of her abandonment. Not that we wish to lay the whole of the blame on the sex whose interests we profess to advocate, but to show that women are in some measure the perpetuators of their own slavery.
There is a nominal respect paid to the women of this country, but it is in most instances only nominal. How often have we been disgusted with the hackneyed, common-place “compliments,” as they are called. The reform of these abuses must begin with the women themselves; they ought to train their little male brats to think properly of their mothers, and sisters, and aunts, and the whole of their feminine acquaintance, and to instruct the little Pollys and Sallys at the same time not to be quite so afraid of masters Jackey and Tommy.
However loudly the men may bellow out for their own liberties, they will never bestow what they obtain upon women until she demands it from her masters, as they were done for theirs; and whenever that struggle arrives, the men will be as tenacious of giving up their absurd domination as is any other power which exists of relinquishing its authority.
It is fortunate, however, that the male part of the population cannot progress in real civilization without imparting the value of independence to those whom they at present consider their inferiors. A writer on the Rights of Women observes, that marriage seems ordained exclusively for the comfort of the man. Yes, and he has taken care to make the law as well as custom support him in his tyranny; for an operative may thrash his wife with impunity, and be in little danger of punishment for his brutality. Indeed, if the law were to punish him, the poor woman would become a victim for want of the means of his support.
In making these remarks, we do not wish a thought to be entertained that we desire to set the sexes at variance with each other; we only hope that, for the mutual happiness of both, the women will endeavour to create a public opinion among themselves sufficiently strong to command fair play, and the respect and kindness which is due to them, and which they will never obtain but by their own exertions and determination. Women would be no less amiable for being more independent, and mankind would be none the worse for a little of their gruffness being rubbed off to give place to the natural rights and privileges of woman.
When I first read Morrison’s essays on his Women’s Page in the Pioneer, there was one feature that became more and more puzzling as I read on. Some of this feature peers through the Synthetic Essay above, but a full appreciation would require reading the material in greater bulk. It is not merely the sustained vigor and even passion of his defence of women’s rights; this is surprising, given our stereotyped view of the time and place, but it presents no unanswered puzzle.
The puzzle is the fact that – at least here and there, and not infrequently – the language of Morrison’s Women’s Page sounds to me as if written by a woman, that is, from a woman’s slant. This is not because of any particular opinion it presents; it is, frankly, an impression, and a matter of tone. Perhaps it emanates simply from the fervency of Morrison’s advocacy?
Perhaps; and in any case it is difficult to find out much about Morrison personally. There is a brief reference to him in Holyoake’s history mentioned above. Holyoake remarks: “His widow was long known at the Social Institution, Salford, for activity and intelligence nearly equal to his own. She was one of the lecturers of the society.” Typically, Holyoake thereupon does not even tell us her name! Morrison would have had a pungent comment on this characteristic treatment.
We can add little more information. Her name was Frances Morrison; she was active in the Owenite movement; in 1838–1839 she was lecturing in Owenite institutions in Lancashire and the North; and she published a booklet on The Influence of the Present Marriage System (Manchester, 1838).
At any rate, we can see that at Morrison’s side was a woman of political intelligence and a comrade, herself a speaker and writer on socialism and the woman question. It becomes easier to speculate that Frances Morrison could have participated – must have participated – in the writing and preparation of at least some of the Women’s Pages in the Pioneer.
As in the case of William Thompson and Anna Wheeler, whom the Morrisons must have known, we have at work what the Saint-Simonians called the Male-Female Social Unit: not merely a cooperation of two individuals, but the integration in their life work of a thinking man and woman in association. At this point it is possible to get lost on the seas of speculation, well out of sight of facts; but is it too speculative to wonder if the female part of the unit was instrumental in turning the male half toward his passionate identification with the cause of women’s rights?
Here is another corner to be lifted on the Hidden History, the underground life of socialist feminism.
A. In the printed version “G.D.G.”.
1. For more information on the nature of Morrison’s ideas, see the Special Note appended at the end of this chapter.
Last updated on 12 September 2020