Golden Cables of Sympathy: The Transatlantic Sources of Nineteenth-Century Feminism by Margaret H. McFadden

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Golden Cables of Sympathy:
The Transatlantic Sources of Nineteenth-Century Feminism
Margaret H. McFadden
University Press of Kentucky, 1999

"My research on the origins of international feminism in the nineteenth century has thus led me to postulate the existence of a pre-organizational matrix or network of international experiences and relationships, which then served as the basis upon which an autonomous movement and explicit feminist consciousness could later develop in the Atlantic community." p. 3
"At least six domains or avenues of woman-to-woman international connectedness can be identified, each exhibiting such vitality that one cannot ignore it without distorting the overall picture: (1) the rise of new communications systems-- including the travel industry -- and women's vigorous use of them, especially the female adventurers' exploits whose deeds served to make travel appealing to newly literate publics; (2) the work of Protestant evangelists and Catholic women religious, who, despite their mostly conservative ideas about women's place, displayed in their actions bold and imaginative modes of international communications and organization; (3) the complex international bonds developed among women working in reform movements - abolitionism, temperance, peace, antiprostitution; (4) the personal and institutional interconnectedness which developed in the utopian community movement, both secular and religious; (5) the transatlantic and intra-European networks of support, affiliation, and common purpose that linked political revolutionaries, refugees, and expatriates; (6) the emergence of female literary celebrities - Harriet Beecher Stowe and George Sand, for example -- whose works and personal example served to call into existence "virtual communities," international in scope and significance." p. 4
McFadden notes that she will discuss the following women: (pp. 5-6)
"Although I view all the figures who make an appearance in the book as what I call "mothers of the matrix," some deserve to wear this appellation as a distinct title of honor. I thus single out Anna Doyle Wheeler, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Fredrika Bremer, and Frances Power Cobbe for special treatment." p. 6
"Mott probably met Marion Kirkland (Mrs. Hugo) Reid, who attended the 1840 Anti-Slavery convention [in London] with her husband and in 1843 wrote an impassioned tract for women's rights, A Plea for Women, in answer to Sarah Lewis's Woman's Mission (1839). An adaptation and translation of Rousseau's disciple Louis Aime Martin, Woman's Mission was a popular and influential treatise defining woman's moral superiority and her special duties; Lewis thus embraced the ideology of "separate spheres." " p. 20
"Without the international peace and relative prosperity that increased the possibility of private travel, without reliable mails, without cheap and plentiful periodicals and books, those connections, once made, would have likely been broken or lost. Instead, by the process of spinning web-like connections, the density of communications grew apace." p. 39
      "The adventurers in particular provide an arresting example of the difficulties in limiting the boundaries and purview of a study in communicative action among women. Most adventurers evinced scant interest in forging links between women; in fact, they probably actively discouraged any such efforts. Nevertheless, they demonstrate perhaps better than any other examples the possibilities for women which the communications revolution opened up. That they wrote about their feats -- and were in turn the subject of others' writing -- is of course signal importance, for in doing so they planted ides in the minds of female readers. While few such readers ended up searching for the sources of the Nile (as did Tinne), they might well have been emboldened to undertake (for them) significant ventures in the now imaginable new horizons of the nineteenth century. More than likely they would alight in Switzerland or Italy instead of Khartoum. But there too they would be positioned to inaugurate or strengthen Atlantic community linkages.
      The majority of women travelers were from the upper middle class and middle-aged; some were aristocratic, and most were well-to-do -- a point that can hardly be overemphasized. . . .
      Mervat Hatem has insightfully analyzed the images that European and Egyptian women had of each other through their writings in this period. Why was it, she asks, that European women avoided finding commonalties between themselves and Egyptian women but, instead, describe differences? Why did European women usually participate in Egyptian male, not female, society? "They avoided'" she says' "asking themselves why they felt powerful in the Orient and less so in their own societies. Here, the need for symbiosis (identification with the power of their culture) contributed to an exaggerated stress on the difference between the Orient and the West." p. 46
"Of all scholars, historians are the best situated to appreciate the ironies and bizarre consequences of "purposeful" human action." p. 47
"These women religious found and participated in opportunities not open to most women in the nineteenth century. they enjoyed "involvement in meaningful work, access to administrative positions, freedom from the responsibilities of marriage and motherhood, opportunities to live in sisterhood, and egalitarian friendships," as Mary Ewens puts it." p. 51
      "What was it that enabled Protestant women to move so forcefully onto the international stage? the answer lies mainly in the realm of ideation, as secular and theological modes of thought interacted. Women evangelists were often embroiled in the controversy about women's rights to preach, even though they did not often speak or testify on that subject per se. Their justification included two kinds of argument, both strands common in other nineteenth-century discussions of the woman question. Nancy Cott has summarized these two opposing general arguments for women's advancement. On the one hand, she says,
women claimed that they had the same intellectual and spiritual endowments as men -- were human beings equally with men -- and therefore deserved equal or the same opportunities men had, to advance and develop themselves. On the other hand women argued that their sex differed from the male -- that whether through natural endowment, environment or training, human females were moral, nurturant, pacific and philosophically disinterested, where males were competitive, aggrandizing, belligerent and self-interested; and that it therefore served the best interests of both sexes for women to have equal access to education, work and citizenship in order to represent themselves and to balance society with their characteristic contribution.
These two positions -- called variously "equality" and "difference," or "minimizers' and "maximizers," or "equal rights" and "women's rights" -- can be detected in the two main arguments used to justify women's preaching. Biblical and theological reasoning drove the discussion forward, and its centrality must shape the historical account.
      The view that women evangelists had talents and gifts different from those of men was usually tied to some kind of premillennialist view. Premillennialists believed that the millennium, a thousand-year period of peace and plenty, would be preceded by the second coming and the fulfillment of the prophecies regarding "the last days." The very fact that many women were testifying showed, according to premillennialists, that this time was approaching. Women preacher were in fact a sign of an imminent second coming. this attitude toward the spread of female preaching is based on a reading of the prophecy in Joel 2:28-29 ("Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy. . . and upon the handmaids in those days will I pour out my spirit.") Olive Anderson discusses several British women evangelists who preached on "the last days," including Elizabeth foster, Geraldine Hooper, and Octavia Jary. Phoebe Palmer used precisely this argument in Promise of the Father; or, A Neglected Specialty of the Last Days (1859), and one of her last publications was a pamphlet titled The Tongue of Fire on the Daughters of the Lord (1869).
      The other position is a variation on the "sameness" or "equality" perspective; women and men are both human, and their rights and duties should be based on their common humanity. The often used Pentecostal argument -- the Holy Spirit was and is no respector of sex -- enunciates this position. Anyone can be visited by the Spirit's tongues of fire; women therefore are the same as men in this context." pp. 52-54
"As Joanna Gillespie shows in her study of such early nineteenth-century works, is was "women in revivalistic religious groups [who] were among the first to erode [the] powerful taboo" against women speaking in public." p. 55
"Frances Willard [president of the Women's Christian Temperance Union], Amanda Berry Smith [black revivalist], and Catherine Booth [founder of the Salvation Army] all traced their own "calls" or "second comings" to Phoebe Palmer's revivals." p. 59
"Historians and literary scholars who take the trouble to look cross-nationally at the Atlantic community in the nineteenth century almost inevitably stumble upon an odd fat. Two writers -- Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-96) and George Sand (1804-76)-- exerted an astonishingly massive influence in a variety of national settings, an influence that bore no real relation to the intrinsic merits of their works. Furthermore, although an important effect of their popularity was the promotion of the cause of female emancipation, neither author was gripped by a sense of the overriding importance of this cause. Indeed, as noted in Chapter 2, Harriet Beecher Stowe operated in most respects as a deeply conventional upper-class female. I thus describe Stowe and Sand as "unwitting allies," women whose writings and lives advanced a process of which they were largely unaware and a campaign to which they were not really dedicated." p. 67
"Women were working on "the woman question" throughout the nineteenth century, well before the late-century formation of international women's organizations. Many began their political work with participation in one or more reform organizations -- abolition (Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton), moral reform (Josephine Butler, Barbara Bodichon), temperance (Susan B. Anthony), peace (Fredrika Bremer, Bertha van Suttner) - but quickly saw the connection to women's situation generally and the importance of organizing with other women for women's rights. Even before the groundbreaking 1848 Seneca Falls Convention with its "Declaration of Sentiments," women such as Sarah and Angelina Grimke, Maria Weston Chapman, Lydia Maria Child, Anne Knight (who wrote a pamphlet advocating female suffrage in 1847), Anna Doyle Wheeler, and the French Saint-Simonians were writing and organizing for women. Of course, once women's rights conventions began to be held in the United States (e.g. Seneca Falls and Rochester, N.Y., 1848; Akron, Ohio, 1851; Worcester, Mass., 1850 and 1851; Syracuse, N.Y., 1852), preexisting connections became even stronger; there were letters of support and congratulations, discussions in the foreign press, resolutions in favor or opposed to the American sisters." p. 108-109
"A less formal organizer than Bremer, Austrian writer Bertha von Suttner (1843-1914) is perhaps the best known of the women working internationally for peace in the nineteenth century. Although most of her work was done after 1890 and is therefore beyond the boundaries of this study, her formative years were spent all over Europe, which helped to develop her international perspective and her aversion to war." p. 118
"The Saint-Simonian women ultimately rejected doctrine in favor of more pragmatic reform strategies. Many of them, left with the care of illegitimate children, saw that free love was not freedom for women. Suzanne Voilquin's situation illustrates a lifetime of disappointments in the idealistic views she held, but it also shows clearly the opportunities for international experience afforded by the group. In 1834 she traveled to Egypt with the group seeking the female messiah; there she gave birth to a child (the father's name is in dispute, and the baby died within a month). The Grand Pasha of Egypt promised to build a hospital in Cairo after the outbreak of plague in 1835, but this was not done. Voilquin had helped Dr. Dussap and studied with Dr. Delong, gaining experience and learning Arabic through her work in Cairo's Coptic quarter. She returned to France in 1836 and completed a diploma in midwifery in November 1837. Meanwhile, the Saint-Simonians who had done to Louisiana included her estranged husband and her sister, Adrienne Mallard, who founded and directed a French school there; Voilquin officially divorced his wife in 1838." p. 124
      "Although all the women discussed thus far helped to construct the fertile web of communication, Anna Doyle Wheeler, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Fredrika Bremer, and Frances Power Cobbe exhibit in full measure the qualities required to put them foremost among the "matrons" who superintended the conversations about women out of which the network was constituted.
      What particularly marks these five women? It is the way they embodied in full measure a number of key characteristics. They faithfully maintained ties with women in different countries; occasionally traveled; and produced sufficient writings about their work to let us gauge the richness of their effort. Moreover, they were quite conscious of their mission in this regard, seeing themselves ad "brokers" (the network analysis term) or connection-makers for women qua women. They also worked on various campaigns or reforms on behalf of women. Important too was their reputational statue: they did their work early enough in their lives to be recognized by later followers as mentors, models, or foremothers. Finally, these "transatlantic Amazons," as one British contemporary called some of them, persistently saw themselves as international figures operating in international contexts.
      Mott, Wheeler, Stanton, Bremmer, and Cobbe are all "mothers" but not necessarily "sisters": that is, they disagreed on may issues. Conveniently, the metaphor of "matrix" in its mathematical as well as biological meaning suggests a multiplicity as well as biological meaning suggests a multiplicity of ideological beliefs. We can certainly call them all feminists, but they were different kinds of feminists. But what do we mean by this "feminism"? Current discussions of both historical and contemporary definitions are long and stimulating. At this point, suffice it to say that I am in agreement with Karen Offen's important delineation of the twin historical strands: "relational feminism" and "individualist feminism." I also concur with her general definition of feminism, which (1) acknowledges and values women's distinctness from men; (2) exhibits consciousness of women's inequity as a group problem, not merely as an individual one; and (3) advocates elimination of that inequality or injustice.
      In the nineteenth century, those arguing from the "relational" perspective (valuing the relational dimensions of selfhood which differentiate males from females) were in the majority; "individualist feminists" (stressing natural rights and the similarity of the sexes) are those most often cited as "early feminists." Still, the early relational-feminist arguments of people like Hannah More, and -- in the United States and France -- the Republican Motherhood plea for giving women better education and more equal treatment for the sake of their citizen-sons, were more likely to gain adherents and the majority necessary for any change to occur. Teenagers Caroline Wells Healey (Dall) and Ednah Dow Littlehale (Cheney) debated the issue in 1837-38 in Boston, and even Mary Wollstonecratf used Republican Motherhood in the conclusion to A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792). Both individualists and relationists can be called feminists, since there is no doubt that both wanted to change the status quo for women.
      I have divided the discussion of the four women into two chapters on the basis of this distinction, whatever their other differences. Thus Wheeler and Stanton were for the most part individualist or equal-rights feminists, though Stanton was never a socialist, as was Wheeler, and they would have also disagreed vehemently on the place of religion in a woman's life. Likewise, Bremer and Cobbe were "relational" feminists, emphasizing sexual differences; single women themselves, both nevertheless stressed woman's role as daughter and mother. Yet although they would have agreed about the importance of religion and morality, they disagreed strongly on the terms of religious belief, Bremer being a staunch Lutheran Protestant and Cobbe a Unitarian theist who rejected the divinity of Christ." pp. 133-135
Regarding The Appeal of One Half the Human Race (1825) by William Thompson and Anna Wheeler: "Finally the book addresses the question, "Is there any way to secure happiness to a group but by means of equal civil and political rights?" " p. 139
"At the end of her speech, she [Anna Wheeler] called on women to press for "a sound and liberal education" for their daughters, not being content to wait for others. Women must, she said, form groups of like-minded people, "the ultimate object will be to obtain, by all legal means, the removal of the disabilities of women, and the introduction of a national system of equal education for the Infants of both sexes." This call for an organization of women, demanding equal education and equal property and political rights, marked Wheeler as one of the earliest and most radical of feminists. Invoking the name of Frances Wrights, she showed her intellectual linkage to her freethinking contemporary, who was at the time organizing the working class in New York. Wright, said Wheeler, was a woman advocating general education for all who understood that only with the system of cooperation, as well as democratic education, could the wrongs to women be righted.
In other published pieces, under the pen name "Vlasta," she continued to promote equal education and equal civil and political rights for women, claiming that these were in men's self-interest." p. 141
"Back in America on her seventieth birthday (November 12, 1885), she [Elizabeth Cady Stanton] received cards, telegrams, and letters from England, France, Germany, and all over the United States. By that time the network was richly stranded, and Stanton's transatlantic mothering was very much a fact. In October 1886 she returned to England and then spent six months with Theodore in Paris. There she met key members of the women's movement in France -- Maria Deraismes, Leon Richer, Isabelle Bogelot (who later attended the 1888 women's congress in the United States). She also encountered the Norwegian playwright Bjornstjerne Bjornson, who, along with Henrik Ibsen, was so important to the women's cause in Scandinavia.
She returned from this sojourn -- nearly two years abroad -- only in march 1888, just in time for the International Council of Women in Washington. She had decided not to attend, and only Susan B. Anthony's pleas and cablegrams persuaded her to change her mind. From England, she sailed to New York with the beautiful young Baroness Aleksandra Gripenberg of Finland, "a very charming woman, to whom I felt a strong attraction" (410). Thus, Stanton's transatlantic mothering came full circle, as the next generation began its work." pp. 147-148
"Unlike Wheeler and Stanton, Fredrika Bremer and Frances Power Cobbe stressed women's difference from men; although not alike in religious belief, in age, or in language, they were similar in their attitude toward woman as daughter, sister, and mother. Both wrote prolifically; both remained unmarried. Like Wheeler, Stanton, and Mott, both created richly textured international networks of correspondents, visitor, and readers." p. 149
"Her first major journey was to the United States in 1849-51. There, Bremer visited many notable women, including Lucretia Mott, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Dorothea Dix, Lydia Maria Child, Lucy Stone, Elizabeth Peabody, and Fanny Kemble. Dr. Harriot Hunt of Boston was at first her physician and soon became her lifelong friend. Bremer also met slave and Indian women, abolitionists and slaveowners, working women and privileged women of leisure. She rewrote and published her letters home to sister Agathe (who died before Fredrika returned in 1851) as The Homes of the New World. That long account of her sojourn can be analyzed in terms of the narrator's ironic juxtaposition of her stance as a "separate spheres" woman (reflected in the "homes" of the title) and her position as a "masculine" explorer-traveler ("the new world"). She wrote to her friend Anne Howland in Charleston, South Carolina, that the letters were "conceived in the homes of my friends in America, and to these friends they will be dedicated." " p. 154
"In 1854 Bremer and other Swedish women philanthropists proposed an international federation of women's groups, set up to communicate country by country to a central committee. "We proposed." she wrote, "to consider ourselves as having the same native country, as belonging to the same family, and, whatever diversity of opinion there may be among us, yet to join hands [as] sisters." She called for women of all lands to join her: "Sisters . . . .in whose existence we believe and hope, here and there among the ancient kingdoms of Asia, the steppes of Siberia, or in the Imperial cities of Russia; sisters of the western countries of Europe; . . . and you, sisters in that vast new land beyond the Atlantic Ocean; . . . and you, Christian women among the nations of Africa; Christian women in the isles of the South Seas; mild, loving sisters, all over the earth. . . give us your hands! may the earth become encircled by a chain of healing, loving energies."
Bremer's plan was published in the Times (London) on August 28, 1854. Although she couched her argument in terms of the Christian responsibility of women, her organizational strategy was still quite radical: she called all women sisters, reaching for commonality beyond diversity; she asked for an organization whose basic task would be communication of different work based on the variety of national contexts; she noted that even though her own group was from a small country, it was a place to begin." p. 157
"As a result of her five-year sojourn, she [Bremer] was able to make astute observations about national character and the position of women, especially unmarried women. She published four volumes on this trip -- Life in the Old World, or Two years in Switzerland and Italy (2 vol., 1860) and Greece and then Greeks (2 vol., 1863)." p. 158
"Both her personal life and her theological and moral ideas enabled Cobbe to travel between the two "worlds" of which she was a part, giving her generosity and insight to different groups in the campaign for women. Her work on violence against women and their legal status derived from her growing beliefs about the value of the single state for women. Article and pamphlet titles reflect her journalistic fervor. For example, in "Criminals, Idiots, Women, and Minors: Is This Classification Sound" she discussed marriage law as it would look to a visitor from another planet: "Why is the property of the woman who commits Murder, and the property of the woman who commits matrimony, dealt with alike by your law?" she mischievously inquired. In "What Shall We do with Our Old Maids?" she vented her wrath on various schemes to send "redundant" women to the colonies and showed that single women have better lives than married ones. She also spoke in favor of women in the pulpit, in "The Fitness of Women for the Ministry of Religion." "The Final Cause of Woman" enunciated her position that woman must not be defined in terms of others; only a theory of "woman as Noun," not "woman as Adjective," was acceptable to her. Women are morally autonomous, but they are also daughters and potential mothers and therefor have qualities that set them apart from men. this insistence on sexual difference as well as equality is an essential ingredient of Cobbe's feminism." p. 166-167
"Her [Gripenberg's] account of her travels, A Half Year in the New World (1889), is a fascinating travelogue from a foreigner's perspective on the situation of American women in different regions, especially the Southwest." p. 179
"Wells-Barnett was the first to show that lynching usually had economic rather than sexual causes, using accounts in white newspapers to gather statistics on age, sex, race, and charges against the victims. She also confirmed lynchings of women, children, and white men to counteract stereotyped beliefs about black men. For our purposes, what is important about Ida B. Wells-Barnett's work is that she utilized transatlantic contacts, many with women, which had been set up two generations earlier." p. 185

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