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William Thompson

(1775-1833)

Born with the proverbial silver-spoon in his mouth, William Thompson devoted his life to ameliorating the condition of those less fortunate than himself. He was a staunch friend of laborers: his lectures enhanced their self-esteem and encouraged them to form trade associations, to devise worker education programs, and to learn to manage their own Mechanics' Institutes. Later a member of the co-operative movement and a student of Saint Simon and Charles Fourier, Thompson was truly a utilitarian who believed in the greatest good for the greatest number of people. Unfortunately, working-class men were not always comfortable with proposals to enhance the status of women in the home, in the workplace, and in society at large, but Thompson never missed an opportunity to spread the gospel of utilitarianism as applied to womankind.

Known in his own time as probably the best writer on political economics since Adam Smith published the Wealth of Nations and as a leader in the co-operative movement, he was highly regarded as a political thinker and social analyst. According to Dooley, "Thompson's writings are of a piece – they are a thorough study of the many ways in which human liberty is denied in the name of the 'public good,' the 'security of the State' or 'true interest' of the poor and marginalized – as judged by those with status and public power. "

Early nineteenth century utilitarian philosophers continued the Enlightenment investigation of political and economic systems that would best serve human's needs, the system which promoted the "greatest good for the greatest number" of people. Thompson and his friend Anna Wheeler traveled in the same social circles as James Mill, Jerry Bentham (an early advocate of birth control), Frances Place (also an early advocate of birth control), and the young John Stuart Mill. Thompson was influenced by the writings of Robert Owen, Thomas Paine, La Mettrie, Lamarck, Diderot, Voltaire, Condorcet, Mary Wollstonecrate, and William Godwin. Wheeler's French connections included Henri Saint-Simon and Charles Fourier, then later Flora Tristan, Derirée Veret, Suzanne Voilquin, Marie-Reine Guindorff, and Jeanne Deroin, many of whom we will come upon later in this series.

Thompson and Wheeler were appalled to find that another utilitarian could simply refuse to consider the happiness of one-half of the people, the female half of the population, when describing what constituted "good government." James Mill, father of renowned nineteenth-century economic and political philosopher John Stuart Mill, wrote in his treatise On Government (1819)

One thing is pretty clear, that all those individuals whose interests are indisputably included in those of other individual may be struck off from political rights without inconvenience. In this light may be viewed all children up to a certain age, whose interests are involved in those of their parents. In this light also women may be regarded, the interests of almost all of whom is involved either in that of their fathers, or in that of their husbands." Encyclopedia Britannica, Supplement, Article 'On Government' p. 500

Tired of waiting for others more in the mainstream of Utilitarian thought to rebut James Mill's assertion, Thompson and Wheeler took up the cudgel and fought the battle themselves. In that glorious pre-twentieth-century tradition of giving a book a very complete title, Thompson's 1825 rebuttal of Mill was entitled Appeal of One Half of the Human Race, Women, Against the Pretensions of the Other, Men, to Retain Them in Political and Thence in Civil and Domestic, Slavery; In Reply to a Paragraph of Mr. Mill's Celebrated 'Article On Government' after which appears the name of William Thompson, a description of Thompson, (author of "An Inquiry into the Distribution of Wealth") and the offending paragraph (complete with citation) quoted above.

Probably the most insightful analysis of the condition of women since Mary Wollstonecraft published The Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) and Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel authored On Improving the Status of Women (1792), Appeal is a direct response to and a refutation of James Mill's assertion that women, children, and idiots need not vote because their interests were subsumed into the interests of another. From the first page of the book, Thompson makes it clear that the vote is a *necessity* (none of that namby-pamby 'rights' talk for him) for women because women's interests often differ from men's interests and women must have the ballot to protect their interests.

A comprehensive statement of economic, political, domestic, legal, religious, and civil disabilities of women, Thompson discusses wife beating (now known under the euphemism of "domestic violence"), laws which discriminate against women, the religious underpinnings of discrimination against women, educational deprivation of women, and women's lack of economic opportunities. From the first page, the reader knows that the author is not going to pull any intellectual punches – that he understands the position of women and means to attack women's subjugation at its root. A sweeping indictment of patriarchy in its many forms, Thompson aimed to raise women's consciousness sufficiently that they would fight for their rights, to rouse women from their stupor to fight on their own behalf.

Yet, Thompson concedes that although political power for women is a *necessity* for them to find happiness, it is not *sufficient* for women to find happiness. For him, social attitudes and habits beyond the law must be changed to ensure emancipation for the marginalized of society, including women. Other needed changes include substantially redistributing wealth, improving the workplace, changing the terms of marriage including the elimination of domestic violence, and giving women educational and professional opportunities.

Considered radical in its own time, Thompson's book was largely ignored, although it was read and debated in the most radical political and social circles of the time, among utilitarian philosophers and Unitarian ministers, some of whom we shall meet later in this series. One reader was utilitarian philosopher John Stuart Mill, son of the same James Mill who wrote the offending article which prompted Thompson to write Appeal. John Stuart Mill would pen his own immortal feminist manifesto almost half a century later, a manifesto that circumnavigated the globe and spurred the creation of woman suffrage scieties wherever it was read.

In his "Introductory Letter to Mrs. Wheeler" Thompson openly acknowledges his intellectual debt to Anna Wheeler, a close friend who was by then widowed, stating

Honored with your acquaintance, ambitious of your friendship, I have endeavoured to arrange the expression of those feelings, sentiments, and reasonings, which have emanated from your mind. In the following pages you will find discussed on paper, what you have so often discussed in conversation – a branch of that high and important subject of morals and legislation, the condition of women, of one half the human race, in what is called civilized society. p. 45

I believe Thompson's claim in total: this intensely feminist analysis would have been difficult for any woman, even a woman who lived through the deprivations of the day, to achieve. To achieve the understanding of women's lives that the author obviously possessed would have been nearly impossible for a man who did not have a staunchly female feminist guide.

Anna Doyle Wheeler, daughter from a prebendary of Fennor Parish, had no formal education, but did learn French, geography, reading and writing. Political conversations abounded in her household. Married at age 15, she separated from her drunken, wife-beating sot of a husband 12 years later when she sought refuge in Guernsey with her uncle, General Sir John Doyle, then governor. While in Guernsey she met visiting dignitaries, heads of state, and gentlemen from the diplomatic services. Anna left Guernsey in 1816 to enroll her daughters, then 14 and 15, in schools in London, then sojourned in France for a time. To her relief, her husband died, bankrupt, in 1820. She returned to London where she meet William Thompson, Robert Owen, Jeremy Bentham, Frances Wright, and other co-operators. She supported herself in part by translating works from French into English, including the works of French Owenites and Charles Fourier. She moved to France in 1823 where she met Fourier and spent the rest of her life moving between France and England. One of the first women to mount the rostrum in England, Wheeler, staunchly feminist, gave a public speech in 1829 in a chapel near Finsbury Square, London on "Rights of Women. "

A close friend of William Thompson, Wheeler, devastated by Thompson's death, wrote shortly thereafter

[He] loved companionship; but his generous feelings and his sense of justice revolted against the system that would make him master of a slave, ignorant and docile to his will. . . . serving through fear and necessity, rather than from a well-defined and rational affection.

This series of articles is devoted to the woman suffrage movement and the acquisition of other forms of female political power in nineteenth-century Europe. Thompson's entire book is devoted to explaining why the vote is *necessary* for women so almost any page could be excerpted and still remain on topic.

First, from ' Introductory Letter to Mrs Wheeler'

"Now this is all that is meant by affording to women (under the system of individual competition) equal enjoyments with men. The simple and modest request is, that they may be permitted equal enjoyments with men, provided they can be the free and equal development and exercise of their faculties procure for themselves such enjoyments. They ask the same means that men possess of acquiring every species of knowledge, of unfolding every one of their facilities of mind and body that can be made tributary to their happiness. They ask every facility of access to every art, occupation, profession, from the highest to the lowest, without one exception, to which their inclination and talents may direct and may fit them to occupy. They ask the removal of all restraints and exclusions not applicable to men of equal capacities. They ask for perfectly equal political, civil and domestic rights. They ask for equal obligations and equal punishments from the law with men in case of infraction of the same law by either party. They ask for an equal system of morals, founded on utility instead of caprice and unreasoning despotism, in which the same action attended with the same portion of approbation or disapprobation; in which every pleasure, accompanied or followed by no preponderant evil, should be equally permitted to women and to men; in which every pleasure accompanied or followed by preponderant evil should be equally censured in women and in men." pp. 170 – 171

"Now is it possible to conceive that any set of legislators, male or - female, particularly men, would not be more inclined to make and preserve laws of entire reciprocity and equal justice between women and men, when they knew that their constituents were equally balanced and that injustice on their part would necessarily enlist a few of either party amongst the injured half, and thus create a majority of the whole constituents against them? Under the system of exclusive political rights though nearly one half of men joined with the whole of women in reprobation of unequal laws, those laws, as long as there was a majority of one of the whole males in favor of injustice, could persevere in injustice in contempt of the wishes of three fourths, wanting one, of the whole race. Under the system of non-exclusion, all men but one could not effect injustice against women. The one just man giving his casting vote to the equal votes of women, would wipe away from men the opprobrium of the meditated wrong. Who can doubt then of the necessity of the enjoyment of equal political rights by women as a preservative against the possibility of the monstrous evil of three fourths, wanting one of every community being every day liable to be oppressed by one fourth plus one? Nothing less than giving equal rights to all. Men and women, can guard against such evils, can promote the equal happiness of all.

A second reason why women, in addition to equal laws and an equal system of morals, should also possess equal political rights and be eligible to all offices, (if so disposed, and not by rotation or compulsion), like men is, that exclusive legislators, particularly men as exclusive legislators for women, though ever so sincerely inclined to promote the happiness of those whom they exclude equally with their own, must be liable to errors from want of knowledge, from false judgments. How can exclusive legislators know the interests of those who are not their constituents of those whom they never consult, who have no control over them? Not what they, the legislators, are pleased arbitrarily to call their interests without having any intercourse with them, without any means of discovering them, but what the excluded themselves think to be their interest? Or at least what those amongst the excluded who choose to think at all, deem to be their interest? In case of difference of opinion between legislators and those for whose benefit regulations are said to be made (as suppose the insolent and stultifying law or custom of preventing women from addressing numbers of their fellow-creatures in a public room or assembly), how is the legislator to find out this opinion, when none of those affected by the regulation, and who choose to think at all about it, have any means of making their sentiments known to him as their representative?" pp. 181 – 182

"Thus does it appear that no equal system of morals, that no equal system of laws, can be relied upon by women as affording them an equal chance of happiness, in proportion to their powers and faculties, natural or acquired, with men, if not accompanied and supported by equal political rights. Without them they can never be regarded by men as really their equals, they can never attain that respectability and dignity in the social scale, which would cause either the bona fide execution or the permanence of equal laws or equal morals. They could not respect themselves. All their blessings would hang on a straw, the continued good dispositions or good judgments of those whose immediate apparent interest must ever, under the system of exclusion, seem to be opposed to theirs. From the physical organization of women, and consequent greater tendency to domesticity and confinement than men, they must be more apt to undervalue the relative importance of the effects of distant and comprehensive regulations; whence the greater necessity of the check and exercise of political rights in them than even in men, in order to counteract this unfavorable tendency of circumstances to inattention to such matters. The possession of equal political rights, if not a complete check (because there can be no complete check on human inclinations and intellect, themselves imperfect), is the best the present state of knowledge affords on old habits of injustice and errors of judgment. Under the shield of free inquiry, the real interests of all would gradually be discovered, acknowledged, and practised." pp. 186 -187

"Strictly speaking, the examination of our first question, namely, "Are the interests of women in point of fact involved in those of men?" was a sufficient reply to the paragraph in the "Article on Government". That monstrous assertion disproved, the whole fabric built upon it, necessarily falls to the ground. If the interests of women are not involved in those of men, the law ought to secure to them equal political rights: this is established by the reasoning of the "Article" itself. The discussion of the two last questions, therefore, were works of supererogation. Even so they may give an impulse to the minds of some of those who have been all their lives benumbed by the withering influence of an insolent domination, which, not satisfied with controlling the outward actions, withholds knowledge from the mind as well as physical development from the body, and completes its odious work, not satisfied with mere ignorance and prostration of all the faculties of its victims, by inculcating submission to arbitrary will as a moral duty, and encompassing the slave with a superstitious horror of its own freedom.

Women of England! Women, in whatever country ye breathe wherever ye breathe, degraded-awake! Awake to the contemplation of the happiness that awaits you when all your faculties of mind and body shall be fully cultivated and developed; when every path in which ye can exercise those improved faculties shall be laid open and rendered delightful to you, even as to them who now ignorantly enslave and degrade you. If degradation from long habitude have lost its sting, if the iron have penetrated so deeply into your frame that it has been gradually taken up into the system and mingles unperceived amidst the fluids of your life; if the prostration of reason and the eradication of feeling have kept pace within you, so that you are insensible alike to what you suffer and to what you might enjoy,—your case were all but hopeless. Nothing less, then, than the sight presented before your eyes, of the superior happiness enjoyed by other women, under arrangements of perfect equality with men, could arouse you. Such a sight, even under such circumstances, would excite your envy and kindle up all your extinct desires. But you are not so degraded. The unvaried despotism of so many thousand years, has not so entirely degraded you, has not been able to extinguish within you the feelings of nature, the love of happiness and of equal justice. The united exertions of law, superstition, and pretended morals of past ages of ignorance, have not entirely succeeded. There is still a germ within you, the love of happiness, coeval with your existence and never to cease but when "life itself shall please no more", which shall conduct you, feeble as it now is, under the guidance of wisdom and benevolence, to that perfect equality of knowledge, sympathy, and enjoyment with men, which the greatest sum of happiness for the whole race demands.

Sleeps there an infant on your bosom, to the level of whose intellect the systematic despotism and pitiful jealousy of man have not sought and for the most part successfully sought, to chain down yours? Does no blush rise amongst you-swell no breast with indignation, at the enormous wrong? Simple as ye are, have ye become enamoured of folly? Do you indeed believe it to be a source of power and of happiness? Look to your masters: does knowledge in their hands remain idle? Is it with them no source of power and happiness? Think ye then indeed that it is of the use of what are called your personal charms alone that man is jealous? There is not a quality of mind which his animal propensities do not grudge you: not one, those only excepted which, like high-seasoned or far-fetched sauces, render you, as objects of sense, more stimulating to his purely selfish desires. Do ye pretend to enjoy with him, at this banquet of bought or commanded sensuality, the sensuality of prostitution or of marriage? He has a system of domineering hypocrisy, which he calls morals, which brands with the name of vice your enjoyment, while it lauds with the name of virtue, or gilds with that of innocent gratification, his." p. 190 - 192

Footnotes:

1 Dooley, p. 3
2 Dooley, p. 14
3 Dooley, p. 15
4 Dooley, p. 12
5 Dooley, p. 9
6 Dooley, p. 10

References:

William Thompson, Dolores Dooley (ed.), Appeal of One Half of the Human Race, Women,Against the Pretensions of the Other, Men [(1825), reprinted Cork, Ireland: Cork University Press, 1997]

On-Line Resources:

The Appeal of One Half of the Human Race, Women, Against The Pretensions of the Other Half, Men to Retain Them in Political and Thence Civil and Domestic Slavery , William Thompson, Edited and introduced by Dolores Dooley, Department of Philosophy, University College, Cork (commercial site, but a nice description, nonetheless, of the book)

Extracts from Appeal of One-half of the Human Race, Women

Another Excerpt from Appeal of One Half The Human Race, Women, against the Pretensions of the Other Half, Men, by William Thompson and Anna Wheeler, 1825, pp.187-192, 196-202.

Yet Another Excerpt: William Thompson (and Anna Doyle Wheeler), Appeal of One Half of the Human Race, Women, against the Pretensions of the Other Half, Men (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown and Green, 1825)

Biography of William Thompson

Return to Women's History Month 2003 Table of Contents

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last updated February 2003