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Anna Doyle Wheeler
1785 - 1848
Considered by Maggie McFadden not only as a nineteenth-century Mother of the Matrix, her term for women who formed a cross-Atlantic interconnected communications web between feminists, but as "perhaps the most important single builder of cross-national women's connections during the early period, " Anna Doyle, daughter of a prebendary from Fennor Parish, had no formal education, but did learn French, geography, reading and writing. Political conversations abounded in her household. Married at age 15 to the young heir Francis Massey Wheeler, her marriage was not a happy one. Wheeler took refuge from her drunken sot of a husband in books, especially the works of French Philosophers and Mary Wollstonecraft. After 12 years of marriage, she separated from her husband 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. Her husband died in 1820. Left without a penny and, consequently, dependent on her own resources, she eked out a living on her allowance from her family and by the income she earned from translating works from French into English, including the works of French Owenites and Charles Fourier. Her friends helped to support her, too. For the rest of her life, she would travel from town to town, principally London, Dublin, Caen, and Paris, to live with friends and family, in the process spreading the news and ideas of the feminist movement far and wide.
She returned to London where she meet William Thompson, Robert Owen, Jeremy Bentham, Frances Wright, and other co-operators. Wheeler and Thompson became close friends and traveled in the same social circles which included 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. Wheeler moved to France in 1823 where she met Charles Fourier and began a long association with him in the role of translator of his works.
Angered by James Mill's article 'On Government' in the 1819 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, tired of waiting for other Utilitarians to reply to Mill, and, by his own admission, inspired by Wheeler, in 1825 Thompson wrote Appeal of One Half of the Human Race, Women, Against the Pretensions of the Other, Men, a work that is *completely* devoted to explaining why the equal civil and political rights, including the vote, is *necessary* for women. His 'Introductory Letter to Mrs. Wheeler' credits Wheeler with many of the ideas contained in the work. Thompson thought enough of Wheeler that he left Wheeler an annuity of £100 in his will.
One of the first women to mount the rostrum in England, Wheeler gave a staunchly feminist, public speech in 1829 in a chapel near Finsbury Square, London on "Rights of Women." Noting the arguments men use to justify their claim of superiority, Wheeler refuted each of them in turn. She encouraged women to work together "to obtain. . . the removal of the disabilities of women and the introduction of a national system of equal education for the Infants of both sexes." She concluded the speech by calling for the creation of a organization which would work to improve the status of women and remove the disabilities women endure.
While in France in the early 1830s, Wheeler joined the group of women which formed around the journal Tribune des femmes. Wheeler's French connections included Henri Saint-Simon and Charles Fourier, later Flora Tristan, Derirée Veret, Suzanne Voilquin, Marie-Reine Guindorff, and Jeanne Deroin, some of whom we will come upon later in this series.
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.
By 1840, Wheeler, then 55 years old, was in poor health and requested her friends to send no visitors to her home. Although Wheeler withdrew from active participation in the feminist movement of the time, she remained in contact through the mail with her old friends. Invited to participate in the French Revolution of 1848, Wheeler had to turn down the invitation – she was much too sick. She died later that year.
Today's excerpt, Letter from Vlasta was published under the pseudonym Vlasta and was Wheeler's response to Constantia in The Crisis (August, 1833).
Footnotes:
References:
Bonnie S. Anderson, Joyous Greetings: The First International Women's Movement 1830 – 1860 [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000]
Margaret MaFadden, Golden Cables of Sympathy: The Transatlantic Sources of Nineteenth-Century Feminism [Lexington, Ky: University of Kentucky Press, 1999]
Karen Offen, European Feminisms 1700 – 1795: A Political History [Stanford, Ca: Stanford University Press, 2000]
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]
Anna Wheeler, 'To the Editor of The Crisis (1833)', The Crisis, August 1833 [reprinted in Marie Mulvey Roberts and Tamae Mizuta (ed.), The Rebels, Irish Feminists [London: Routledge / Thoemmes Press, 1995]
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last updated February 2003