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Nineteenth-Century Advocates of Political Power for Women (Non-US)

Introduction

The history of the quest for woman suffrage in the nineteenth-century is primarily a story of the establishment and extension of democracy in Europe and the English colonies in the 19th century. Consequently, the women highlighted in this Women's History Month presentation are primarily European women and European women transported to mainly British colonies.

In each of the countries in which we will explore the woman suffrage movement, the quest for woman suffrage is bound up in the story of men's quest for suffrage (the replacement of an absolute monarchy by a constitutional monarchy or a republican form of government and the consequent growth of democracy) and broader social reform movements of the time.

Historians often speak of the "long nineteenth-century", meaning the period encompassing the French Revolution to the beginning of World War I (1789 to 1914). The dominant cultural attitudes of a society do not necessarily change according to nice round numbers on the calendar. The change from a social outlook in which absolute monarchies dominated Western discourse to a social outlook in which democracy dominated Western discourse began with the French revolution and took a great leap forward, at least in Europe, with World War I. By the end of WW I, subjects of monarchs became citizens of nations as democracy in the form of constitutional monarchies or republics replaced absolute monarchies throughout Europe.

The dominant forces in nineteenth-century European history can be grouped into two very broad and related classes, political forces and economic forces. The growing wealth and population of well-to-do and middle-class businessmen were no longer willing to abide by a political system in which they had no voice. They used their wealth, talents, and numbers to extend the political system to encompass themselves. As part of this process, the questions "Who are citizens of a nation?" and "What constitutes a nation?" became urgent questions.

Political philosophers throughout Europe discussed the meaning of citizenship and nation. Was a citizen of a nation a person who had the right to vote? If so, then women, indigent men, and minors, all lacking the right to vote, were not citizens. Yet, they were expected to pay taxes, were subject to all the laws of the state, and received benefits from the state, such as use of public schools.

If people who paid taxes, lived and worked in a nation, and used public services were all citizens of the state, then what about people who immigrated from one country to another either voluntarily or involuntarily without the intension of giving up their citizenship in one country for the citizenship in another? Were they citizens of whatever nation they lived in by virtue of their residency and work?

What was a nation? Was it a group of people who were ruled by a common government? If so, the polyglot conglomeration of peoples that formed the Austro-Hungarian Empire or the Russian Empire formed nations, even though their people often could not speak to one another because they did not share a common language.

Was a nation a group of people who spoke the same language and shared the same history and culture? A sovereign country named Poland ceased to exist in 1795 with the third partition of Poland in which the lands inhabited by Polish speaking peoples were divided among the Prussian, Austrian, and Russian Empires. If a nation is a group of people who speak the same language and share a common history, then did Polish nation existed even though no independent, sovereign Polish political entity existed? Was a nation a group of people with a common language and heritage? German speaking peoples existed then, and exist today, in a number of countries. Does that mean that the German-speaking people taken together form a different nation than the political boundaries which differentiate the countries in which they live?

As can be seen, although the concepts of citizenship and nationality appear to be simple on the surface, applying those concepts to real-world situtations can be quite complex.

Throughout the century, major events across the continent reflected and responded to the events that occurred in France as well as reflected each country's own domestic concerns. The French Revolution, the march of Napoleon's troops across Europe which spread the ideals of the French Revolution -- Liberty, Equality, and Brotherhood --throughout the continent, the defeat of Napoleon, the reaction against the French Revolution by the newly reinstalled or invigorated monarchies, and the Revolution of 1848 profoundly affected the attitudes and policies of governments and the aspirations of common men across Europe. These events caused many men to fear the tyranny of mob rule under a democracy. Yet, the success of the radical American experiment in democracy convinced others that men were capable of governing themselves without an overlord of one sort or another.

As the long nineteenth-century opened, the Industrial Revolution, lead by England, was still in its infancy and the vast majority of people lived the way their ancestors had lived for generations, relying on the muscles of man and beast to fulfill their daily tasks. As the long nineteenth-century closed, the Industrial Revolution was well under way, the age of steam was giving way to the age of electricity and the age of the internal combustion engine fueled by oil, and change became a way of life. World's Fairs were hosted in one country after another as places to showcase a country's industrial prowess. Sailing ships and oar powered barges had given way to steam-engine powered railroads and ships. Natural gas provided heat, power for cooking, and light in many homes while the avant-guard lived in homes powered by electricity. City water, delivered to individual homes and businesses, replaced the hand-pumped water wells on the street corner while city sewer systems cleansed city streets of much human and animal refuse, both together extending the human lifespan by ameliorating water-borne epidemics that had ravaged cities for generations. Telephones and telegraphs enabled people separated by long distances to much more easily communicate with one another, making the world a smaller and more interconnected place and increasing the tempo of daily life.

Women's lives as women changed profoundly, too. The first mass market industrial commodity was unsurprisingly cloth. Traditionally, each household was responsible for producing the raw materials from which cloth was made by growing cotton or flax or by raising sheep or goats, then going through the lengthy process of processing the raw materials so that it could be spun into the miles and miles of thread required to weave even a modest sized piece of cloth. After the thread was spun, it still had to be woven into cloth, fulled, dyed, and processed in other ways to bring it to the point where it could be fashioned into an item of apparel or a piece of household linen. Industrial production of cloth transformed women's lives in a number of ways, sometimes for better and sometimes for worse. By purchasing cloth instead of manufacturing it, (1) women saved enormous amounts of time, time which was applied in other pursuits, (2) women's contribution to household economics changed from being a manufacturer of a commercial product to a consumer of a commercial product, and (3) women were empowered to leave the homestead to work in the factories where cloth was produced.

As the century progressed, the upper-class ideal of a non-working (outside the home, that is) wife filtered down to the middle- and working- classes. Women, once vital contributors to the family's economy, were being turned into consumers and in some ways, male status symbols. Partly to fill their time and partly from indignation at social wrongs, many middle-class women turned to philanthropy and social reform movements, fueling the social reform movements of the nineteenth-century. As will be seen, time after time, when women became involved in social reform movements -- perhaps abolition, temperance, social purity, penal reform, or the creation of a public school system -- they discovered that their second class status as citizens hampered their ability to be successful reformers. Women came to understand that they would have to create social and political space in which to operate in order to be effective reformers for their selected cause. By the third quarter of the century, women began to create organizations with the sole purpose of winning suffrage for women (ie, of acquiring political power for women) and of working on other issues on behalf of women as women.

Men who were pressing for political change created a society in which men were relatively free to question the appropriateness of long-standing traditions. Not unexpectedly, women used these relatively liberal social constraints to question long-standing traditions in the home, industrial and educational institutions, church, and state which kept them subordinated to men.

The interplay of these forces -- the pressure to assimilate increasingly large segments of a nation's population into the political system, nationalism, the industrial revolution, the rise of the middle-class, the spread of literacy, and the large-scale creation of social reform movements -- worked themselves out in each European country in different ways. Each country had its own domestic concerns that in some ways restricted possible responses.

Not until 1870 when it was unified as the Kingdom of Italy can one speak of a country named Italy. Until then, the Italian Peninsula was a collection of independent city-states, small countries under the control of a local nobleman, and, of course, the Papal Estates where the pontiff of Rome was secular overlord in addition to being the Pope.

At about the same time as Italy became unified, Germany finally coalesced under the domination of Prussia from about 30 independent principalities.

As noted above, Poland ceased to exist in the nineteenth-century as an independent country, but continued to exist in the hearts and minds of the Polish people.

Nationalism was a potent force in the Austrian and Rusian Empires as various ethnic groups pressed for autonomy and independence, creating pressures to dissolve those empires. Indeed, in the second half of the century, the ethnic pressure on the Austrian monarchs forced the empire to become a dual empire, the Austro-Hunagrian Empire.

The Spanish people were still trying to throw off the yoke of the Roman Catholic Church in political affairs. To the eternal shame of its leaders, Spain did not formally abolish the Inquisition until the 1830s.

Great Britain, the superpower of the nineteenth-century (remember "The sun never set on the British Empire"), was a source of stability. Perhaps wizened by its experience with the American rebels, successive British governments recognized the political pressures and responded to them with sufficient changes in the lives of the people to avoid outright revolution.

Denmark, one of the most absolute of the absolute monarchies at the beginning of the century, was also blessed with a progressive monarch who directed the country's path to a constitutional democracy, enabling the Danish monarchy to survive the forces that swept so many monarchs and nobles from their realms in the wake of World War I. Russia, like the US, was slow to give even minimal freedom to all of its people, not freeing the serfs until about the time of the American Civil War.

Into this cauldron of social pressures for change went women's quest for independence, dignity, respect, and autonomy in their daily lives and their fair share of political power. Always, like a volcano, women's hopes and dreams bubbled and boiled for a better life. During periods of reform and revolution, women's hopes and dreams burst through the overlaying crust of tradition and enabled them to articulate their desires for political equality. During the periods of repression, those hopes and dreams manifested themselves in other ways, often by women coming together to create institutions (primary and secondary schools, colleges, and post-graduate universities) and reform movements (temperance movement, "social purity" movement) to improve the lives of women as women. In those times, women emphasized opening educational and workplace opportunities for women of all classes, the sexual double standard, women's legal disabilities, violence against women, and a variety of institutional reforms. The quest for woman suffrage was international from the very beginning, the idea spreading from country to country, taking root first in one place then another, bubbling to the surface from time to time when it was safe to openly espouse the idea, taking refuge underground and in foreign lands in times of repression and reaction.

The topic for Women's History Month 2003 is Advocates of Political Power for Women in the Nineteenth-Century. The topic for 2003 is restricted to the quest to extend political power to women in countries other than the US. Sometimes that political power is manifested by supporting suffrage for women. In those countries were there was no democracy and no active democratic movement for women or men, the term "political power" is broadened to include the advocacy of female magistrates, lawyers, judges, and state councilors. For the first time, a Sunshine for Women's Women's History Presentation will highlight a handful of men, men who were influential in this phase of women's history.

From time to time, political power for women actually decreased throughout the century. For example, in Great Britain, some women had always been allowed to vote. But when the 1832 Reform Act was passed increasing the number of men eligible for the vote, the word "male" was inserted into the law, barring even those women who had once voted from the vote. In this and similar cases, men were responding to a vocal minority of women and their supporters who were advocating suffrage for women.

The individuals highlighted in this presentation are presented roughly in historical order, although at times it was difficult to date a woman's work relative to the contributions of other women. Sometimes a woman was active for a relatively long stretch of time. For example, Frenchwomen Eugénie Mouchon Niboyet and Jeanne Deroin were both active in woman's rights activities from the beginning of the Saint Simonian movement in the 1830s to the end of the Revolution of 1848. The two women worked with one another both in the Saint Simonian movement and during the Revolution of 1848. Yet, I placed Niboyet with other 1830s activists and Deroin with other revolutionaries of 1848. Why? Well, in the biography for Niboyet, I wanted to highlight the newspaper she ran in Lyon in 1834. In the biography for Deroin, I wanted to highlight her activities of 1848 and the influence of her activities on the woman's movement, especially the woman's movements outside of France, after 1848.

For another example, at other times, vociferous support for woman's political empowerment existed for only a short time and several works appeared almost simultaneously, as in the groups of works appearing during the French Revolution, during the various European Revolutions of 1848, and in the 1870s in response to John Stuart Mill's The Subjugation of Women.

At still other times, one woman and her work was overshadowed by the presence of another person or event, as when Helen Taylor was overshadowed first by her mother, Harriet Taylor Mill, then by her step-father, John Stuart Mill. The three were intellectually intimate and shared many ideas. JS Mill makes his willingness to accept his wife's and his (step)daughter's ideas quite clear. The three discussed and debated issues, influencing and improving one another's ideas. Rightly or wrongly, Helen did not come into prominence in her own right until both her mother and her step-father passed from the scene.

On another note, I would like to discuss my sources. I am not an historian either by trade or by training. Sunshine for Women is my hobby. I do not have a university or college reference library at hand to look up articles in a large collection of journals or on microfilm. Everything I write comes from books that are in my own personal collection -- books that have recently been in print or old books that I find on the used book market. As such, my sources are limited to those books I have discovered on my own, either by carefully reading bibliographies in books I already possess or by being advised from time to time by another lover of women's history to find a particular work. Since my entire collection of books has been purchased within the last ten years, my sources should be accessible to anyone interested in women's history and certainly to serious scholars of women's history. I do not fluently read any language other than English, so all of my sources are in English. Consequently, the men and women who have been highlighted here are those whose works were either originally in English or have been translated into English. I know that there are additional men and women who deserve pride of place on this list, but I have not been able to find anything in English on them and their works. Specifically, I have not been able to find information about nineteenth-century women's movements in Spain, Poland (such as it was), or Russia and I have found very little information on such movements in Italy, although I can find scattered references to women's movements, including debates on political power for women, in Spain, Poland (such as it was), Russia, and Italy. Consequently, the works of English-writing women and the works of women who have been written about in English have, alas, been emphasized. Hence, the absence of women from other lands should be taken as absence of available information on this topic to the writer of this series, not necessarily as an absence of the movement itself. So sorry. If you have additional information on the quest for political power for women in the 19th century, I would love to hear from you. If you would like to contribute to women's history and you know a foreign language, why not read some of these women's works and translate them into English?

As a final note, I began this series as a collection of essays on women's rights activists in the nineteenth-century from countries other than the US. My interest in the topic was to uncover information on the women Matilda Joslyn Gage would have known or known of. Gage died in the 1890s, so I tried to focus on women who were active in the first three-quarters of the time period. I discovered a wealth of information on the topic so I narrowed the subject down to the quest for political power for women with the intension of following up in 2004 with women's rights activists excluding suffragists. I expected to find something much like the American woman suffrage movement. Could I be more wrong? I learned a lot of European history. Then, to top it off, when I finished, I discovered that there weren't supposed to be any woman suffragists before the last quarter of the nineteenth century when the first organizations to fight exclusively for women suffrage were created. As you will see, for almost a century prior to that time, the issue of woman suffrage was written about and debated and it wasn't until a sufficient number of the "right sort of" women (women with lots of ready cash to invest in the effort and with connections to the rich and powerful) accepted the idea that woman suffrage organizations were created. The story you are about to read here often finishes in each country at the point where most stories of the history of women suffrage begin – when the first organizations to fight for women suffrage were created. Many of the women you will read about here were considered during their own time by large numbers of their contemporaries as radicals, revolutionaries, kooks, and cracked-pots and by their friends as the avant-garde of women's rights activists, and it is only now that they are coming into prominence in their own right. These women were often on the fringe of social reform movements, they were "the fringe of the fringe" if you will.

I even discovered two works which addressed political power for women from earlier times, one from the 17th century [Francois Poullain de la Barre, Translated by A. Daniel Frankforter and Paul J. Morman, The Equality of the Two Sexes 1673, reprinted by Lewison, Lampeter, Queenston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1989] and one from the 18th century [Sophia, Woman Not Inferior to Man: or, A short and modest Vindication of the natural Right of the Fair-Sex to a perfect Equality of Power, Dignity, and Esteem, with Men by Sophia, A Person of Quality (London: John Hawkins) c. 1740] -- but more about them later in this series.

I hope you enjoy with series. I sure had fun learning about European history, meeting new women, reading their works, and writing about them. I guarantee you will meet at least one person you have never heard of before. If I'm wrong, I'll take you out to dinner – after all, that means you know a lot more about this topic than I do and I want to pick your brain. ;-) Oh, I almost forgot. I got a new computer this year – and it has a scanner. Some of my "excerpts" got a little out of control -- but since the works were originally written in English, the copyrights on them expired long ago. ;-)

References:

1. Bonnie S. Anderson, Joyous Greetings: The First International Women's Movement 1830 – 1860 [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000]
2. Elizabeth Wayland Barber, Women's Work the First 20,000 Years: Women, Cloth, and Society in Early Times [W. W. Norton & Co., 1994]
3. Margaret MaFadden, Golden Cables of Sympathy: The Transatlantic Sources of Nineteenth-Century Feminism [Lexington, Ky: University of Kentucky Press, 1999]
4. Karen Offen, European Feminisms 1700 – 1795: A Political History [Stanford, Ca: Stanford University Press, 2000]

As a part of the conclusions, I will include a comprehensive list of works used as reference material for this collection of essays.

Return to Women's History Month 2003 Table of Contents

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last updated February 2003