The Making of Modern Woman

Lynn Abrams

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317876670
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

Modern woman was made between the French Revolution and the end of the First World War. In this time, the women of Europe crafted new ideas about their sexuaity, motherhood, the home, the politics of femininity, and their working roles. They faced challenges about what a woman should be and how she should act.  From domestic ideology to women's suffrage, this book charts the contests for woman's identity in the epoch-shaping nineteenth century.

Part I

IMAGINING WOMAN

Chapter 1

BODY, MIND AND SPIRIT

A woman’s identity and her experience are influenced, in part, by the ways in which she is ‘constructed’ by others. This means that the language used to describe her and what the ideals of womanhood and femininity should be, are just as important for her experience of life as the economic and social structures that surround her. To understand the structures of womanly life we must appreciate the construction of the woman. Part I of this book is concerned with this. We look at how woman and her role were imagined by philosophers, scientists, writers and women themselves in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Constructions of that abstract concept ‘woman’ – her body, her mind and her role – were all important in helping to determine how she was treated in European society. At the same time though, women both negotiated and challenged these constructions through their everyday actions and their writings.

So much of the verbal construction of our modern world began with the Enlightenment. For many historians of the modern period it is the eighteenth-century Enlightenment which signals a turning away from the darkness and superstition of the early modern period and an awakening in the light, symbolised by rationality, science and knowledge. Centring on France, but extending across most of Europe from Edinburgh to St Petersburg, and lasting some seventy years, the Enlightenment was at its essence an intellectual, philosophical and scientific investigation into the human condition and the physical world, characterised by a desire to apply fresh observation to old ways of thinking. Old shibboleths were opened up for discussion and subjected to reasoned debate. Enlightenment writers and thinkers addressed the ‘science of man’: the human condition, family, marriage and gender relations. This movement or set of ideas acts as a convenient frontier between early modern and modern Europe, between the old regime and the new.

The Enlightenment also constructed modern woman. But the merits of this construction are double-edged. It left an ambiguous legacy for women. There is a danger in drawing a line between Enlightenment belief in individual natural rights and arguments for those rights to be applied to women. As Jane Rendall remarks: ‘the heritage of the Enlightenment to feminists and their opponents is an extraordinarily confusing one.’¹ The revolutionary potential of Enlightenment thought on such diverse subjects as marriage and the family, individual citizenship rights, political thought and natural law nevertheless stopped short of challenging the fundamental relationship between the sexes. Sexual difference was rethought but not undermined or rejected; inequality was questioned and reworked but not discarded. For every writer who raised the possibility of women’s emancipation, he or she was outnumbered by those who sought to justify or even reaffirm existing inequalities and sexual difference. Some, like Montesquieu, managed to combine a belief in woman’s natural weakness with calls for her independence and greater gender equality, but most intimated that woman’s nature inclined her towards passion and irrationality, her mind dominated by her biology. The truly revolutionary writings of those philosophes who dared to suggest the unthinkable in terms of women’s status were marginalised, not least because the question of the relationship between the sexes was more a by-product of debate about the nature and source of difference than a discrete issue. The French mathematician and philosopher the Marquis de Condorcet (1743–94) questioned the absurdity of the exclusion of women from citizenship rights, and the Prussian Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel (1741–96) similarly demanded that women be granted equal political, educational and professional rights. In one sense, Enlightenment thought turned traditional ideas about woman’s nature inside-out: although woman was ascribed a new elevated status in the family (as wife and mother) and by extension within society, her role was still, if not even more, tightly defined. And the privilege of citizenship was not extended to women. European society was not ready to consider female citizenship rights. It much preferred the language of gender difference to that of equality which threatened stability in the home and in the body politic.

It would be careless to disregard this philosophical revolution on account of its apparent irrelevance to women. Women did have an Enlightenment. All women were affected but some actively engaged in and benefited from this unprecedented opportunity to challenge accepted ways of thinking. Some participated in the intellectual ferment, hosting salons for intellectual sociability and debate and providing a space where women could ‘think for themselves’. In London, Elizabeth Montagu (1720–1800) became known as the pioneer ‘blue stocking’, so-called because she permitted this apparel in the place of the more formal black silk at her literary gatherings. In Paris, Madame du Deffand and Madame Necker, and in Berlin Rahel Levin Varnhagen (1771–1833), hosted gatherings of intellectuals helping to create a culture which encouraged independent thought.² Women also contributed to the realm of scientific and mathematical knowledge. The physicist Laura Bassi (1711–78) and mathematician Maria Agnesi (1718–99) both rose to prominence at the University of Bologna, although there were many more whose contribution was never properly acknowledged, or at least not by their contemporaries. The Anglo-German astronomer Caroline Herschel (1750–1848) discovered a comet in 1786 but was only recognised much later for this work of assisting her brother William.

For most women, however, the Enlightenment impacted in other ways. They participated even more than men in the explosion of literature and the dissemination of knowledge. Women’s literacy rates, especially in urban parts of Protestant Europe, rose faster than those of men. In Amsterdam for example, two-thirds of women could read in 1780 compared with only one-third in 1630.³ Although female literacy rates as a whole still lagged behind male, many more women could consume the debates about gender relations in newspapers, broadsheets and ballads and could contribute to those debates through the pages of novels and journals. ‘We women think under our coiffures as well as you do under your wigs’, insisted the female editor of the Parisian Journal des Dames in 1761. ‘We are as capable of reasoning as you are.’⁴ The range of contributions was enormous, from the poetry of Austrian Gabrielle Baumberg (1766–1839) who used her writing to express her belief that the convention of marriage was stifling women’s expression of sexual desire, to the writings of English republican Catherine Macaulay-Graham (1731–91), an early advocate of education for girls.⁵ In Britain, Eliza Haywood’s (1693–1756) contributions to the first periodical written by and for women, The Female Spectator, published between 1744 and 1746, both addressed the difficulties faced by women within a system that defined their role in such restrictive ways and advocated a ‘life of the mind’ as compensation for subordination to a husband. Women’s lack of education was disabling, argued Haywood:

Why do they call us silly Women and not endeavour to make us otherwise? … For while we live in a free Country, and are assured from our excellent Christian Principles that we are capable of those refined Pleasures which last to Immortality, our Minds, our better Parts, are wholly left uncultivated, and, like a rich Soil neglected, bring forth nothing but noxious Weeds.⁶

And then there were the novels of countless female authors, amongst them Jane Austen (1775–1817) and Sophie von La Roche (1731–1807), featuring heroines who experienced all the contradictions and constraints for women at the end of the eighteenth century. Women were talking, writing and reading about themselves in ways they had never done before. Woman was in her own thoughts.

Certainly the intellectual shifts wrought in terms of citizenship and politics by the Enlightenment and the French Revolution had less direct impact than those in the realm of science, medicine and culture. The end of the eighteenth century signalled a change in the ways in which woman was imagined, for good and for bad. These changes were mediated through debates about woman’s body and the relationship between the body and the mind, and in turn the relationship between mind and body and a woman’s role in the family and society. Moreover, a new concept of female piety and domesticity was to emerge as a central plank of nineteenth-century idealised femininity, and it had a profound impact on the image of woman and the ways in which women experienced their lives. These shifts did not affect all women equally or at the same time, yet, by the end of the nineteenth century there were few places where Enlightenment thought, however diluted, had not reached.

THE BODY

The Enlightenment construction of woman started with her body. The body is an appropriate starting point for a study of nineteenth-century woman because the body, and more especially reproductive biology, was used to underpin a broader reconception of woman’s nature and role. The physical differentiation of women from men was thought to account for the moral and social differences between the sexes. Different gender roles were determined by different bodily function, but it was the female body that came to bear an enormous interpretive weight. As Rousseau so memorably put it: ‘The consequences of sex are wholly unlike for man and woman. The male is only a male now and again, the female is always a female … everything reminds her of her sex.’⁷ For woman, experience could not be independent of her physical function.

The belief that women were enslaved to their bodies has been a historical constant. The words of one sixteenth-century German Protestant speaking of women ‘inextricably caught in the snares of their own biology, enslaved to a sexuality which destroyed their reason and unbalanced their health’ anticipates the much later nineteenth-century assertions equating women’s physical with their mental weakness.⁸ What had changed in the intervening centuries was, first of all, the fact that women’s bodies ‘in their scientifically accessible concreteness … came to bear an enormous new weight of meaning’.⁹ The second change was a new conviction on the part of the medical profession that the body (and implicitly the mind) of woman could be medicalised, pathologised and controlled.¹⁰

Until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the classical idea of woman’s body prevailed. According to this model of the male and female body, and more especially of the reproductive organs, formulated by Galen in the second century ce, the female was essentially the same as the male, her sexual organs were the mirror image of his only they were located inside the body. Thus the ovaries were equivalent to the testes, the vagina to the penis. ‘Turn outward the woman’s, turn inward, so to speak, and fold double the man’s, and you will find the same in both in every respect.’¹¹ This ‘one-sex model’ of humankind was not equal. It prioritised the male or normal sex; the female was the lesser sex, a variation on the norm, lacking the strength or heat of the male and thus imperfect. Stories of women transmogrifying into men when placed under duress abounded. One apocryphal tale from the sixteenth century featured a female swineherd who, upon chasing a pig, jumped a ditch and promptly developed male genitalia on account of the vigorous activity and the generation of heat from the exertion. Such stories attest not only to the belief in the transmutability of sex but also to the idea of a sexual hierarchy because, as the seventeenth-century story-teller said: ‘Nature tends always toward what is most perfect and not, on the contrary, to perform in such a way that what is perfect should become imperfect.’¹²

In this pre-Enlightenment conception, the woman was seen not merely as weaker in body but also as weaker in mind. A woman’s body was unstable. She had no control over her own body, it was said, because of the demonic struggles contained therein. This instability was most powerfully manifested in the image of the wandering womb: women who experienced fits or ‘hysteria’ were said to be suffering from a condition in which the womb roamed around the body as a result of the failure to put the womb to its rightful use. Thus, psychological complaints were explicitly linked to physical changes in the body. Woman’s mind was, therefore, unstable, unable to reason. ‘Her mind and judgement is as variable and as fickle as the weather,’ stated a husband of his wife in 1713.¹³

By the middle of the eighteenth century things were changing. The one-sex model of humankind was being replaced by the ‘two-sex model’ which stressed not the similarities but the differences between the sexes. The female reproductive organs were no longer seen as imperfect versions of the male forms, but as distinct in their own right. Thus the early modern gender hierarchy predicated on male heat and strength and female coldness and weakness (a male model of bodily form and female imperfection) was superseded by gender difference based on distinct anatomies with specific functions. The Enlightenment, and specifically the medical and scientific investigations of the anatomy and physiology of sex, caused this reassessment of ideas of sexual difference. The discovery that women’s bodies were not the inverse of men’s – that they had a smaller frame, a broader pelvis and completely different reproductive organs – propounded the concrete reality of sexual difference. Now there was no in-between, no possibility of uncertainty. And, in theory, the old hierarchy which subordinated the female to the male body could be discarded as the differences between the two were clear for all to see. Yet, in the eighteenth century, writers used the body and physical difference more than ever to explain and legitimise cultural and political inequality. Indeed, whereas before 1700 a woman’s status might have been signified by cultural signs such as the long hair of the virgin and the covered head of the married woman, now sex determined identity and destiny. Scientists and doctors played a central role in the rethinking of gender; their discoveries based on natural law rather than religious belief or metaphysics, served to bolster the new conception of male–female relations. Women’s anatomical difference was said to be natural: their finer nerves made them more sensitive than men; their smaller frames made them more childlike; their reproductive cycles made them prone to mental disturbance; their smaller skulls and brains made them unsuited to mental exertion.¹⁴ Women’s bodies may have become more fixed in a scientific sense but little had changed in the perception that women were enslaved to their bodies in ways that men never would be. The scientific and medical revolution, far from breaking down sexual stereotypes, served to reinforce them.¹⁵

Woman, according to the men of the Enlightenment, was not, as previously imagined, an imperfect man, but a completely different creature.¹⁶ It followed that whilst a man might be unencumbered by his body, his sex, a woman could never be free of hers. For woman, body and mind were as one. Her mind was in thrall to her physical being. The consequences were twofold. Firstly, the theory that a woman’s mind was innately connected to her reproductive function helped to justify the theory of separate spheres – the translation of sexual difference into social and economic difference comprising the belief that woman was fitted for the private or domestic sphere and the male for the public or civic and political arena. Secondly, the mind–body continuum helped to legitimise the use of the female body as a battleground for a variety of knowledges or discourses. By the end of the nineteenth century the female body had been transformed in popular discourse from a wild, untameable symbolic entity containing demons and unknown forces, into something that could be medicalised, invaded and controlled. The modern (female) body, then, was a sexualised body which determined identity and destiny.

The new Enlightenment understanding of women’s bodies did not result in the liberation of women from physical and mental limitations. In fact the female body increasingly became a site of struggle – not of demons as in the early modern period, but of doctors and scientists who attempted to usurp women’s functional and metaphysi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Imaging Woman
• Part II Private Lives, Public Worlds
• Part III Power and Contest
• Notes
• Further Reading