Jasper Gregory is a citizen science advocate and gender activist in Oakland, California; for the past few months he’s been researching the development of modern feminism from the 19th-century variety, and his “tweets” on the subject were so fascinating I invited him to contribute this column. I think you’ll find it just as interesting as I do.
A new wave of sexual repression has swept through the lands of the Puritan Diaspora. Under the banner of Feminism sexual puritans have declared a war on prostitution in Sweden and politically incorrect words and images in the UK and North America; the new Puritans are on the rise and have wrapped themselves in a rhetoric of “True Womanhood” that seems more appropriate for the 19th century than for the Internet Age. But the similarities between today’s prude feminism and the earlier Victorian age of moral regulation go far deeper than you might suspect: the radical “cultural” feminism of 1970-2013 is actually the continuation of a two century moral purity movement.
The English romantic sentimental novel became established in the 1730s during the evangelical Protestant “Great Awakening“. Under the label of “sensibility”, displays of romantic sentimentalism became the measure of good character; the more sensitive you were, the more civilized you were. According to True Woman ideology, they were the most pure and civilized and thus the most sensitive, which is they were always fainting away and coming down with cases of nerves. One outgrowth of Gothic romanticism was the science fiction novel, which first rose to international success in 1818 with Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, daughter of romantic novelist and women’s rights pioneer Mary Wollstonecraft. And soon the Utopian science fiction novel became a way for the early women’s movement to inspire collective action just as the earlier Gothic romance heroines had provided a template for individual reformist action.
The first American woman science fiction author published the Utopia Three Hundred Years Hence in 1836. In it, Mary Griffith imagines the Philadelphia of 2135, in which middle-class white women have attained more power in society. The novel displays many features which would appear in later feminist Utopias, but it also contains many elements which were more in keeping the Victorian separation of spheres. For instance, 2135‘s women do not have or desire the vote, for when they were given equal status under the law they retreated into a women’s sphere and separated themselves even more fully from the men’s sphere of politics and the university. They did, however, enter the realm of business, which they were suited to on account of their house-holding skills; in fact, quite prophetically, Griffith saw equal competition in the marketplace as the route by which women achieved equality.
Griffith lived in an era in which romantic movement activists were holding up women as especially pure and civilized within the separate women’s sphere of the home. Though it seems paradoxical to us, it was middle-class women who fought for their gilded cages as moral arbiters of the home and guardians of society’s manners and morals. Rather than being imposed upon women, the separate women’s sphere was fought for and attained by a Romantic Era women’s movement. This can be seen in Griffith’s Utopia; her 2135 Philadelphia is a world in which the women’s sphere had domesticated and civilized the male public sphere. All of the rough edges had been removed: the roads were smooth, and noisy, scary steam engines were banned once women began to guide technology. All dogs were also exterminated, a theme common in later feminist Utopias: dogs were uncouth, ill mannered and dead, though cats would be allowed to live. Griffith’s Matrons got together and censored the vulgar passages of Shakespeare, and in another flash of prophecy, once the actors had been censored they would go on to become major cultural figures. Mostly, Griffith dreamed of state regulation and a strong police to intervene and protect white middle class women from undignified situations and unscrupulous men. Liquor and smoking were banned; if a bachelor was found drunk three times his head was shaved and he was sent to the work camps.
These themes mirror the concerns of Romantic Era Christianity in which a highly artificial version of sentimental femininity came to dominate. As Colin Campbell wrote in The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism,
…the rise of sentimentality went hand in hand with the rise of consumer capitalism and of middle class women’s new role as head consumer of household items. This is reflected in Three Hundred Years Hence, where all duties on imported luxury goods have been lifted. 2135 is a consumer paradise.
By the 1880s the women’s movement was picking up steam and had moved on from the creation of women’s space into the purity campaigns, the effort to impose what they considered to be feminine virtues onto all of society. Proto-eugenics was also becoming popular because as mothers, the reformers believed they could lay claim to special eugenic knowledge. These themes are especially noticeable in Mary Bradley Lane’s Mizora (1881), the first parthenogenetic Utopia (this element would become dominant in 20th-century feminist Utopias). In Mizora, our narrator descends inside the Earth to find a blonde, Aryan, all-female society; their forebears had decided that dark skin caused criminal behavior and had used eugenic breeding to “cure” this affliction, and men were regarded as an inferior dark-skinned race whose elimination had led to a perfect society (an idea familiar to readers of 1970s feminist Utopias). As in Griffith’s work, the Mizorans had tamed and domesticated uncivilized nature; animals had been eliminated and farming was held in suspicion because of the “deleterious” effects of earthly matter. Their engineers made food from chemicals, produced bread from limestone and were close to achieving their glorious goal of finding chemical substitutes for fruit and vegetables; in a sense, Lane was imagining the Hostess Twinkie Utopia. But besides being the first exclusively female Utopia where all of the turbulent and chaotic aspects of the men’s sphere had been tamed and made safe for proper ladies, Mizora was also a whiteness Utopia: even their architecture and clothing were all bleached white.
1888 brought the literary Utopia into the mainstream with the publication of Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, which contained many of the themes of earlier women’s Utopias. Looking Backward became the first international blockbuster bestseller and inspired the American Nationalist Socialist movement, the Nationalist Women’s Movement and later the Progressive Movement, the New Deal and Europe’s National Socialist movements. One early Bellamyite was Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who in 1915 wrote Herland, a direct inspiration for 1970s women’s separatist Utopias. Gilman continued the dog exterminationist themes of Mizora and Three Hundred Years Hence, and like most feminists of the time was a strong believer in Lamarckian evolution and eugenics; the Herlanders “of Aryan stock” had made eugenics the focus of their society, and had perfected their race by eliminating males along with the dogs. The “Race Mothers” gave virgin birth to girls and were never subjected to the degradation of sex; women thus became supermothers and maternal passion was the only emotion left to them. Herlanders did not eat meat and cats had been eugenically engineered not to meow or catch birds; female cats were allowed to roam free, but males were kept in cages for stud purposes only.
Contemporary feminists consider Gilman one of the founders of American feminism, which is ironic considering that her eugenic feminism contained so much of the intolerance displayed by modern neo-Puritans. She is less known for the white supremacism evidenced in her 1908 “A Suggestion on the Negro Problem”, in which she argued that the state should re-enslave African Americans to instill social hygiene in them and take away their right to reproduce; her proposal anticipates both the German solution to “the Jewish Problem” and the invasive social hygiene policies of the modern welfare state. Gilman was rediscovered in the 1970s and adopted as a feminist idol, thus supporting the idea that 1970s feminism was a white women’s power movement; her model of purified eugenic Utopia became a cottage industry as multiple generations of women’s studies students read and wrote these Utopias and used them as a guiding principle for action. The following graph shows the rise in use of the term “feminist Utopia” from 1970 to the mid-’90s:
The year 2013 has seen a renewed feminism which in the United Kingdom is busy banning rock music, men’s magazines, pole fitness and exotic dancing, while in California a new culture war is aimed at the traditional libertarian values of the high-tech scene. Without knowing it, a new generation is taking up the battle to civilize and domesticate the wild unruly natives and impose the traditional values of the Victorian women’s sphere on men and women alike.
This reminds of the lost Entwives in Tolkien, who disapeared in search of the perfect garden. He denied being an allegorist, but perhaps he was more in touch with the movements of the day than I realized.
To me, their are two frightening things about this:
1. The obvious loopiness of it. Killing all the dogs for example. I mean female separatism has always struck me as loopy but I’ve also always been fairly confident that the majority of women would never go along with it. However, I suppose that I could understand some women, in some circumstances, developing a hatred of men. (Though, oddly enough not the pampered and privileged leaders of the modern radical feminist movement who seem to be the most active in their hate.) But this other stuff? Eliminating steam engines? Wiping out entire species of useful, friendly animals?
2. How much this kind of thinking has influenced mainstream feminism. I’m not talking about radical feminism where lesbian relationships are the only legitimate ones. I’m talking about feminists with husbands or long term relationships with men or even male feminists. Normal male behavior which is not hurtful is pathologized. Now, I’ve come to realize that this is only when it serves their agenda. For example, if their own politician has a well known pattern of affairs they are likely to help suppress it. In this way it just becomes a useful political tool for the leadership… but that wouldn’t work unless the rank and file accepted it.
The dogs confused me as well. I mean, what in the world…?
Then again, they’re living remnants of a time when the masculine skills of hunting and protection were much more valuable. Guard dogs and hunting hounds have likely been around much longer than pure pets. Destroying our versatile, friendly companions is just cutting that link.
Personally, I’m with LawDog on this one – here’s to Nog: http://bit.ly/ILVwbq
I’d say only if you’re a hardcore scholar do you even know much about this 19th century movement. For most, feminism starts with the Second Wave, though, yes, you are familiar with some figures from the Frist Wave.
Nevertheless, I think this does point to unique characteristics of mainstream feminism today in ANGLO countries like the UK and US. So keywords in Jasper’s article like “purity” and “utopia” are behind a lot of what’s going on lately.
Compare, for example, the purification movement that grew up at the same time in Germany in the 1880s–nudist culture. Public nudism (which is still popular in Germany today) is unthinkable in the UK or US even today in 2013, let alone in the Victorian era!!
Lord (Kenneth) Clark wrote a illustrated book called The Nude. He distinguished between nakedness, which had sexual overtones, and nudity which didn’t, it was purely artistic. Very strange idea.
Re: dogs and feminism.
Naturally, I know that correlation is not causation. But I do know a lot of feminists of the “men are wrong unless they’re just like us” bent (and many of these feminists consider themselves “sex-positive”…yeah) prefer cats over dogs. Because cats are “cleaner” (except when they track litter all over the damn place) and, for some reason, because of their standoffish nature. Not one of them has a dog, even if they live in an apartment building that allows them.
And regarding your second point, a feminist I know on Facebook commented that she is “afraid of men” on a story about the YWCA disallowing male children in female locker rooms for the comfort of women like that feminist (I think it was the YWCA. May have been another gym). You’re afraid of a male child too? Really? How pathetic. And yes, she is married to a man, though I’ve only met him once, but they nonetheless celebrate their marriage online and post couple-y pictures. It’s just…baffling.
Well, that’s disturbing.
The realities of the upper, and middle class early feminists were not the realities of factory girl, or the farm girl or servant. They were already “equal” in that they had to work just as long and hard as the men, under just as harsh conditions, but for less pay, which usually wasn’t their own.
They weren’t as anti-prostitute as the upper and middle class women. They knew sex workers, and occasionally had to turn a few tricks themselves if money was short. They looked at the world from a more practical basis.
Historians point to the Dockers strike as a beginning of modern social progress, but the Match Girls strike was just as much a motivator.
There has always been that division in feminism, as in all social movements between the theorists, most of who are privileged enough to have all that time to talk, write and think, and the working woman, who needs equal pay to support her family, to not have to endure rape and harassment, and other things.
The separatist movement came out of the college educated, privileged set. A social movements do, in the 1960’s, they found it useful to reject the members of their movement who the mainstream disapproved of, to gain acceptance. Lesbians, sex-workers had always been strong feminists, and the backbone of the movement. They were pushed out.
As for myself, I would no more want to live in a world without men than a world without dogs.
Yes, one of the things I’ve noticed in the sex work debate is that it’s really hard to get through to women who think a job is just a hobby you do for money and not the only thing preventing you from freezing to death on the streets after you lose your home. They seem to think if times are tough you should just dip into your trust fund. I’m not even talking about “survival sex work” here, even if you have a pretty decent life it doesn’t mean you can quit your job and expect to find a totally different one with equivalent pay and hours.
Even so, I have to really wonder what happened to the women above to hate dogs, men, non-whites and a lot of aspects civilization. That goes beyond cluelessness and a simple desire to cut off alternative paths for their men to experience sex to real darkness.
That reminds me—on Twitter, Mistress Matisse was upset at some novel she was reading where the heroine refuses to prostitute herself to save herself and a dependent sibling from starvation. She sticks to these principals even though one of the potential clients is someone she is physically attracted to. Although she does have sex with this man, the heroine throws his money back in his face. Evidentally, the author (apparently a woman) seriously buys into the idea that without true love is unthinkable. I never found out the name of this book, but I can’t blame MM for being that upset about it.
Tess of the D’Urbervilles will give you nightmares too. I wish she had stabbed Angel in the face.
And that reminds me of being in Mexico talking about the movie Lost in Translation with my Mexican friends. They could not believe the Bill Murray character refused the prostitute that was sent to him. They’re like, “WTF is up with that?!?”
If I could write, I’d write a story in three parts.
The first part would be about the women successfully struggling to establish a segregation: women would have civilisation, men the badlands. Reproduction to be accomplished by men periodically visiting the cities to replenish the sperm banks. Boy children, after weaning, would be sent to live with the men.
In the second part, we’d witness the gradual decay of the cities – women engaging in nasty interpersonal politics while the lightglobes stop working, because none of ’em actually knows how to fix anything, and the ones that do are ostracised for being “all that” and thinking they are better than the others. Meanwhile, men build buildings out of mud brick, hunt animals for food, and organise themselves into a society with written laws.
In the third part, the female protagonist escapes the decayed city to live with the men, with their functioning plumbing and roofs that don’t leak. Discovering that most of the stuff she has been taught about superior feminine civilisation is lies. There is a general exodus. In the final scene, men re-enter the cities and rediscover the forgotten science books.
Yeah, I’m a bit of a misogynist. Sue me 🙂
The female segregated society would need reeducation camps to prevent the vast majority of women from sneaking away to live with the men. Seriously, try raising a teenage daughter and you’ll see.
They’d probably wish they hadn’t exterminated all the dogs after putting in the barbed wire fences and guard towers.
I know at least one woman who would read your story. Have you ever heard of the columnist “Judgy Bitch”?
Who hasn’t?
I had a WTF? moment when I read the first line; my dyslexia turned ‘citizen science advocate’ into ‘Christian Scientist advocate’….
I have been pondering the dog extermination part. I think they were not discreet enough for the Victorian Women’s Sphere. They were always licking their genitals and humping your leg.
I thought it interesting that Gilman eugenically engineered her cats not to catch birds or meow. It all had to be very ladylike.
I know one woman at least who would be rather horrified that meowing had been bred out of cats. Hhhmmmnnn……
Make that two… maybe more, and those are only women I know personally and have some reason to think I might know where they stand on the Meowing Issue.
Meh. Viewing modern feminism through the lens of Victorian feminism is going to give you a severe headache at the very least. It’s like saying the Democratic Party is the party of racism because they were the party that supported the southern racists through the 1950s. I will bet you dollars to donuts that the echoes of Victorian feminist utopianism you are talking about are all the product of modern gender feminists, and are not attributable to modern equity feminists.
Which is another reason it’s not smart to address feminists as a monolithic group. In addition to all the women who are involved enough in feminism to understand the difference between gender feminism and equity feminism, I’m sure there are many, many women (probably the vast majority) who identify themselves as feminists but really don’t know or care about the differences between gender feminism and equity feminism. They would respond to the stuff about feminists being a group that had once favored eliminating black people through eugenics, and killing all males and dogs by staring at you as if you had lobsters growing out of your ears. Even though it’s true, it’s kind of pointless and bad strategy besides.
Smart thing to do is lay all these tropes at the feet of the feminists who are most responsible for whatever continuation they might have into modern feminism: the gender feminists. Peel all the support for gender feminism away by portraying them as a bunch of pointy-headed, racist, academic man-haters, while making clear your support for equity feminism, weakening the gender feminists. Then link gender feminists and attacks on sex workers and trumped-up hysteria about human trafficking with them, while making clear that REAL feminists have done none of these things, and bob’s yer uncle, you can go after the trafficking hysterics without sounding like someone who is just using it as a stalking horse for a hatred of feminism and women generally.
Because if hating on feminism, including equity feminism, is what you’re all about, good luck, buddy. You will find almost no women and only a minority of men who are willing to take a ride on THAT train.
But aren’t the number of those who identify themselves as feminists low lately? I argue that calling oneself “liberal” or “progressive” already includes equal rights not only for women, but for LGBT and racial minorities, etc.
As I wrote above, I think this essay does indeed point out unique characteristics of Anglo-Saxon culture. Recently, in two prominent German media outlets–the Süddeutsche Zeitung and Der Spiegel–the founder of modern German feminism was very harshly criticized for her recent anti-prostitution stuff. She was called “anachronistic,” “misogynist,” and “patriarchal,” amongst other things. There was another op-ed in Die Zeit, where the guy just said, “Fine, go ahead, arrest me.” I don’t see that here in the major media in the US.
In Spain, feminismo only refers to the historic movement, while neofeminism is called hembrismo.
In the UK at least, “gender feminism” completely dominates the organised feminist movement. Pretty much every significant feminist organisation and lobbying group is pushing the same policies of censorship and criminalisation. I see little in the way of organised or influential “sex positive” or “equity feminist” activism to counter that authoritarian and puritanical mainstream.
Most of the women I know who reject “gender feminist” ideology don’t identify as feminists at all. Despite claiming to to be the voice of women, feminists are certainly a minority group over here. According to this poorly made flowchart based attempt to “rebrand” feminism, only 1 in 7 British women identify with the label: http://www.adweek.com/adfreak/3-ad-agencies-try-rebrand-feminism-did-any-them-get-it-right-152866
Maybe it’s different elsewhere, but on this side of the pond I don’t think that “hating on” feminism (even without differentiating between the different versions) is something that’d alienate most women. In my experience many British women are highly critical of feminism, and certainly don’t equate rejection of it with hatred of women.
It sounds like the same here in the US, as my comments on this thread have suggested. At least for feminism on the internet.
Our favorite sex worker activists and thinkers are, in my mind, feminists. But, yeah, why call yourself that, when the concept of feminism for most people is still that of the puritan prudes of the Second Wave?
Btw, I was a believer, back when I took my first Women’s Studies class in the 1980s. And I liked all the progress the Second Wave had made.
And then, flash-forward to 2013, and the zombies are telling us that, “No, we actually have made NO PROGRESS AT ALL! Women are still objectified by the Patriarchy,” etc, etc, and other such bullshit.
Good grief…….
From what I’ve seen the big name promoters of equity feminism, such as Christina Hoff Sommers, are just as apt to jump on the trafficking hysteria bandwagon as other types of feminists, so I for one am unwilling to use these categories.
Its a good thing I found this blog, lately I’ve seen many mainstream (and not so mainstream) sites on the Internet awash with this bizarre Tumblr form feminism. Comments or articles on any content; from TV shows, to Movies, to Video Games, seem to be occupied now with some form of modern neo-feminists (usually seem to be white teenage or college girls, and the male knights that follow them). I’ve seen them call the very existence of breasts, or high heels, or even the smallest hint of sexual or aesthetic beauty as some form of “Patriarchy”, and literally scream at it, and all those that like such content as “rapists”, “misogynists”, “cis scum”. This attitude, and where it came from is really strange to me, since I escaped from a heavily religious country ruled by these very same puritanical (or Islamic for me) ‘values’. And now I see that the liberal western world is not going any better. This is a very disturbing trend. I’ve read some of the previous articles on this site that this new generation of feminists are better then the second wave generation. But from what I’ve seen, they are far more worse in some cases.
There is a problem in terminology here. And I admit to not being an expert in all the various terminologies to describe feminism today. Nonetheless, I think it best to talk about three waves of feminism. The disturbing “new generation of feminists” you describe sound like what I like to call, “zombie Second Wave feminists.” Maggie calls them “Neo-Feminists.” But I just did a Google search, and it seems other people use “Neo-Feminism” in a different way.
As Tomcat hints at below, I am guessing that much of the Third Wave, i.e. what should really be called “modern feminism,” don’t really care about proclaiming themselves “feminists,” and may in fact not call themselves “feminists,” just cause of all the baggage associated with that term, due to the Second Wave.
Modern feminism actually began in the twelfth century and included the invention of chivalry. It was based on a Roman Catholic heresy (Mary worship morphed into worship of women).
See http://www.podles.org/church-impotent.htm (chapter 6) for some background.
This also gave rise to the Madonna/Whore dichotomy. Women were, by definition, inherently perfect (like Mary). Any woman who wasn’t had to be a subhuman animal.
Oh, and those nasty men should strive to become more like the perfect women.
I really have to disagree with your thesis linking the second wave to romanticism. There is nothing romantic about those people.
Romanticism emerged largely as a reaction against the enlightenment desire to scientifically perfect and control man according to reason/ While romanticism was naturalistic and traditional, promoting the beauty of things left alone and uncontrolled.
I mean, Frankenstein is a story about the hubris of trying to play God, which ultimately fails against the power of nature and the human spirit violently reasserting itself. Probably prohibitionists should have read it.
Actually, it’s a lot like another science fiction book about an all-female utopia, Jurassic Park (all the dinosaurs were supposed to be female). But that didn’t work out either. “Nature will find a way”. Same formula for both, but like Jurassic Park, Frankenstein clearly is dystopian, it’s clearly a bad idea. Unlike a novel like Herland or Looking Backwards.
And besides, while “progressives” like Marx were talking about eliminating prostitution in a new perfect future, Romantics loved to write about them. Maybe a little obsessively, to the point of trope. I mean the whole second half of, Notes From the Underground is about this.
And I really like Mary Shelley.
Not that Herland isn’t clearly a bad idea. You know what I mean.
Hmm. Well, let’s see how he started this:
“The English romantic sentimental novel became established in the 1730s during the evangelical Protestant ”Great Awakening“.”
So, he is actually talking about Sentimentalism, since “romantic” isn’t capitalized, and surely we can’t talk about Romanticism in the 1730s. And Sentimentalism was indeed a strong influence on later Romanticism.
Btw, there’s another Anglo aspect here: Britain prides its literary history on novels in the early 19th century, including lots of novels about women often written by women. That’s just not the case in the rest of Europe. So, again, I think Jaspers is pointing out a particular preoccupation in the Anglo world.
There is the stereotypical English synthesis, the lurid and fantastical threat to proper Englishness. For example, the Fu Manchu novels, imagining a yellow peril conspiracy by a Chinese Moriarty. So the readers get to hear a “moral” story, while actually getting what they paid for. Just like the lurid stories about white slavery.
The message, rationalist, the style, sentimental.
Yes. Same thing happened in the Middle Ages, in spite of what another commenter wrote above.
I’m just saying a prohibitionist ain’t a Byronic Hero.
Also, just like the Bible almost never talks about gay sex (certainly not in the New Testament), Marx almost never talked about prostitution. I mean, he compared it to marriage.
And reading Marx is a fricking pain in the ass, it’s a drudgery. So I agree with Jaspers that it was Romanticism that glowed in the notion of a “new perfect future,” unlike Marx.
Very interesting blog and comments today. I have a few random observations:
1. In my experience, organizations work best when they consist of roughly equal numbers of men and women at every level of organization.
2. Many women want equality, not dominance. Few care much for the hate men/control women feminism of MacKinnon, Morgan, et al.
3. This is why few women will call themselves feminists, although they believe in equality.
4. And that is why, as Maggie has often told us, that hate men/control women feminism has become hate men/control women/save the children feminism.
I’m not convinced. This author seems to be connecting and conflating a lot of unrelated phenomena in an attempt to create a “science of history” that is mostly hooey, just like the Communist one.
The one major connection I do buy is between late-19th-century feminism (especially the Suffragettes) and 20th century nanny-statism (especially the Prohibition movement). Those were mostly the same people (and sure make me question the practical wisdom of letting women vote, regardless of the superficial fairness issue). (Superficial because I see democracy as worthless except insofar as it serves the goal of freedom for everyone.)
Good grief…
What on earth do you mean by “science of history?” And how is it like the “Communist one?”
The conservative, Libertarian nonsense on this blog is just ridiculous. I returned after a year-long hiatus, but I think I’m gone after this post, with all the stupid Libertarianism here and Tea Party idiots…
Tschüssie…
/me chuckles slightly
“Herlanders did not eat meat”
The overlap between feminism and vegetarianism/veganism continues to this day via the likes of Carol J Adams. Summary version ‘Pork is violence against women’