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Overview
This book uses men's engagement with women's rights as a platform to reconsider understandings of gender in eighteenth-century Britain, the meaning and legacy of feminism, and feminism's relationship more generally to traditions of radical reform and enlightenment.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780804763110 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Stanford University Press |
| Publication date: | 12/18/2009 |
| Pages: | 272 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.10(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Men and the Making of Modern British Feminism
By Arianne Chernock
STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2010 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior UniversityAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-6311-0
Chapter One
Becoming Champions of the Fair Sex
In a sermon delivered in Norwich on November 5, 1788, commemorating the centennial of the glorious revolution, the Unitarian minister William Enfield demanded removal of "the false maxims of ignorance and bigotry" still present in Britain. Speaking to a crowd assembled at the Octagon Chapel, one of the most politically and socially engaged Dissenting congregations in the nation, Enfield warned his audience of the dangers of complacency. Britain, Enfield insisted, had not completed its revolution; there was still significant work to be done. Even if Britons were more enlightened than other cultures, their country was not yet perfect. "It is the glory of Great Britain, that it has perhaps less to do, in the important work of political reformation, than any other nation in the world," Enfield explained. "But this is surely a reason, not for remaining inactive, but for going on, with an accelerated motion, towards perfection."
In many respects, Enfield's sentiments encapsulate the goals of the late British Enlightenment, a radical program spawned by a community of mostly middle-class and male nonconformist writers, thinkers, andinnovators at the end of the eighteenth century. Theirs was a project committed to enlightening the British Enlightenment, to pushing its foundational precepts-toleration, liberty, the rule of law-to their imaginative limits. the term "radicalism" itself comes from the Latin radix, "relating to the root," and this was just how enlightened radicals approached reform: they sought to "transform a system, a set of ideas or practices, from the 'root' upwards." Historian Roy Porter elucidates this philosophical stance. As he explains, members of the British Enlightenment had always "thrived upon controversy, self-criticism and self-celebration," but they now held themselves, and the world that they inhabited, to even higher standards.
This chapter analyzes the late British Enlightenment as a launching point for discussion of why some men took it upon themselves to explore women's rights. Their efforts in behalf of women must be situated within this context, for it was precisely the philosophical principles promulgated by and social organs and institutions established during this radical moment that propelled certain men to reconsider the place of women in their polity. It is only after mapping the broad intellectual and social contours of this late Enlightenment project, then, that I provide a more focused discussion of the specific factors-philosophical, spiritual, and personal-that helped convince a select group of men to become "champions of the fair sex." While the scope of their visions may have been exceptional, their ideas, arguments, friendships, and networks were firmly grounded in late-eighteenth-century radical culture.
"liberty-loving" nation still ruled over colonial subjects, prevented religious Dissenters from holding municipal office, denied most people what they took to be basic "constitutional" privileges, and continued to promote slavery and the slave trade. In light of these realities, Britain needed to finish its own revolution. The Unitarian minister Richard Price offered the most explicit statement on this count in his controversial 1789 A Discourse on the Love of our Country, a sermon intended as much to incite the British as to praise the French. (It was Price's speech that in part prompted Edmund Burke to pen his own 1790 Reflections on the Revolution in France, a rejection of the French Revolution and of "revolution principles" more generally.) "I would ... direct you to remember," Price observed, speaking to his fellow members of the Society for Commemorating the [Glorious] Revolution, "that though the [Glorious] Revolution was a great work, it was by no means a perfect work; and that all was not then gained which was necessary to put the kingdom in the secure and complete possession of the blessings of liberty." Thomas Paine would elaborate on this theme in his own inflammatory 1791-92 Rights of Man, a two-part response to Burke in defense of Price, and one of the most widely circulated texts of the 1790s. Inveighing against those who resisted change, Paine challenged his readers to see the Revolution of 1688 as a process, an ongoing revolution in continual need of modification. "Every generation is and must be competent to all the purposes which its occasions require," Paine famously explained. "It is the living, and not the dead, that are to be accommodated."
If there was a hint of regret in Price's and Paine's statements-Britain's own revolution, Paine observed, paled in comparison to the "luminous Revolutions of America and France"-their rhetoric was nevertheless intended to inspire action. That Britain had not yet achieved true greatness did not mean that it would not or could not do so. Echoing William Enfield, both insisted that the nation was capable of perfection, albeit, given Paine's republican tendencies, with fundamentally different understandings of what "perfection" designated. It was this insistence on perfectibility, or the belief in progress through reason, in fact, that linked what would have otherwise been a disparate group of reformers. William Godwin may have been the most famous exponent of perfectibility with his 1793 An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, but the belief lay at the core of most reformist thinking produced during this period. Paineite republicans, millenarian enthusiasts, "real" or "honest" Whigs-almost all shared a commitment to creating a world in which the "enlarging orb of reason" could achieve its fullest potential. Only then, with reason in the ascendant, could humanity exist in a true state of perfection. The concept of perfectibility itself owed much to the tradition of Rational Dissent, with its insistence on accessing God via reason, but the term took on new, increasingly secular meanings during the 1790s, as Rational Dissent became radicalized, and associated with a more general spirit of critical inquiry.
British radicals, then, were for the most part reformers rather than revolutionaries-men and a few women who wanted to inject reason into their existing world rather than to overturn it. This was a point borne out by the goals of the numerous and overlapping clubs and societies that sprang up throughout Britain during this period, organizations whose very existence reflected the profoundly social dimensions of the reformist enterprise. The Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, created by the medical ethicist Thomas Percival in 1781 but increasingly active during the 1790s, sought to encourage "a spirit of inquiry." The London Corresponding Society (LCS), established by the shoemaker Thomas Hardy in January 1792 with the aim of democratizing the reform movement (membership cost only a penny), asserted its primary goal as to disseminate political knowledge. The Philomathian Society, begun by the artillery officer Alexander Jardine in London in 1793, intended simply to exclude "no subject ... from conversation." Although diverse in their approaches and courting different populations, these clubs shared a collective commitment to rational debate and deliberation.
The numerous progressive journals created during this period communicate the same late Enlightenment vision. Joseph Johnson's Analytical Review, begun in May of 1788, described its mission in terms remarkably similar to those that were used by Thomas Hardy four years later in a more plebian context. The journal's "ambition," as set out in the inaugural issue, was to "diffuse knowledge, and to advance the interests of science, of virtue and morality." The Norwich Cabinet, launched by John March in 1794, similarly proclaimed its goal as to encourage "a spirit of free and dispassionate inquiry" and "a liberal investigation into the nature and object of civil government," so as to "remind their fellow-citizens at once of their duties and their rights."
Of course, such positions became more difficult to maintain as the French Revolution entered its violent and combative stages, marked by Robespierre's political ascendancy, the execution of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette in 1793, and the escalation of war with Britain and Europe. In light of these threatening developments, British radicals' desire to "perfect" their own revolution aroused suspicion, as the very concept of change was now increasingly associated with "king-killing." Already in May of 1792, Prime Minister William Pitt's government had circulated a royal proclamation against seditious writings-a response more to the coalescence of political opposition at home than to events in France. The royal proclamation was soon followed by the formation, during the winter of 1792-93, of the Association for the Preservation of Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers, under the leadership of the loyalist London magistrate John Reeves. The Crown and Anchor Society, as this association would be known (in reference to the tavern where the society first met), made it a priority to halt the "progress of such nefarious designs as are meditated by the wicked and senseless reformers of the present time." Upward of two thousand similar loyalist organizations rapidly formed in the months and years following. To make radicals even more uncomfortable, Pitt issued the "Gagging Acts" in 1795 (the Seditious Meetings Act and the Treasonable Practices Act), which limited radicals' ability to organize and publicize their views.
"Pitt's Terror" was largely successful. In 1792, Paine was placed on trial in absentia for libel for his antimonarchical Rights of Man. In 1794, numerous London Corresponding Society reformers, including Thomas Hardy, John Horne Tooke, John Thelwall, Thomas Holcroft, and Thomas Spence, were sent to jail, held in the Tower of London and Newgate Prison for months without recourse to habeas corpus, which had been suspended that year, before finally being acquitted. The Liverpool Literary Society, whose members included the prominent antislavery advocates William Roscoe and William Rathbone, terminated its meetings as early as 1793 for fear of government prosecution. The Society for Constitutional Information, which had been established by John Cartwright in 1780, disbanded in 1795. Joseph Johnson printed the last issue of the Analytical Review in 1798, the year in which he was imprisoned for publishing the religious controversialist Gilbert Wakefield's A Reply to some Parts of the Bishop of Landaff's Address, which embraced the idea of a French invasion. The London Corresponding Society was outlawed in 1799. Certainly, radicalism did not die in 1800-many radical reformers continued to agitate through the first decades of the nineteenth century-but the movement lost much of its earlier momentum.
Despite these repressive measures, however, radicals were able to launch a muscular and multifaceted campaign during the late eighteenth century, which though never great in numbers was able to put considerable extra-parliamentary pressure on government. No doubt the most popular radical cause, and the one that attracted the most adherents, was the push to end what was labeled "Old Corruption." By this, most radical reformers meant adopting the Duke of Richmond's plan, which demanded universal male suffrage and annual parliaments. Britain's limited electorate (less than 20 percent of men could vote) and remote Parliament represented some of the clearest indications of an incomplete revolution at home. "As a Briton," remarked the Manchester activist George Philips, "I rejoice at the political improvements of my countrymen, and I look forward with eagerness to the period that I believe to be near, in which the constitution of this kingdom shall be purified from its defects, and the undue power of individuals become mixed, and undistinguished in the energies of the people." Democratic reforms, based on a belief in the need both to recover "ancient" constitutional liberties and to secure Paineite natural rights, were the most pressing consideration.
A number of different projects, though, were joined under the banner of radical reform. The campaign to repeal the Test and Corporation Acts, acts established under Charles II that prevented nonconformists from holding offices under the Crown and that denied them access to Oxford and prevented them from receiving degrees at Cambridge, gained ground during this period, not least because many radicals themselves suffered these penalties. Reformers, led by the London surgeon Edward Jeffries, launched three coordinated campaigns to repeal the Test and Corporation Acts in 1787, 1789, and again in 1790. While each campaign ultimately proved unsuccessful, failing to gain the needed support in the House of Commons, Dissenters remained dogged in their efforts. "[We] are, with a calm and dispassionate firmness, determined to persevere in every peaceable and constitutional exertion, till we shall have obtained those equal rights to which all good Citizens are entitled," observed the Manchester radical Thomas Cooper during a meeting of Protestant Dissenters held in Warrington in February 1790, just a month before the repeal's final failure in the House. For Cooper, as for so many other reformers of Dissenting background, religious freedom was a central component of "perfection," a belief that would only intensify after "Church and King" mobs thronged into Birmingham in July 1791 to burn Dissenters' homes and chapels, with natural philosopher Joseph Priestley's residence the principal target.
Radicals also immersed themselves in the activities of antislavery, a movement that truly began to mobilize in 1787 with the establishment of the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, formed under the leadership of the Anglicans Granville Sharp and Thomas Clarkson. Slavery, reformers insisted, was another glaring example of the "false maxims" still present in Britain, a system wholly incompatible with enlightened thinking. By 1791, antislavery reformers had submitted more than five hundred petitions to Parliament. Indeed, by 1792 the incompatibility of slavery and enlightenment was so striking that the Catholic biblical scholar and critic Alexander Geddes was compelled to lampoon those who would exclude the issue of slavery from the radical agenda in his Apology for Slavery: "In this curious and inquisitive generation, when the most venerable and hoary prejudices seem to flee, with precipitancy, before that blazing meteor, called The Rights of Man; some rash and inconsiderate assertors of those rights have gone so far as to maintain, that the vile and barbarous Blacks of Africa have an equal claim to freedom with the rest of the human race."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Men and the Making of Modern British Feminism by Arianne Chernock Copyright © 2010 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Introduction....................11. Becoming Champions of the Fair Sex....................11
2. Cultivating Woman....................37
3. Publishing Woman....................60
4. Revising the Sexual Contract....................82
5. Imagining the Female Citizen....................106
Conclusion: the Champions' Legacy....................131
Biographical Appendix....................137
Notes....................149
Bibliography....................211
Index....................245