Abstract
The question of women’s status in society came to provide the basis of a number of historical works by women in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The struggle for the higher education of women and the demand for womanhood suffrage and other campaigns of first-wave feminism informed much historical writing on women. Inspired by the ‘spirit of historical inquiry’ that characterised the Victorian age, women concerned about their declining civil status and their exclusion from higher education turned to the past to understand their present condition. This chapter will explore certain aspects of the ‘woman question’, as it was called, particularly focusing on how it created new interest in women as an historical category. While women mobilised into feminist organisations they looked to the past to detail their oppression and to supplement their arguments for education, social purity, marital equality and suffrage. As the demands of first-wave feminism grew, women’s historical writing came to be framed in light of explicitly feminist arguments. Unlike earlier histories that saw women progress historically towards equality with men, histories of women informed by feminism focused on women’s declining civil status. By the end of the nineteenth century the idea that women were reclaiming rights that had been wrenched away from them became commonplace. Feminist histories of women challenged the celebratory nature of female biography, asserting the importance of the experience of the mass of women over the particular.
The impression conveyed by our text books is that this world has been made by men and for men and the ideals they are putting forth are coloured by masculine thoughts …. Our text books on civics do not show the slightest appreciation of the significance of the ‘woman’s movement’.
Paula Steinman, The History of Womanhood Suffrage, 1909
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Mary R. Beard, On Understanding Women (London: Longman, 1931), p. 31.
For discussion of the limitations of Beard’s analysis see Carol Ellen DuBois, ‘Making Women’s History: Activist Historians of Women’s Rights 1880–1940’, Radical History Review, 49 (1991): 61–84 and
Bonnie G. Smith, ‘Seeing Mary Beard’, Feminist Studies, 10, 3 (1984): 399–416.
Donna Dickenson, ‘Introduction’, in Margaret Fuller, Woman in the Nineteenth Century and Other Writings (Oxford: Oxford University Press: 1994), p. viii.
Eleanor Flexnor, A Century of Struggle: The Women’s Rights Movement in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1986), p. 45.
Jane Rendall, The Origins of Modern Feminism: Women in Britain, France and the United States (London: Macmillan, 1985), p. 227.
Declaration of Sentiments’, in Judith Papachristou (ed.), Women Together (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976), p. 27.
William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, Vol. One (1783) (New York: Garland, 1978), p. 442.
Lynne E. Withey, ‘Catherine Macaulay and the Use of History: Ancient Rights, Perfectionism and Propaganda’, Journal of British Studies, 16, 1 (1976): 59–83.
Sandra Stanley Holton, ‘The Making of Suffrage History’, in June Purvis and Sandra Stanley Holton (eds), Votes for Women (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 14.
Sandra Stanley Holton, ‘British Freewomen: National Identity, Constitutionalism and Languages of Race in Early Suffrage Histories’, in Eileen Janes Yeo (ed.), Radical Feminity: Women’s Self-Representation in the Public Sphere (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), p. 150.
Florence Griswold Buckstaff, ‘Married Women’s Property Rights in Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman Law’, Annals of the American Academy (1886).
For discussion of such texts see Susan Mosher Stuard, ‘A New Dimension? North American Scholars Contribute their Perspective’, in Women in Medieval History and Historiography (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986), pp. 85–7.
Emmeline Pankhurst, My Own Story (New York: Hearst International Library, 1914);
E. Sylvia Pankhurst, The Suffragette Movement: An Intimate Account of Persons and Ideas (London: Longman, 1931);
Christabel Pankhurst, Unshackled: The Story of How We Won the Vote (London: Hutchinson, 1959).
See for instance Catherine H. Birney, The Grimke Sisters: The First American Advocates of Abolition (Boston: Lee & Shephard, 1885);
G.W. and A.L. Johnson, Josephine Butler: An Autobiographical Memoir (London, J.W. Arrowsmith, 1909);
Elizabeth Raikes, Dorothea Beale of Cheltenham (London: Archibald & Constable, 1908);
Ray Strachey, Frances Willard: Her Life and Work (London: T.F. Unwin, 1912). Collections such as Noble Works by Noble Women (London: S.W. Patridge, 1900) began to routinely include figures such as Milli- cent Garrett Fawcett alongside women engaged in more acceptably feminine works, such as Angela Burdett-Coutts, Elizabeth Fry and Octavia Hill.
Ray Strachey, The Cause: A Short History of the Women’s Movements in Great Britain (Washington, DC: Kennikat Press, 1928), pp. 418–19.
See, for instance, Ray Strachey, Millicent Garrett Fawcett (London: John Murray, 1931);
Alma Lutz, Created Equal: A Biography of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (New York: J. Day, 1940).
Kathryn Dodd, ‘Cultural Politics and Women’s Historical Writing: The Case of Ray Strachey’s The Cause’, Women’s Studies International Forum, 13, 2 (1990): 127–37.
Laura E. Nym Mayhall, ‘Creating the “Suffragette Spirit”: British Feminism and the Historical Imagination’, Women’s History Review, 4, 3 (1995): 329.
Kathryn Dodd, A Sylvia Pankhurst Reader (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), p. 18.
Anna Davin, ‘Redressing the Balance or Transforming the Art? The British Experience’, in S. Jay Kleinberg (ed.),Retrieving Women’s history: Changing Perceptions ofthe Role of Women in Politics and Society (Oxford: Berg, 1988), p. 61.
Barbara Caine, ‘Vida Goldstein and the English Militant Campaign’, Women’s History Review, 2, 3 (1993): 363–76.
Diane Kirkby, Alice Henry: The Power of Pen and Voice (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 70.
Maxine Berg, ‘The First Women Economic Historians’, Economic History Review, 45, 2 (1992): 308–12.
Terry Crowley, ‘Isabel Skelton: Precursor to Canadian Cultural History’, in Beverley Boutilier and Alison Prentice, ‘Locating Women in the Work of History’, in Creating Historical Memory: English- Canadian Women and the Work of History (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1997).
See Isabel Skelton, ‘Canadian Woman and Suffrage’, Canadian Magazine, 41 (1913): 162–5.
T.S. Ashton, ‘A Memoir’, in Frances Collier, The Family Economy of the Working Classes in the Cotton Industry 1784–1833 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1964), pp. v-viii.
Hilda Kean, ‘Searching for the Past in Present Defeat: The Construction of Historical and Political Identity in British Feminism in the 1920s and 1930s’, Women’s History Review, 3, 1 (1994): 59–60.
Dubois, ‘Making Women’s History’, p. 61. In spite of their best efforts, suffrage history would become marginalised in political and national histories in the post-war period. Indeed, certain vituperative masculinist tradition had emerged by the 1970s in the wake of second-wave feminism. See especially David Mitchell, Queen Christabel (London: MacDonald & Janes, 1972).
For discussion of this literature see June Purvis, ‘“A Pair of Infernal Queens”: A Reassessment of the Dominant Representations of Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst, First-Wave Feminists in Edwardian Britain’, Women’s History Review, 5, 2 (1996): 259–80.
On social purity see Josephine Butler, Personal Reminiscences of a Great Crusade (London: Marshall, 1896) and
Christabel Pankhurst, The Great Scourge and How to End It (London: E. Pankhurst, 1913).
On marriage see Cicely Hamilton, Marriage as a Trade (London: Chapman & Hill, 1909). On education see
Elizabeth Blackwell, Pioneer Work in Opening the Medical Profession to Women (London: K. Barry, 1895)
and Barbara Stephen, Emily Davies and Girton College (London, Constable, 1927).
Eileen Janes Yeo, The Contest for Social Science: Relations andRepresentations of Gender and Class (London: Rivers Oram Press, 1996), pp. 3–31.
Ibid.; Helen Silverberg, ‘Towards a Gendered Social Science History’, in Gender and American Social Science: The Formative Years (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), pp. 3–32.
See, for instance, Harriet Martineau, ‘Female Industry’, Edinburgh Review, 222, (1859): 293–336;
Caroline Dall, The College, the Market and the Court: Or Women s Relation to Education, Labor and the Law (Boston: Lee & Shepherd, 1859);
Frances Power Cobbe, ‘What Shall we do with our Old Maids?’, Fraser’s Magazine, 66 (1862): 594–610 and ‘Wife Torture in England’, Contemporary Review, 32 (1878): 56–87.
Silverberg, ‘Towards a Gendered Social Science History’, p. 6 and Kathleen E. McCrone, ‘The National Association for the Promotion of Social Science and the Advancement of Victorian Women’, Atlantis, 8, 1 (1982): 47.
Cited in Kathryn Kish Sklar, ‘Hull House Maps and Papers: Social Science as Women’s Work in the 1890s’, in Martin Bulmer, Kevin Bales and Kathryn Kish Sklar (eds), The Social Survey in Historical Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 111–12.
Denise Riley, Am I That Name: Feminism and the Category of ‘Women’ in History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), p. 50.
Georgiana Hill, Women in English Life from Medieval to Modern Times Vol 1. (London: Richard Bentley & Sons, 1896), p. vii.
Mabel A. Atkinson, The Economic Foundations of the Women’s Movement (London: Fabian Women’s Group, 1914), p. 6
and Barbara L. Hutchins, Women in Modern Industry (London: G. Bell, 1915).
Helen Laura Sumner Woodbury, The History of Women in Industry in the United States (1910) (New York: Arno Press, 1974) and
Rolla Milton Tyron, Household Manufactures in the United States 1640–1860 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1917).
Stewart A. Weaver, The Hammonds: A Marriage in History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), p. 67.
Maxine Berg, ‘Women’s Work, Mechanisation and the Early Phases of Industrialisation in England’, in Patrick Joyce (ed.), The Historical Meanings of Work (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 64–9.
Alon Kadish, Historians, Economists and Economic History (London: Routledge, 1989).
E.J. Hobsbawm, ‘From Social History to the History of Society’, in M. Flinn and T.C. Smout (eds), Essays in Social History, Vol. One (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), p. 2.
Copyright information
© 2002 Mary Spongberg
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Spongberg, M. (2002). Women’s History and the ‘Woman Question’. In: Writing Women’s History since the Renaissance. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-230-20307-5_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-230-20307-5_7
Publisher Name: Palgrave, London
Print ISBN: 978-0-333-72668-6
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-20307-5
eBook Packages: Palgrave Social & Cultural Studies CollectionSocial Sciences (R0)