Abstract
By the middle decades of the nineteenth century, the cause of feminism, the explicit assertion of the individual autonomy of women, against their husbands, against the state and against prevailing stereotypes, had clearly emerged. It can be seen in the arguments of individual writers, following Mary Wollstonecraft and William Thompson, outlining the case for equality from varying political perspectives. It can be seen too in the lives of lesser known women, associating together, writing, agitating, signing petitions, sitting on committees. Such women addressed themselves to the issues that have been discussed here: to legal reform, to the question of women’s education, to employment, to the part that they could play in public life and in so doing they came to demand the right to citizenship. The demand for the vote was not a single demand, growing out of the envy of propertied women for their husbands’ rights, but one which grew from decades of action. By 1860 the ground was clearly laid, and in Britain and the United States a small but recognisable feminist movement was established. In France the defeat of 1848 was a disastrous one, and the regime of the Second Empire uncongenial to any kind of political association. But more fundamental reasons may explain the long delay before the emergence of feminist association in France, and its weakness when it did.
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© 1985 Jane Rendall
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Rendall, J. (1985). The Feminist Case. In: The Origins of Modern Feminism: Women in Britain, France and the United States 1780–1860. Themes in Comparative History. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-17733-2_9
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