Thoroughly Modern Woman

Abstract

Ramazanoglu (1989: 40) maintains that using the concept of male domination as a universal generalization has the effect of making basic features of women’s experience, notably class, race, nationality and subculture, invisible. Her analysis emphasizes the contradictions of women’s oppression. So will mine in this chapter. My discussions of women and the passions, women and the home, women’s space and women and medicine are linked by the design of revealing the rooted and tenacious fact of male domination. On the other hand, I will break rather sharply with the feminist received idea that we still live in patriarchal societies. ‘Patriarchy’ refers to a system of domination based upon the principle that men’s physical and intellectual powers are normally superior to those of women. This is reflected in the legal, economic and political subordination of women and the institutionalized closure of female life-chances. Following Turner (1984: 149–56), I want to argue that the term patriarchy is only relevant to conditions in early capitalism — the capitalism that advocated the medical practice of clitoridectomy as a ‘cure’ for female masturbation, and campaigned in favour of the overtly sexist Contagious Diseases Acts of 1864, 1866 and 1869.¹ After the 1860s these institutions of moral regulation came under heavy and sustained fire from feminist critics.