17.5: First Wave Feminism

As socialist parties were growing in size and strength, another political and cultural conflict raged: the emergence of feminism. In the context of the Victorian era, most Europeans believed in the doctrine of gender relations known as “separate spheres.” Basically, men and women had useful and necessary roles to play in society, but those roles were distinct from one another. The man’s job was to publicly represent the family unit and make all decisions affecting the family. The woman’s job was maintaining order in the home and raising the children, albeit under her husband's “veto” power. The Code Napoleon, in Article 231, proclaimed that the husband owed his wife protection, and the wife owed her husband obedience. Until the late nineteenth century, most legal systems officially classified women with children and the criminally insane in having no legal identity.

As of 1850, women across Europe could not vote, could not initiate divorce (in those countries in which divorce was even possible), control custody of children in the case of divorce, pursue higher education, open bank accounts in their own name, maintain ownership of inherited property after marriage, initiate lawsuits or serve as legal witnesses, or maintain control of their own wages if working and married. Everywhere, domestic violence against women (and children) was ubiquitous. It was taken for granted that the “man of the house” had the right to enforce his will with violence if he found it necessary. Despite the claim by male socialists that the working class were the “wretched of the earth,” there is no question that male workers enjoyed vastly more legal rights than did women of any social class at the time.

What had changed was the growth of liberalism. It was a short, logical step from making the claim that “all men are equal” to “all people are equal”. Indeed, some women had vocally emphasized the point in the early liberal movement leading up to the French Revolution. By the late nineteenth century, liberal legal codes were present in some form in most of Europe. After World War I, all men won the vote in Britain, France, and Germany, along with most of the smaller countries in central and western Europe. Thus, early feminists argued that their enfranchisement was simply the obvious, logical conclusion of the political evolution of the century.

Late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century feminism is referred to by historians as “first-wave” feminism. Its defining characteristic was the battle against legally-mandated discrimination against women regarding property laws, control over children within the family, and the right to vote. Of all of the cultural struggles and legal battles of the period, first-wave feminism faced the greatest opposition from those in power: men. Biologists routinely claimed that women were simply physiologically less intelligent than men. Women who had risen to positions of note were constantly attacked and belittled. For example, in the early 1900s, a new female scientist at the University of Athens had her speech interrupted by male students shouting, “back to the kitchen!” Indeed, Queen Victoria once said that the demand for equal rights for women was “a mad, wicked folly…forgetting every sense of womanly feelings and propriety.”

First-wave feminists argued that women were only “inferior” because of their inferior education. If they were educated at the same level and to the same standards as men, they would be able to exercise reason at the same level and deserve to be treated as full equals by the law.

First-wave feminism’s defining concern was suffrage - the right to vote. In 1867, in Britain, the National Society for Women’s Suffrage was founded. Over the next three decades, comparable movements spread across the continent. Only in Finland and Norway did women gain the vote before World War I. In some cases, it took shockingly long for women to get the vote. France only granted it in 1944 as a concession to the allies, who liberated the country from the Nazis. Switzerland took until 1971(!)

It would be misleading to claim that first-wave feminism was solely focused on suffrage. There were other components that needed to be addressed in relation to women's equality. An iconic example is marriage. For middle-class women, marriage was a necessity, not a choice. Working-class women worked in terrible conditions just to survive, while the truly desperate were often driven to prostitution due to the brutal economic and legal conditions for unmarried poor women. Feminists argued that women needed economic independence, the ability to support themselves before marriage without losing status or respectability, and the right to retain the property and earnings they brought to and accumulated during marriage. Voting rights and the right to initiate divorce were thus “weapons of self-defense”.

After decades of campaigns by feminists, divorce became possible in countries like Britain and France in the late nineteenth century, but it remained difficult and expensive to secure. For a woman to initiate divorce, she had to have the means to hire a lawyer and navigate labyrinthine divorce laws. As a result, only the well-off could do so. In other countries, like Russia, divorce remained illegal. Much more common than legal separation was the practice of men simply abandoning their wives and families when they tired of them. This action made the institutions of middle-class family life open to mockery by socialists, who, as did Marx and Engels, pointed out that marriage was nothing but a property contract that men could choose to abandon at will. (The socialist attitude toward feminism, incidentally, was that gender divisions were byproducts of capitalism. Once capitalism was eliminated, gender inequality would supposedly vanish as well).

In Britain, the best-known first-wave feminists were the Pankhursts: the mother Emmeline (1858 – 1928) and daughters Christabel and Sylvia, who formed a radical group known as the Suffragettes in 1903. A large part of the original membership came from the ranks of Lancashire textile workers before the group moved its headquarters to London in 1906. Eventually, the Pankhursts severed the links with the Labour Party and working-class activists, beginning a campaign of direct action under the motto "deeds, not words". By 1908, they had moved from heckling to stone-throwing and other forms of protest, including destroying paintings in museums and, on one occasion, attacking male politicians with horsewhips on a golf course.

Activists who staged public demonstrations were treated brutally by police, including coercive feeding when they went on hunger strikes. The brutality led to more widespread public support for the Suffragettes. But, no legal changes were forthcoming. Even the British Liberal Party, who had claimed to support women’s suffrage, always ended up putting it on the back-burner in Parliament. In the most spectacular and tragic act of protest, a Suffragette named Emily Davison threw herself under the King's horse during the Derby of 1913 and was killed.

Figure 17.5.1: Suffragettes who went on hunger strikes were often brutally force-fed while jailed.

By the early 20th Century, by and large, women had secured the right to enter universities. The first female academics secured teaching positions soon after. For example, the first woman to hold a university post in France was the famous Marie Curie, whose work was instrumental in understanding radiation. Women secured the right to initiate divorce, control their own wages and property, and fight for the custody of children. In short, thanks to feminist agitation, women had secured a legal identity and meaningful legal rights in at least some of the countries of Europe, and the United States, by the onset of World War I in 1914.

Women's Suffrage

In 1893, New Zealand became the first self-governing country to grant women the right to vote in parliamentary elections. Between 1893-1960, an additional 128 countries approved suffrage. After European decolonization, 80 percent of the countries in Africa granted women the right to vote between 1950 and 1975. More recent examples include Kuwait (2005) and the United Arab Emirates (2006). Published in 2020, the infographic is based on Pew Research Center data.