The Origins of Feminism: Part 1

In the last couple of weeks, I’ve stumbled across several unrelated posts online claiming to explain the reasons behind the rise of feminism, including one amusing conspiracy theory whereby the minds of women have been explicitly targeted to bring about the downfall of western civilisation. Since this is a subject I ended up dealing with as part of my recent book on Archetypology, I thought I would take the opportunity to provide my account for the emergence of feminism, which, like most aspects of modern society, began with the broader identity crisis that took place in the 19th century.

Archetypology is able to identify that identity crisis with precision because it is a model of identity formation. The framework relies on an expanded version of the archetype concept first introduced into modern thinking by the great Swiss psychologist, Carl Jung. The reason why I prefer to use archetypes is because they are natural symbols, and the advantage of a symbol is that it can point to multiple related meanings. For example, the archetype of a dove can denote the bird itself. But it also famously denotes peace, a meaning derived from the Old Testament story of Noah. From Greek mythology, we get the association of doves with love, and, like other birds, doves also have a symbolic meaning as messengers.

For those of us educated according to the strict scientific materialism of the post-war West, we are taught not to take this kind of symbolism seriously since it’s all too airy-fairy and vague and therefore not amenable to analysis and verification according to cause and effect. This attitude is a recent one and is at odds with the way our forebears treated symbolism, which was taken very seriously as a source of truth. It was Jung’s work which did the most to revitalise and validate symbolic thinking in modern times, although, of course, he has also fallen out of favour in the post-war years as scientific materialism has become the philosophical hegemon of our time. The point to be made is simply that symbolic thinking can be every bit as rigorous as “science”, and once upon a time people took it very seriously as a source of truth.

In Archetypology, we use the archetypes as complex symbols that point to truths about human nature and its development. We posit four archetypes that account for life’s journey: the Child, the Orphan, the Adult, and the Elder. Each of these can then be said to resonate across three primary fields of identity, which we call the biological-familial, the socio-cultural, and the higher esoteric. The provisional meaning of the first two should be fairly self-evident, while the category of “higher esoteric” mostly refers to what Kant and the subsequent German tradition called a Weltanschauung, or worldview, which includes the primary beliefs of an individual and culture, including moral, religious, mythological, philosophical, and intellectual presuppositions about the world. Our Weltanschauung operates mostly subconsciously, and it is only if we actively engage in philosophical, theological, or aesthetic reflection that we can bring it to consciousness.

When we combine the three “levels of being” with the four archetypes, we get a simple but powerful matrix for tracking human development over the course of life. In table form, it looks like this:-

	Child	Orphan	Adult	Elder
Higher Esoteric
Sociocultural
Biological-Familial

This simple way of framing development nevertheless hides a great deal of complexity. The advantage of Archetypology is that it provides a map that allows us to “drill down” into lower levels of complexity without losing sight of where we are in the broader picture. One of the complexities that is hidden in the above table is the distinction between men and women. Another is class distinctions in civilisation. We need to flesh out both of these in more detail because modern feminism arose out of a crisis of identity that occurred in the 19th century among a quite specific demographic in Western society: aristocratic women.

But we can be even more specific than that because the problems facing aristocratic women in the 19th century were contained to the Orphan phase of life. As the name suggests, the Orphan archetype is about separating from our parents and family and beginning to forge our identity in the broader culture. In almost every society, there is a marked difference between the male and female initiation that occurs during the Orphan phase of life. We’ll turn to those in a minute. But, first, let’s distinguish the Orphan from the Child.

The identity of the Child is almost entirely subsumed within the family. It is a seeming universal of human culture that children are left to the care of their parents for at least the first five or six years of life. But even in the period after this, the Child is not seen to have a real independent identity and is given none of the political, economic, or religious rights that are granted later. For all intents and purposes, the Child has no socio-cultural identity except as a member of its family. Similarly, the Child has a limited understanding of the Weltanschauung of the culture into which it is born, since what is learned during this time is done through instinct, imitation and mimicry rather than conscious reflection.

The transition to the Orphan phase of life is ushered in by the arrival of puberty which coincides with what the psychoanalysts call the birth of the ego. This gives us both a major biological and psychological upheaval which, in almost every culture, is the signal for the first proper initiation into the socio-cultural realm. The individual’s family identity is deprecated in favour of a new set of identities granted by the wider society. Hunter gatherer tribes, in particular, seem to have marked this change very strongly with initiation rituals for both men and women accompanied by subsequent taboos and restrictions around interaction with the parents.

The major change in identity that occurs with the onset of the Orphan archetype resonates very differently for men and women. That is obviously true at the biological level, but it’s equally true in the socio-cultural. Anthropology tells us that the most common cultural paradigm for women is to marry shortly after puberty and leave the home they grew up in to move into that of their husband. Especially in pre-modern societies, this involved an almost complete severance with the family of birth due to the difficulty of travel and lack of communication technology. But, in many cultures, even when contact can be continued between the women and her family, it is considered inappropriate and only ever done through the auspices of the husband’s family.

If we remember that the Orphan archetype is all about severing or reducing dependence on the parents, then we can see that such practices fulfil the Orphan’s mission to a tee. In fact, we can argue that women have traditionally had a far more pronounced break with their family. By contrast, in patriarchal societies, men are expected to continue their family line rather than break with it. Having said that, the man’s “leadership” of the family is mostly a legal or religious matter rather than a practical one. The household itself has traditionally been the domain of women, and when a young woman is married, she has the task of being initiated into her husband’s family, a job which is normally done by the matriarchs of the household: primarily, the mother and grandmother.

The Orphan phase of life for young men has typically involved initiation into the socio-cultural institutions of society, of which the economic, political, and military are the most important. Because these require a longer period of education and training, the Orphan period for men has usually quite a bit longer than it is for women. In addition, men have been expected to establish themselves in society before getting married. This means that grooms have traditionally been older than brides in most cultures.

Although these general properties hold across many cultures throughout history, there are, of course, innumerable variations, and the one we are concerned with here is that which gave rise to modern feminism. It’s called the Western European Marriage Pattern (WEMP), and it emerged in the Middle Ages in northern and western Europe, predominantly in the towns and cities.

As far as young male Orphans go, the WEMP was not that unusual. Both working-class and aristocratic males were expected to establish themselves in society before getting married. This normally involved an apprenticeship/education period of a number of years. However, because Western Europe at the time was relatively poor, it took young men longer to establish themselves. The result was that the average age of marriage occurred very late. It was not uncommon for aristocratic men to marry in their early 30s or even later. Meanwhile, their working class counterparts had an average age of marriage in the early 20s.

By far the most unusual part of the WEMP was the way it played out for young women, but here we see a crucial demographic difference that was already present in the Middle Ages. As we have already noted, the common paradigm across cultures is for women to marry shortly after puberty, move in to the household of their husband’s family, and have children shortly thereafter. That was true of one demographic of women in the West: the aristocracy. Young aristocratic women married young and took up residence with their husband’s family with the express intent of continuing the family line.

We see a classic example of this dynamic in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Juliet is only thirteen years old when Paris comes courting. She doesn’t want to get married, but her mother tries to encourage her by pointing out that several of her friends had already tied the knot and had even had children. Thus, as late as 1600, when Shakespeare wrote the play, it was normal for a woman of Juliet’s pedigree to marry at 13. That would be the case all the way into the 19th century, and it was only in the middle of that century that the legal age of marriage for women was raised from 12 in most Western nations.

All of this was quite normal when compared against other cultures. Where the WEMP really differed was among young working-class women, the demographic majority of society. Because of the relative poverty of Europe at that time, most families could afford little to no dowry, and therefore the only way that a working-class couple could set themselves up for marriage was to work and save money. That is exactly what young women did, and the classic medieval archetype of the pretty young housemaid comes out of this dynamic since it was mostly in the households of the wealthy that young women could hope to earn a living. Because the wages were very low, it took a number of years to build up any kind of savings, and this meant that the average age of marriage for young women was far older than in almost all other cultures at the time. In fact, working-class women were almost as old as their male counterparts in getting married in their late teens and early 20s on average.

One of the results of all this was the relative independence that the young working class had from their families, which allowed them a much greater choice of marriage partner. Since the parents were not paying a dowry, their ability to influence the choice of a husband or wife was limited. Furthermore, although multi-generational families were common, they were not as dominant as in other societies meaning that many young couples expected to move into their own home rather than live with their parents. All of this meant that young working class people had relative freedom from their own families although, of course, their weak economic position in general meant that they needed to faithfully serve the interests of the aristocracy who were paying their wages.

The reason why this unusual pattern of marriage is important in terms of our archetypal analysis is because marriage represents the beginning of the Adult phase of life. It is the time when the man and woman take on the responsibility that comes from starting a family of their own and becoming parents. If marriage marks the beginning of the Adult archetype, it follows that the Orphan archetype belongs to the time between puberty and marriage/childbirth. The length of this period differs between the sexes, between classes in society, and between cultures. One of the results of the WEMP was that the Orphan period of life in Western culture has been much longer than in other cultures. This trend began all the way back in the Middle Ages. But there was one demographic of society for which this was not true; you guessed it: aristocratic women.

Young aristocratic females were expected to marry shortly after puberty, move into the household of their husband, and have children. Needless to say, marriage for this class of people was entirely an economic and political transaction whose purpose was to benefit both families. The result was that aristocratic women were far more at the whim of their parents than their working-class counterparts. They were also far less likely to be able to marry somebody they cared about, let alone loved. The working-class had a relative freedom of choice of marriage partner that was denied to the aristocracy.

That brings us back to the plot of Romeo and Juliet since the story revolves around Juliet refusing to do what was expected of aristocratic women and marry whomever her parents chose. Instead, Juliet marries for love, and this ends in death for both her and Romeo. Although Shakespeare was not interested in making any kind of moral judgement about this, it’s certain that most of his audience in Elizabethan times would have interpreted the tragic outcome as fitting since marrying for love instead of duty was seen to be morally questionable at that time. Most people would have thought that Juliet brought it on herself by choosing reckless love over the sage advice of her parents.

It was exactly this attitude which changed in the two centuries after Romeo and Juliet was premiered. It is no coincidence that Shakespeare enjoyed a massive surge in popularity in the early 19th century. That popularity came mostly among the aristocracy and educated classes of that time, who were in the process of rebelling against what they saw as the outdated and stuffy pretences of the old guard. This was the time when Romanticism became the dominant Weltanschauung among educated elites, and, according to this way of thinking, Juliet was 100% justified in pursuing love for its own sake even when it conflicted with familial duty and even when it brought about her downfall.

This change in attitude was not just an arbitrary aesthetic or moral issue. It was tied in with the breakdown of the Orphan identity that had existed for aristocratic women since the Middle Ages. The purpose of the arranged marriages of the aristocracy was economic and political; however, the economics and politics of the Western world were in a state of rapid change and uncertainty in the 19th century. The rise of democracy and capitalism was fast destroying the old aristocratic paradigm. It is no coincidence that the feminist movement was strongest in the Anglo countries since Britain and America were the ones pursuing democracy and capitalism the most fervently. They were the societies where the old paradigm was quickly becoming irrelevant.

The arranged marriages of the aristocracy no longer served a purpose, and they were gradually abandoned. That wasn’t a problem for aristocratic men who were well placed to transition into the new social arrangements. It also wasn’t a problem for the working-class who had been working before marriage for centuries and had been the the lifeblood of capitalism from the start. But it was a major problem for aristocratic women. As the need for an early marriage disappeared, they found themselves without an identity to transition into. Their Orphan period of life had been thrown into limbo. It was as a response to this identity crisis that modern feminism arose. We’ll sketch out the details of that in next week’s post.