The Origins of Feminism: Part 2

When historians analyse major historical developments, they have tended to do so through the lens of political power, which makes sense purely from a narrative point of view since political stories usually involve great personalities and dramatic events which seem to turn the entire tide of history in one fell swoop. On closer inspection, however, we find that these great events of history have their own history. When we examine that, it starts to look as though the most momentous occasions are the final stages of longer processes, often the official culmination of tensions and forces that have been building for a very long time.

It was in the 19th century that this view of history as a series of longer arcs began to emerge. That entailed a reduction in emphasis on the great events and personalities and more focus on the forces that seemed to unite them. The historical materialism of Marx is a prime example of this, as were the thinkers who took a more esoteric approach, such as Vico, Herder, Humboldt, Nietzsche, Toynbee, Spengler, Freud and Jung.

The assumption of many materialists in the 19th century was that their viewpoint somehow extinguished the esoteric perspectives, as if only one or the other could be true at the same time. There’s no reason at all why that should be the case. In fact, we can easily incorporate the materialist perspective alongside the esoteric one and arrive at an integral or holistic point of view. A word which encapsulates this integral perspective is identity, which we can then divide into exoteric and esoteric aspects and which applies to both individuals and collectives. The exoteric aspects are the formal, outward-facing parts of identity, and the esoteric are inward-facing.

As individuals, our identity evolves as a constant back and forth between the exoteric and esoteric poles. A crisis of identity can seem to come from either. For example, being made redundant from your job is an exoteric problem. Becoming so disillusioned with your job that you quit is an esoteric one. But, as with important historical events, these individual crises have their own history that also vacillates between the exoteric and the esoteric. Maybe you (esoterically) saw the writing on the wall about your job, and the official (exoteric) redundancy did not come as a surprise. Maybe the disillusionment that led you to quit your job was preceded by numerous exoteric attempts to solve the various problems that were sucking away your motivation. Dramatic upheavals rarely come out of nowhere. The warning signs are there for those who know how to look.

In last week’s post, we sketched out some of the background context required to understand the “warning signs” that emerged in the 19th century and that eventually gave rise to feminism. We examined four different identities that had existed in Western culture since the medieval period. These were working-class men and women and their aristocratic counterparts. One major group we left out was the feudal peasantry. The reason we haven’t needed to focus on this group was because it was fairly easily transitioned into the working class as industrial capitalism took over in the 19th century. There were major problems associated with this, such as the appalling poverty and pollution in the industrial cities, but it didn’t cause an identity crisis because the established capitalist paradigm could initiate new members easily. In much the same way, aristocratic men gradually transitioned into the elite roles of the new paradigm, such as businessman, banker, parliamentarian, and technocrat, and that’s why there was no identity crisis among that demographic either.

The one demographic which was unable to transition easily into the new capitalist-democratic system was aristocratic women. To understand why, let’s describe the nature of the identity that such women had enjoyed in the centuries leading up to the 19th. If we recall our three primary categories, the biological-familial, socio-cultural, and higher esoteric, it’s easy to see that the role of aristocratic women was almost entirely limited to the biological-familial domain. The first and foremost task of such women was to propagate the family line, and there are countless dramatic stories which revolve around what happened when this went wrong (cough, cough, Henry VIII, cough, cough).

However, the role of an aristocratic woman was not limited to being a brood mare for her husband. There were a number of important ceremonial and cultural responsibilities to fulfil. There was also an economic function that, perhaps ironically, modern feminism has helped to erase. To understand this, we need to appreciate that, for most of history, the household has been a major source of production. The word “economy” comes from the Greek “oikonomia”, which meant “household management”. In ancient times, the households were where food, clothing, and many of the other necessities of life were produced, most of which was done by slaves. In addition, the household was managed by the women, as opposed to the public sphere, which was the province of men.

Almost the same paradigm was copied across into medieval Europe, where aristocratic estates were large-scale enterprises employing a small army of servants who grew and cooked the food, maintained the house and garden, and carried out whatever other productive activities were required. With the man of the house often away for various reasons, it fell to his wife to manage the affairs. Thus, in both ancient and medieval times, it was women who were in charge of household economic production, and this was an important part of their identity and also an important contribution to their families. Of course, the lady of the house would not have been expected to manage the servants directly but would have been a decision-maker and overseer. 

If we were to summarise the life of a young aristocratic woman from the medieval period onwards, we would say that she would be married off shortly after puberty to a husband chosen by her parents for the purposes of strengthening the family line. She would take up residence in the estate of her husband with the intention of bearing him children and then taking over the management of the estate. 20th-century feminists were correct in pointing out that this paradigm allowed women no pathways into the political and military institutions of society or the higher esoteric via formal education. That may be true. But it is clear that aristocratic women had a well-defined identity and one that was, all things considered, not exactly a terrible life when set against the conditions of broader society. Furthermore, especially in Renaissance Italy and 18th-century France, aristocratic women played important roles as patrons of the arts.

We may argue that women didn’t have a lot of freedom during this time, but nobody had much freedom. Your life path was pretty much defined at birth. People in those days had ninety-nine problems, but an identity crisis was not one. What brought on the identity crisis for the aristocracy was the arrival of industrial capitalism and democracy, which went hand-in-hand with the new Weltanschauung known as the Enlightenment. The upshot of all of this was to undermine both the economic and moral basis of the aristocracy, whose social position had always been tied to the ownership of land and the agricultural production that came with it. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the declining economic position of the aristocracy translated into reduced political influence as parliamentary democracy became increasingly controlled by the rising bourgeoisie, who passed a number of laws in their own interests and against the interests of the landed gentry. Perhaps the final nail in the coffin was the democratisation and professionalisation of military service, a process that was complete by the end of WW2. In fact, in most respects, WW2 signalled the official end of the old aristocracy.

We might take a Marxist approach to all this and claim that economic factors were solely to blame for the declining fortunes of the upper classes, but that would ignore the major changes that were also occurring in the Weltanschauung of the era. One of those might seem, at first sight, to be unrelated or trivial, and yet it had major implications for the life path of aristocratic women in particular. We alluded in last week’s post to the fact that Shakespeare enjoyed a major surge in popularity beginning early in the 19th century. This was part of the larger development known as Romanticism. One of the doctrines of the Romantic movement was a focus on passion as a guiding principle of life, in opposition both to the over-intellectualised Enlightenment movement and to the stuffy old notions of duty which had guided the aristocracy for centuries. It was now believed that young people should be allowed the freedom to develop according to their own inner nature rather than be made to conform to the requirements of society.

As a result of this, the arranged marriages of the aristocracy became an anachronism, both because they prioritised duty over passion and because they failed to allow young women the opportunity to develop themselves. Of course, it was also true that the economic and political basis of arranged marriage was fast becoming obsolete. In any case, the result was that aristocratic women no longer married shortly after puberty as they had been doing for centuries. Therein lay the crux of the identity crisis because, without marriage and the associated responsibilities of child-rearing and household management that came with it, young aristocratic women were left with no role to step into during adolescence.

As industrial capitalism and democracy became the dominant paradigm over the course of the 19th and early 20th centuries, the working classes kept doing what they had been doing for centuries, which was taking a job to save money before getting married. Aristocratic men continued to follow the old pattern of receiving a long period of education, including military training, and then establishing themselves before marriage. The remnants of the old feudal peasantry had lost their identity, but they were easily absorbed into the growing working class and therefore had a well-established identity to transition into. That was precisely what aristocratic women lacked. Their old paradigm was also disappearing, but they had no new paradigm to move into. The socio-cultural institutions of society, such as politics, law, and the military, were closed to women, as they always had been. Formal education, including university study, was off limits, and no respectable woman would have considered getting involved in the grubby affairs of capitalist enterprise or finance. The Orphan phase of life had been lengthened for such women, but had been filled with nothing.

Let’s remember that the whole point of the Orphan phase is that we must separate from our parents and begin to forge our own identity. Viewed this way, the Orphan transition for aristocratic women had traditionally been far more abrupt and comprehensive than for their male counterparts since they had to leave their home, take the surname of their husband, and give birth to children shortly thereafter. That same pattern was prevalent in the early 19th century, but what the changes in attitude did was to push back the time of marriage so that aristocratic women were now marrying in their late teens and early twenties just like their working-class counterparts. Unlike the working class, however, it was considered inappropriate for aristocratic women to work. Meanwhile, educational opportunities were almost non-existent. Put simply, upper-class women had nothing to do except wait around in the house of their parents until they were old enough to get married.

It is no coincidence, then, that the literature of the 19th century began to be filled with stories involving young ladies vacillating between the tedium of domestic life and the thrill of romance which came with the new freedom of choice around a marriage partner. The novels of Jane Austen represent the most perfect expression of this dynamic, and it is no coincidence that they often hinge on a choice between love and money. In earlier times, the parents would always have chosen on financial grounds, but the young ladies of the 19th century found themselves with some power to make their own decisions, the same decision that Juliet makes in Shakespeare’s great play.

In fact, Jane Austen’s life was itself an exemplar of this new dynamic since she was born into an old-money family that had fallen on hard times with the changing economic conditions. Her choice was to marry as a way to escape the threat of poverty. Meanwhile, her “education” came from filling the hours that would otherwise have constituted dreadful domestic boredom with various artistic pursuits, including and especially writing. Austen was extremely fortunate to have a supportive and educated family that she used as her proto-audience to bootstrap herself to fame (although never fortune).

If Austen represents the positive side of the new domestic and romantic arrangements, Emily Brontë surely represents the darker side, and, again, it is no coincidence that the themes of her work reflect the much more problematic upbringing that she had with a mother who died when she was young and a father who was, although supportive of his daughter’s education, not the most affectionate and loving of parents. In any case, what we find in both writers, and others of the same era, are domestic situations revolving around young women who have nothing else to do but wait around for a marriage partner to arrive on the scene. That is what the new arrangements had brought into place and it was the new reality that young aristocratic women needed to deal with. The popularity of Austen and Brontë is testament to the fact that there were many other young women in that era who were facing the same situation.

Against this backdrop, the arrival during the Victorian era of extremely prudish attitudes towards sex among the aristocracy makes a great deal of sense. The new arrangements meant that young women would be sexually mature and single for a number of years before getting married. Since out-of-wedlock dalliances were out of the question, the honour of young ladies needed to be preserved, and one of the ways to do that was via the incredibly repressive morality around any form of sexual expression.

Of course, this was just one more restriction placed on young women who already had no meaningful way to express themselves or to formulate an identity of their own. In terms of the exoteric-esoteric distinction we have been using, aristocratic women had lost the old exoteric identity that was available to them as a wife and lady of the house. Whatever we think of that lifestyle, it was a proper identity and one that was recognised by society. By the 19th century, the same women had been almost entirely confined to the homes of their parents. They were denied an independent exoteric identity. As a result, they reverted back to the esoteric. Jane Austen and Emily Brontë were able to turn their introversion into great works of literature, but many other women were not so fortunate.

This leads us into another way in which the identity crisis expressed itself in esoteric form: the arrival of psychoanalysis. It is no coincidence that Freud and Jung’s patients were almost entirely drawn from one demographic of society: aristocratic women. Consider one of Freud’s most famous cases, called the Dora Case. Dora’s real name was Ida Bauer, and she was exactly the kind of young woman we have been talking about. She was born into an aristocratic family but had no real prospects for individual advancement during her teenage years. In fact, Ida was even more housebound than her peers since she needed to stay home for long hours to care for her sick father.

When Ida was eighteen, her father began to have an affair with a female friend of the family. That was bad enough, but then the husband of the woman her father was diddling made an advance at Ida herself. Ida slapped him for his trouble, whereupon her father decided that she needed to be sent to Freud for treatment. Nowadays, we would applaud Ida for standing up for herself, but in the Victorian era, it was simply not done to make a scene about such matters. Once again, the repressive morality of the era was largely at their expense. A big part of Freud’s appeal was simply that he listened to his young female patients without judgement, something that their families or broader society never did.

Just as Marx had reduced everything to materialism, Freud was interested only in psychological explanations. Our integral and holistic approach does not need to choose between these models because it makes clear that there is a feedback loop at play and that esoteric expressions of an identity crisis cannot be separated from the exoteric problems that are involved. At the time of life when the young women of the 19th century should have been extroverting themselves into an exoteric identity, they had been forced back into introversion. Combined with the stifling morality that aimed to govern their behaviour, it’s no wonder that a general helplessness fell on such women, which manifested primarily in psychological symptoms.

Of course, while these esoteric developments were taking place in the literary and psychological spheres, there also arose the political movement that came to be called feminism. It was feminism which dealt with the exoteric side of the equation by opening up new pathways of identity. Thus, there was political access in the form of suffrage, legal equality, avenues to formal education, and even, in our times, the ability to take up military service. All of these occurred synchronously with the broader arc of change that swept away the old aristocracy and replaced it with the democratic, capitalist technocracy that is still the dominant paradigm in our times. Whatever else can be said about that, it solved the identity crisis for aristocratic women.