Femocracy: How Educators Can Teach Democratic Ideals and Feminism 9781475860863, 9781475860870, 9781475860887

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F E M O C R A C Y

F E M O C R A C Y How Educators Can Teach Democratic Ideals and Feminism

Chris Edwards

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Rowman & Littlefield An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com 6 Tinworth Street, London SE11 5AL, United Kingdom Copyright © 2021 by Chris Edwards All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Edwards, Chris, 1977– author. Title: Femocracy : how educators can teach democratic ideals and feminism / Chris Edwards. Description: Lanham : Rowman & Littlefield, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references. | Summary: “Feminism is world history’s most significant historical force and should be presented in classrooms as the central narrative in world history from the Protestant Reformation to the present. Democratic ideals created both the American Congress and the feminist movement, but which is more important? This and more is discussed in Femocracy: How Educators Can Teach Democratic Ideals and Feminism”—Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2021008879 (print) | LCCN 2021008880 (ebook) | ISBN 9781475860863 (cloth ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781475860870 (paperback ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781475860887 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Women’s studies—United States. | Feminism—United States—History. | Democracy—Study and teaching—United States. | Feminism and education—United States. Classification: LCC HQ1181.U5 E39 2021 (print) | LCC HQ1181.U5 (ebook) | DDC 305.4209—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021008879 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021008880 ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements

of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

For my wife, Beth. The family is lucky you are the one in charge.

CONTENTS

Introduction ix 1  Antecedents to Femocracy

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2  English History and the English Stage

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3  The Enlightenment

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4  Revolution and the Vindication

45

5  Anti-slavery and the Declaration of Sentiments

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6  Between the Suffragettes and Birth Control

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7  Higher Education and the Pill

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8  From The Feminine Mystique to Oprah

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9  Femocracy in the West: 2011 to the Future

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Conclusion 153 References 157

vii

INTRODUCTION

Traditional narratives of history operate like a Mercator map of the

world by creating order through distortion. Mercator maps distort the actual size of landmasses so that a round surface can be represented on a flat surface in a way that makes everything fit on the right latitude and longitude. The Mercator map does not claim to be proportionally accurate, but people unacquainted with cartography might eyeball the map and think that Greenland is roughly the size of Africa. Computer cartography has allowed for the creation of some interesting new maps that reflect proportionality better so that one can see that countries that appear modest on the Mercator map loom rather large in real space. Countries that appear to sprawl across the Mercator take up less impressive spaces in proportional maps. World history lacks a means of measuring the significance of events and so sometimes an event of no great long-term importance gets stretched, by acclamation, to fit the established lines while events that should take up more significant space get shrunk. The point of this book is that democratic ideals created feminism and that feminism as a historical topic has been distorted into a constricted little island when it should take up most of the map. Since the audience for this book will be primarily made up of educators and academics, some guidelines for how to teach this new synthesis will be included. ix

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Historians should judge the importance of a historical event by the scale of its effects. Has anything been more consequential during the last century and a half than the rise of feminism? In 1900, Chinese mothers and grandmothers deliberately broke the feet of their female children and grandchildren and then bound those broken feet so tightly that they grew into a malformed and useless clump of bones and flesh. In the United States, no federal provision guaranteed a woman’s right to vote and women could not vote in Great Britain either. Compare that status for women with the present and it becomes hard to see why the rise of feminism is not the central narrative in world historical studies. Given feminism’s importance, and the vast population affected by it, the way in which it derived should be studied and explained. The contention in this book is that democratic ideas, which developed specifically in Western civilization as a result of unique religious, geographic, and political circumstances, created a philosophical basis that led to feminism. Furthermore, the development of feminist ideology, by way of analogy with democratic ideals, is the most important effect that democratic ideals created. Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, for example, might be said to have begat both the American Constitution and the 1848 Seneca Falls Declaration, but the Seneca Falls Declaration helped to create global feminism while the Constitution created the American Congress. Which is more significant for the daily experience of more people? Readers of this book should know something about my motivation for writing it. My background is in world historical studies and I have written extensively in the field. I am not a feminist historian or a women’s studies specialist. This book is about world history and is driven by a desire to correct the proportional distortions that affect all historical studies, but world history in particular. I am interested in how this powerful global force that is feminism was created and I am interested in where it might go not because I am a feminist (though I am) but because of its importance to the field of world history. My skin is white, my gender is male, and my age is middle, but my hope is that my qualifications as a scholar of world history, and not my immutable personal characteristics, will matter more. World historical methods differ from those of traditional history in that world historians tend to read widely in search of trends and novel

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connections while traditional historians begin with a specific research question and then research to find as many facts as they can to help answer that question. Before I begin this book, a few terms must be defined and a few points made. Femocracy itself means “governed by the feminine.” It should not be confused with “governed by women.” Femocracy as a world historical force is currently emerging but cannot be said to exist anywhere quite yet. For the purpose of this book, the historical trend has been that democratic ideals created feminism and that feminism is in the process of creating femocracy. Most of the book will describe how that developed but a vision for what the future might be in a femocracy is developed throughout and, specifically, in the final chapter. In this book, feminine will be defined as cooperative, considerate of others, group based, nurturing, and passive (as opposed to aggressive). Masculine will be defined as individualistic, aggressive, competitive, and often violent. Femocracy will be achieved when society accepts the feminine rather than the masculine as the default norm for behavior. The genders of the people practicing the behavior matter little. These definitions might seem broad and arguable, and they are, but a failure to define these terms leads to the creation of what I would call anti-feminist posturing; this is where historians, writers, filmmakers, and so forth accept the masculine norm and then try to make women fit those norms. A good example from popular culture would be the 2019 film Captain Marvel, with Brie Larson as the title character, named Carol Danvers, and Jude Law as her mentor Yon-Rogg. Early in the movie, before she receives her superpowers, Danvers engages in a martial-arts sparring match with Yon-Rogg. Yon-Rogg repeatedly punches Danvers in the face until the point where blood bursts from her nose. No doubt the purpose of the scene was to show two peers fighting in equality, but the scene made me uneasy not just because it showed a man beating up a woman but mostly because a woman conforming to masculine norms got passed off as feminism. That scene, like so many of the books and presentations in the “badass-women of history” genre, really is anti-feminist because it accepts the underlying notion that masculinity is the established standard that a battalion of women-who-acted-masculine must march under. To keep the point short: a feminist superhero movie would have Captain Marvel

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teaching Yon-Rogg how to put his fists down and learn how to cooperate and respect the feelings of others. The whole “girl-power” genre holds back the development of femocracy. Although the first few paragraphs of this introduction explained my academic interest in the development of feminism as a world historical force, I am hoping the reader will permit me to include here a few statements about my personal interest in the subject. Probably the original inspiration for this book came when I read a New York Times piece in 2008 about how just about every woman in Saudi Arabia would sit down in the afternoon and watch the Oprah Winfrey Show. Oprah fascinated Saudi women because of her independence and prestige. That article stuck with me as I studied and wrote about world history over the years. Over time, that piece about Oprah and the Saudis began to synthesize with a question that Jared Diamond tried to answer in his Guns, Germs, and Steel, paraphrased as “Why did the Europeans sail west to encounter the American Indians rather than the American Indians sail east to Europe?” Why, it might be asked, were Saudi women sitting down to watch an American woman rather than the other way around? Teachers and professors should seek to create proportionality in world historical studies and, currently, the traditional narratives and texts fail to frame feminism to its scale and to connect feminism to its roots. Past distortions in the historical narrative need to be brought into their proper proportion. In the process of telling this narrative, I will also present an argument that the development of feminism should be seen as the supreme narrative in world history and, as such, should have a core set of documents and geniuses just as traditional political or scientific histories do. I have done a considerable amount of writing on the history and development of genius and I believe that feminism has produced three genuine geniuses: Mary Wollstonecraft, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Oprah Winfrey. The reasons why will be explained in the body of the book. These three feminist geniuses just happen to be women. John Stuart Mill and Frederick Douglass certainly helped the cause of feminism, but I did not consider them geniuses because their work was not impressive enough in either its form or its effects.

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My goal here is to develop the history of certain ideas, not to encapsulate a comprehensive female experience; I did not detour so that I could find evidence regarding the experience of African American or Asian American women, for example. There is no shortage of books that detail those experiences, but only people relevant to the topic are included here. The evidence did lead me to several individuals who were from diverse backgrounds, but I did not go searching for them just for the sake of diversity. This book was written with two hopes. The first is that the distortion of historical events can be reshaped so that feminism’s development will be the core narrative of Western civilization. The second is to correct an increasingly obnoxious assumption that Western values are somehow illiberal and irredeemably connected to white supremacy. That notion exists because the traditional narratives of Western civilization connect the creation of liberal values to Western political institutions as a primary function and make feminism a very small subheading. Teaching this history in a new way may create generations of students who feel more connected to Enlightenment ideals and liberal values. Educators will find this book useful in two ways. The first is practical in the sense that two of history’s most important developments, democracy and feminism, will have their origins explored, their synthesis detailed, and their historical effects linked. Every chapter will end with a few key points or questions that will make the book directly useful for classroom application either to be read by an educator to stimulate new ideas for teaching or to be used directly with students as a core text. The second use is that femocracy might be used to help students develop an understanding of what a historical meta-analysis might look like. The connections and conclusions that past historians have created regarding content might need to be rethought entirely; my hope is that Femocracy will provide an example of how to do that.

1 ANTECEDENTS TO FEMOCRACY

Modern

democratic ideals created feminism, and the combination of the two created femocracy. The causation of these events occurred in Western civilization for a variety of historical reasons. The question “Why the West?” has been thoroughly answered by historians, but generally in the terms of “Why did the West emerge as the dominant global society in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in a way that remade the world in a Western model?” That certainly is an important question in global studies, but for the purpose of this first chapter, the question is “Why did the West develop the right conditions for democratic ideals, the most significant effect of which was the creation of feminism?” To answer that question, the narrative needs to begin before Western civilization developed a unique trajectory from the rest of the world. This means beginning at the point where hunter-gatherers transitioned into civilization, and a few parameters must be put in place before that narrative can begin. The desire to create generalizations about human nature (and to proscribe a variety of governmental structures based on those generalizations), and to use hunter-gatherers as evidence, developed first during the Enlightenment. Prior to the Enlightenment, the Christian consensus in the West had it that human beings were, by nature, wicked. The catholic Church (the lowercase c denotes the pre-Reformation Church, when “catholic” was 1

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an adjective rather than a proper noun) taught that people came into the world with a sinful nature that could only be cleansed by engaging in such good works as going to mass, giving to charity, buying indulgences, confessing sins, and engaging in the Last Rites that the Church proscribed. Martin Luther and the Protestants never challenged the notion that human behavior is wicked, they merely believed that faith alone led to salvation and that good works helped not at all. The discovery of the Americas was also the discovery, from the European perspective, of tens of millions of people who lived in societies largely unshaped by cities and entirely unshaped by Christianity. This state-of-nature concept called the traditional Christian concept of human nature into question. Locke said that people were born blank and that experience gave them character; Rousseau claimed that humans were born free and happy and that civilization corrupted them, and Hobbes agreed with the Christians about the essentially bad nature of humanity, but he thought a strong central government could check the negative impulses that people exhibit. The debate continues in the modern era, with Steven Pinker and a slew of anthropologists making the case that hunter-gatherers tended to engage in all forms of violence from infanticide to inter-tribal warfare. If human nature is violent, then modern states with strong centralized control are the most effective means of holding those natural impulses back. The opposite to Steven Pinker might be Christopher Ryan, whose 2019 book Civilized to Death made the claim that people in huntergatherer societies tended to be happier, less stressed, and more prone to cooperation than people living in an unnatural modern society. Part of the problem with trying to generate conclusions about huntergatherer societies comes from trying to theorize too much with too little evidence. This might be called the Monty Python and the Holy Grail fallacy. That movie featured a scene where medieval peasants spoke of themselves in modern academic terms—a sarcastic reminder that historians and philosophers should be careful when employing groups of people from the past as foundational material for a grand thesis. To avoid the Monty Python fallacy and the Holy Grail fallacy, only two modest conclusions will be drawn here regarding the move of huntergatherers into civilization. First, the development of civilization reveals the importance of exaptation (pre-adaptation) for the human brain. The brain can memorize

A ntecedents to F emocracy 3

the alphabet, learn algebra, and create complex music; however, these activities are not natural to human beings because those activities did not occur in hunter-gatherer societies. Children come out of the womb with genes that expect a free lifestyle on the African savannah, and parents must civilize their children so that the kids can live in an environment (with sharp table corners and breakable glass) not well suited to them. The concept of parenting comes from this relationship. Toddlers pick up spoken language naturally from those around them because spoken language came about early in human evolution, but written language and complex mathematics are recent products of civilization. The brain can learn to read, write, and do arithmetic but this is not natural to it. The development of abstract mental skills meant the creation of a master-apprentice relationship, and this, in turn, led to a gradation of skills valued by their rarity. The teaching of rare skills that developed because of exaptation led to the creation of internal hierarchies that the people in the egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies never would have accepted. Almost all anthropologists agree that civilization downgraded the status of women. In hunter-gatherer societies, women tended to possess political power and real status. In deep human history, goddesses, usually depicted as being heavy with pregnancy, were often carved into wood. One presumes that after a female reached a certain age, sex was so ubiquitous in the tribes that individuals would have seen no more reason to connect the sexual act with pregnancy than with the act of eating. Pregnant women likely held special status in hunter-gatherer bands because they were seen to be a connecting point between the material world and the spirit world, with spirits using the womb as a conduit from immaterial soul to physical shape. Even giving birth was probably easier in a hunter-gatherer society because the physical dynamics of childbirth were more favorable in a hunter-gatherer environment. A woman’s pelvis is particularly susceptible to being altered by nutrition, and the general effect of a diet based on grain (typical of civilization) is to narrow the pelvis. Women in hunter-gatherer societies also did not mate with individuals outside their ethnic group so it would not have been the case, for example, that a Vietnamese woman would become impregnated by a Masai hunter. Women in civilization have always faced the prospect of pushing bigger children through a

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narrower birth canal, and this fact alone means that for untold numbers of women, civilization turned a natural act into something horrifically painful and deadly. Human beings are sexually dimorphic, but determining how modern levels of dimorphism relate to past levels can be difficult. With 7 billion people on the planet, and the fact that protein, steroids, and modern forms of training can significantly alter both the male and female physique, a modern study will not likely correlate with a hunter-gatherer tribe. In a 2013 paper for Psychological Inquiry, Peter Gray stated, These data [regarding sexual dimorphism in the human ancestral past] present the interesting possibility that even the relatively small sexual dimorphism in body size that remains for Homo Sapiens could be vestigial, a remnant of the huge dimorphism that existed at an earlier time and has not entirely evolved out. (p. 192)

As a general trend, the physical differences between men and women seem to be shrinking as time passes. The question of how sexual dimorphism affects humans in civilization versus hunter-gatherer bands needs to be addressed for three reasons. First, historians generally assume that a greater level of physical strength gave men an increased advantage in early civilizations where human muscle power was necessary for labor. Second, when Enlightenment philosophes, Rousseau especially, discarded Christian doctrine as justification for female oppression, they turned to the natural strength difference of the sexes to justify it. Thirdly, sexual dimorphism has led to a separation of masculine and feminine virtues that makes little sense in a modern, civilized context, and the question should be raised as to how that might be changed. Furthermore, the modern historian can surmise that civilization brought an increasingly subordinate status for women not because of sexual dimorphism (which existed in egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies) but because of new specializations that got passed on from male to male. Civilization shifted child-rearing from a communal activity to one increasingly thrust upon individual women in a household, and this meant that women quickly became excluded from the process of skill development and, shortly behind that, came the belief that such things

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must be biologically predetermined. If one further believed that a god or gods created that biological determination, then the subordinate status of women became encoded in religious customs and laws. One interpretation of human history, then, might have it that the development of civilization amounts to a temporary aberration in the status of women, and that because of the skewed population proportions that civilization creates actually did more damage to more women over the course of human history than hunter-gatherer societies did for the good. Wherever civilization developed, in China, India, the Middle East, and Western Europe, it created conditions that led to the subordination of women. Why then did feminism develop first in Western civilization? The answer to that is that democratic ideals evolved in Western civilization, and feminism evolved from those ideals. If one accepts the assertion, and it is hardly deniable, that feminism is the most impressive cultural force of modernity, then the creation of democratic ideals must be understood primarily as a causal factor in the development of feminism and secondarily as a causal factor for democratic political institutions. Although the Greeks bequeathed democratic traditions to the West, the trajectory of Western civilization did not really become unique until the early fourth century when the Roman emperor Constantine (272– 337 CE) elevated Christianity from a small and occasionally persecuted minority faith to the official religion of the Roman empire. Christianity cohered and quickly calcified as the fourth century proceeded, and Christianity marked the great difference between Western civilization and the rest of the world. When Constantine elevated Christianity, he seems to have been cynically interested in the cohering power that a monotheistic religion brought with it. Constantine liked the idea of “one God, one emperor” and thought that Christianity would serve the purposes of the Roman state. Wu Di (156 BCE–88 BCE), the emperor of Han China, did something similar when he chose Confucianism to be the philosophy that upheld China’s political structure; however, Christianity fit Constantine’s purposes less well than he might have assumed. Although no New Testament existed at the time of Constantine, about two dozen different gospels floated around the disparate groups of Christian believers in Rome. The gospels differed on details, but none of them could be read as a guidebook for how to gain and exercise

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political power. The Synoptic Gospels that would eventually make it into the New Testament told the story of a man who praised the meek and the poor and was then executed by political power. The concept of a Christian ruler could never fit as well in Western civilization as the concept of a Confucian ruler did in China. Just a few decades after Constantine’s death, the disjunction between Christian doctrine and the actual exercise of political power became apparent. In the year 390, the Christian Roman Emperor Theodosius (347–395) walked up the steps of a cathedral in Milan, Italy. Standing before him was Saint Ambrose (c. 340–397), the bishop of Milan (a position now seen as a predecessor to the papacy). Along with the power of a secular ruler, Theodosius carried with him a burden of guilt. In response to a violent uprising in the Grecian city of Thessalonica, the cause of which involved a sexual scandal and chariot racing, Theodosius had commanded his army to put down the rebellion. Theodosius possessed a self-effacing sense of conscience, and when he had calmed down, he rescinded his order. The second order reached the troops only after they had hacked and punctured the rebels into submission. Ambrose thought Theodosius had acted in an un-Christian manner. When the emperor showed up for Mass, the bishop checked him at the door and said that Theodosius could not enter a sacred place without atonement for his actions. That 390 confrontation on the steps of the Milan Cathedral set the precedent for a power that the ecclesiastics would come to call “excommunication.” Theologically and theoretically, being excommunicated kept a person out of heaven. Practically speaking, to be excommunicated meant that all legal contracts with the excommunicated became forfeit, which meant legal and social nonexistence in a pre-medieval society increasingly dependent on localized contracts for providing stability. Eventually, the authority of Ambrose and the Church forced Theodosius to ask forgiveness. The emperor enacted a law requiring a certain passage of time, what might today be called a cooling off period, between the giving and carrying out of a decree. Nothing like the confrontation between Ambrose and Theodosius ever occurred in Chinese, Indian, or Islamic society. In the West the Church emerged as the institution that controlled the theology that the secular rulers not only had to live by but, by the very nature of their imperial positions, would have to contradict.

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After the collapse of Roman political authority in the late fifth century, the catholic Church became the dominant authority of Dark Ages Europe, and until the year 800, it primarily acted to try and ameliorate the violent actions of the provincial rulers. In the year 800, however, Pope Leo III declared the Frankish king, Charlemagne, to be the Holy Roman Emperor. Leo’s actions were driven by a fear of the heretical Lombard people, who threatened Rome from the north. Since they practiced Arian Christianity, the Lombards did not fear excommunication and so Leo needed to create a military branch to protect the Church. By anointing Charlemagne, Leo embraced an impressive new world historical force: militant Christianity. Several decades before his Christmas day crowning in Rome, Charlemagne had offered a defeated group of heretics, the Saxons, the chance to either convert to the right Christian way or die. The Saxons chose death, and the Franks slaughtered several thousand of them. By embracing Charlemagne, Pope Leo III turned away from over four centuries of Church practice. Militant Christianity would eventually connect Christendom with the Islamic world through the Crusades, lead to the reconquest of the Muslim occupied lands in the Iberian Peninsula, and be the force that sent Columbus across the Atlantic in 1492. But militant Christianity furthered the divide between Christian doctrine and political practice, something that led the Church in the medieval era to begin decreeing that soldiers who killed in warfare had to engage in acts of penance, which included prayer and a long period during which the soldiers abstained from bloodshed. Instead of actually engaging in the acts of penance, the soldiers paid monks to do it, and this eventually led to the selling of forgiveness, better known as the selling of indulgences. Militant Christianity established the conditions that led to both trans-Atlantic exploration and the Protestant Reformation. The European discovery of the Americas must be the most significant event in world history. Prior to 1492, Europe was likely the weakest power in Eurasia, but global power shifted toward Europe shortly afterward. Two facts highlight how weak pre-1492 Europe was in comparison to contemporary societies in Eurasia. First, Columbus only sailed west across the Atlantic because the Ottoman Muslims so firmly controlled the Mediterranean, which was the most direct trade route to the riches of the East. Second, the Ming Dynasty of China put a veritable floating

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city on the Indian and Pacific oceans with its Treasure Fleet voyages that took place between 1405 and 1433 while Columbus barely made the trip across the Atlantic in his three rickety bathtubs that were designed for sailing the Mediterranean or hugging the western coast of Africa. After 1492, for reasons well-developed by modern historians, particularly Alfred Crosby and Jared Diamond, the Europeans conquered and consolidated the Americas and established a slave trade with Africa. New World gold, silver, and crops flowed into Europe and altered the balance of military and economic strength between the Europeans and the civilizations of the Middle East and Asia. It would take several centuries before the reality of that new balance became apparent, but historical distance allows us to see the sixteenth century as the time when the West began its rise. Most significantly, after 1492 Christendom ended. “Christendom” means the arrangement of society around a single variation of the Christian faith. This might be thought of as similar to how the modern United States is centered around Constitutional law. Christendom held Western civilization together for over a millennium after the fall of Rome. Trans-Atlantic exploration facilitated the destruction of Christendom for a number of reasons. First of all, the Bible made no mention of the Americas. In fact, no ancient authority from Confucius to the Koran predicted the discovery of all that territory and all those people that existed just over a month’s sail away from the Straits of Gibraltar. The Church’s claims to authority had already been damaged by the fourteenth-century Black Plague, which was generally considered to have been a manifestation of God’s wrath. In short, the Church could not stop the plague and it could not predict the Americas. As David Wootton has written in The Invention of Science (2016), exploration caused the development of a new vocabulary and set of analogies with the words “discovery” and “fact” being invented to describe the results of Columbus’s voyage, and with the idea that one could go into the world and find new knowledge quickly becoming a core notion of the emerging natural philosophy. The intellectual disruptions caused by the discovery of the Americas would almost certainly have been contained among the highest theological circles of the Church if not for the mid-fifteenth-century evolution of the printing press. Certainly, the masses harbored cynicism and resent-

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ment against the hierarchs in both the Church and the secular authorities, but those resentments had no structured outlet. Although the printing press was invented in Germany about the year 1450, its spread across Europe occurred gradually and few people could read anyway. It was not enough for the press to spread across Europe, knowledge of how to build and operate presses needed to evolve and literacy had to be taught. A demand for books had to be inculcated, and it probably took six or seven decades for the press to go from being a novel technology in an early-adapter phase to a part-of-your-life phase where the products of the press became as ubiquitous to Baroque era peoples as time-keeping devices are to moderns. When Luther’s Ninety-five Theses spread as result of the press, this shattered Christendom and created and promoted democratic ideals. The Protestant Reformation that began on October 31, 1517, ended the hold that Christianity once held on the center of Western civilization, and a new center, or centers, would not form until 1687 and 1688 when Newton’s Principia Mathematica established science as the new authority and England’s parliament seized authority from the king, thus making a democracy of a sorts the new central political authority, respectively. Luther himself must be understood before his theology can be. He never really lost faith in the monumentality of the Catholic Church. When he turned against the bureaucratic structure of the Church, he simply flipped its claims upside down. Suddenly, the Church became a force that corrupted the original and true word of God, and that meant that its entire edifice grew up out of hell. For Luther, the pope could not simply go from being God’s earthly deputy to an ordinary person in a fancy hat; the pope had to become the anti-Christ. When the Church held a Mass, the focus was on the communion of a body of believers with Christ. The worst punishment the Church could inflict, excommunication, amounted to the removal of an individual from the body of believers. And to be an individual was to be damned. Luther altered this because if the Church belonged to the devil and if the pope was the anti-Christ, then to be an individual outside that Church was to be heroic and saved. The individual was judged by his faith alone, and the Bible rather than the Church hierarchs was the sole authority. It never occurred to Luther that if the Church could not withstand the monumentality of a claim to omniscience, then the Bible could not either.

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Although Luther claimed to be reforming Christianity back to its original roots, he effectively created a new Christianity in the West and soon enough other religious prophets began to break away from Luther and create other protest faiths. Protestantism never dominated Europe; historians estimate that only about 25 percent of Europe left Catholicism, but it did localize faith in a bottom-up structure and created congregationalism. In a congregation, the people in the pews held the power to choose the person at the pulpit, and that was the creation of modern democratic ideals. Or as has often been said, the kind of people who do not believe that the pope got his power from God are unlikely to believe that the king did either. Protestantism brought other ideals with it, for example, more openness to making money and lending it at interest. The pantheon of saints, which made a lot of money for the Church, was abandoned in favor of a more direct communion with God. The Protestants created the notion of individual salvation and judgment, and if the Bible was authoritative, then believers needed to be able to read it for themselves without waiting for priestly interpretations. Mass education and literacy became core aspects of the Protestant faithful. Still Christian doctrine cannot sustain a feminist movement any more than Confucian, Hindu, or Islamic doctrines can. Protestantism brought democratic ideals, but female equality is simply not something promoted by the biblical texts. An intellectual movement that discarded Christian notions entirely would have to occur for femocracy to begin. That movement was the scientific revolution. The narrative regarding Copernicus, Bacon, and Galileo is so wellknown that it need not be redeveloped here except to say that in the seventeenth century it became apparent that new discoveries made by ships and telescopes gave the lie to the idea that any ancient philosopher or religious doctrine could be authoritative. The results of discovery and experiments were elevated over ancient authorities, a notion encapsulated by the phrase Nullius en Verba (On the words of no one) that was adopted by the Royal Society, England’s first club dedicated to natural philosophy, which was given a royal charter by King Charles II in the 1660. By the seventeenth century, Western civilization possessed a dynamism that Old World Eurasian societies lacked: new forms of thought

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based on the idea that while knowledge could be acquired, a total and doctrinaire picture of the world could not be attained. Somewhere in this murky environment, the concepts of equality began to gradually coalesce, waiting only for a catalyst. For reasons to be explored in the next chapter; the catalyst was likely Shakespeare. Before the discussion of England and the stage, a little more should be stated about Christian attitudes toward women. The subject is broad and nuanced, but a theme can be brought out of even the most sympathetic of Christian theology on the topic. In chapter 16 of The City of God, Saint Augustine writes about the “violation of the consecrated and other Christian virgins to which they were subjected in captivity, and to which their own will gave no consent; and whether this contaminated their souls.” His answer to the question “If a woman is raped, did she sin?” is just as wordy as the chapter title but he essentially says that “no, a violated woman does not sin.” He goes on to extol women not to kill themselves if in danger of being violated or in disgrace if they have been violated. The beginning of chapter 18 reads, Of the violence which may be done to the body by another’s lust while the mind remains inviolate. But is there a fear that even another’s lust may pollute the violated? It will not pollute, if it be another’s: if it pollutes, it is not another’s, but is shared also by the polluted. But since purity is a virtue of the soul, and has for its companion virtue, the fortitude which will rather endure all ills than consent to evil; and since no one, however magnanimous and pure, has always the disposal of his own body, but can control only the consent and refusal of his will, what sane man can suppose that, if his body be seized and forcibly used to satisfy the lust of another, he thereby loses his purity? For if purity can be thus destroyed, then assuredly purity is no virtue of the soul; nor can it be numbered among those good things by which life is made good.

Augustine goes on to repeat his point in several different ways, making an analogy about how if a midwife breaks the hymen of a girl during an examination, the girl would still be a virgin. His statements reveal much about early Christian beliefs about, and attitudes toward, women. The feminine virtue of virginity could only be given, not taken. A violated woman maintained her purity. Certainly from Augustine’s vantage

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point as a theologian, this seemed like a magnanimous response, and it reflected two philosophical traditions. The first tradition is stoicism—a part of this philosophy had it that physical torment or punishments could not redirect a person from his or her ideals. If a Stoic reasoned to a conclusion about ethics, then no external force could change the stoic’s behavior. The second tradition established by St. Augustine also operated under the concept of mindbody dualism, or the ghost-in-the-machine conceit, as if the soul simply dwelled inside the protective shell of a body. Augustine’s comments expressed the limitations of Christianity’s views regarding women. Good treatment of women, or a favorable theology toward them, was seen as a way of keeping the rules of sin and redemption equal for everyone. A man who raped a woman committed a sin of lust, and if she could not hold him back then she committed no sin. That sounds fair from a theological standpoint. What Augustine does not say is that women should have agency over their sexuality, or that purity or virginity might not be important aspects to aspire to. He seems to think that a woman who is raped should suffer little from the experience given that God holds her blameless—as if that would be the only concern. In all of his volumes, Augustine makes little mention of women, saying only in his Confessions that his youthful carnal exploits had been pleasurable enough but that he recognized the expression of his sexuality with a woman to be a sin. Defenders of Christianity’s record toward women often mention the Church’s reverence for Mary, the mother of Jesus. But Mary is a literary character, not a person, and she is an expression of the virtues of loving passivity and virtue held dear by the patriarchy. The purpose of celebrating her was not to propagate the respect of women as equals but to hold up her as a virtuous model to control female behavior. The Church’s insistence on ecclesiastical celibacy was never really intended to stop anyone from having sex, it just made the sexual relationship between a priest and a woman contractually illegitimate. It logically followed that any children born from that illegitimate pairing would be unrecognized legally as well. This prevented priests from passing on their property to a wife or son and meant that the Church’s wealth remained under the control of the hierarchs. Up until the modern era,

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even popes enjoyed robust, sometimes downright orgiastic sex lives without suffering much in the way of penalties. Martin Luther was pragmatic about the sexual urge, seeing it as inevitable, and once preached a sermon on March 11, 1522, on the issue, making this memorable statement: Any monks or nuns, therefore, who find they are too weak to remain chaste should examine themselves thoroughly. If their hearts and consciences are strong enough, then let them take a spouse. Would to God all monks and nuns could hear this sermon and properly understand this matter and all would leave their monastic houses. Then all the monasteries in the world would cease to exist. That’s my wish. (http://reverend luther.org/pdfs2/The-Third-Sermon.pdf)

This part of the sermon, which is doubtless based partly on St. Paul’s famous dictum that it is “better to marry than to burn,” differs from St. Augustine in numerous ways. First, Luther writes with a clarity that escaped Augustine, and clarity in writing tends to equal clarity in thinking. Second, Luther recognizes that both men and women possess a sexual impulse. It is not just that Luther is resigned to sexual urges as being part of humanity’s sin impulse; he sees the expression of sexuality as legitimate within the confines of marriage. Contrary to St. Paul, who expressed that a man should only marry if he could not control his sexual urges, Luther sees chastity as an impossible ideal. The next section of the sermon demonstrates how well Luther could reason within the parameters of Christian logic. My dear friends, I have therefore said it clearly enough, and I believe you’ve got it—do not make a free choice into a law. Don’t say, “That priest has taken a wife, therefore all priests must marry.” No way. Or “this monk or that nun has left the monastic life, therefore they must all leave.” No way.

Inconsistency on the topic of marriage plagued Catholic doctrine. As Luther said, something cannot be a sin for a priest or a nun but not a sin for an average Christian. Sin is not like the violation of a job description. If God sanctioned sex within the context of heterosexual marriage, then

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priestly celibacy might be considered a choice, but not a virtue, and if not virtuous, then a pointless misery. Luther himself got married, and to make it just as egregious as possible, he married a former nun. Her name was Katharina von Bora. Their twenty-one-year marriage, from 1525 to 1546, appears to have been happy, although it is clear that Luther had plenty of time to write while she did not. While Protestantism made no statement about female equality, women who sought salvation as individuals possessed more freedom as Christians than did women inside the mass. Ever since Christendom was divided between religious and secular authorities, a dichotomy existed regarding women in power. The Church disallowed it, but the secular authorities allowed it; but in the three centuries after Luther, Protestantism became deeply connected with Europe’s political structures, and science and the Enlightenment would soon all but discard religion entirely, leaving a new question: “If we are not Christians, then by what authority should women be subjugated?” It was a question first posed on the stage. KEY POINTS AND APPLICATIONS TO EDUCATION •  Define pre-adaptation and discuss what new skills were discovered by the brain in civilization. •  How does Christianity in Constantine’s Rome compare with Confucianism in Wu Di’s China? For what reasons did Christianity make the relationship between power and ideology unique in Western Civilization? •  What is significant about Martin Luther’s concept of individual salvation? In what other arenas of Western life can we see this concept of the individual? How might that compare to certain aspects of Confucian or Islamic notions of individuality? How does it compare to the Catholic definition of the Mass? •  In what ways was a world historical perspective, as opposed to a traditional historical research, employed in this chapter? Where were global comparisons made? What specifically links Protestantism with democratic ideals and why is it significant to the West?

2 ENGLISH HISTORY AND THE ENGLISH STAGE

It should be restated that the Protestant Reformation by itself could have unleashed democratic ideals, but not femocracy. The theatrical genius of England would play a role. The English theater, both in its actual physical form and in the content of the plays performed on the stage, developed a sense of democratic participation and feminist ideology. The specific circumstances of England’s politics and the stage are essential components for the development of feminism. The term “feminist” cannot really be applied to anyone from the era. Even women in power had to maneuver within a political world based on manly virtues and controlled in some ways by male advisors. Queen Elizabeth I (1533–1603) is a good example. The crown as an institution sat loosely on her head as the Protestants had put her in power after the fortuitous death of her half-sister Mary I (Mary Tudor, or “Bloody Mary” to her enemies, 1516–1558). Mary herself would never have claimed the throne except for a power structure in England that desired a Catholic monarch with any kind of claim; the gender of that monarch mattered little. After all, Mary had overthrown a teenage girl, Lady Jane Grey, to usurp the throne. The Protestants replaced Mary because her religion and not her sex mattered to them, and probably only then because Mary’s religion kept the wrong advisors in paying positions. 15

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At any rate, Elizabeth’s beauty, intelligence, and control of the English throne made her excellent marriage material. But like an English Penelope, she refused all suitors as a means of remaining true to her lifelong love, England. If Elizabeth had married either a Protestant or a Catholic she might have provoked a civil war, so she married no one. This prompted her rather optimistic nickname, the “Virgin Queen,” and, again, Elizabeth emerges as a quasi-feminist character who is celebrated for her feminine virtues. When the Spanish Armada invaded in 1588, she emerged to let these famous words inspire the English troops at Tilbury. I know I have the body of a weak, feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too, and think foul scorn that Parma or Spain, or any prince of Europe, should dare to invade the borders of my realm; to which rather than any dishonour shall grow by me, I myself will take up arms, I myself will be your general, judge, and rewarder of every one of your virtues in the field.

Mathematics tells us that 1588 is a full century before 1688, and yet Elizabeth refers to “tyrants.” The tone is hyperbolic, but she almost certainly aimed her reference at the very Catholic Phillip II of Spain, who wanted to fell the Virgin Queen and reclaim England for the papacy. Elizabeth clearly did not see herself as a tyrant, although she did condemn people to be executed, had the hand of an uppity journalist chopped off, and presided (even if from a distance) over the messy business with her cousin, Mary Queen of Scotts. Did the English see her as a tyrant? That’s unlikely. Elizabeth ordered her own lovely visage be painted and hung up across the isle and she generally ruled lightly over her subjects. She aged into a motherly figure, “Good Queen Bess” as the commoners called her. An effective ruler, yes, but a feminist figure and one who helped to bring about femocracy? Probably not. “I know I have the body of a weak, feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king” almost certainly stirred the blood of those late-sixteenth-century warriors, but it reveals that Elizabeth ruled within a world where the kings created standards that queens tried to uphold. While Elizabeth sensibly downplayed the personal effects of religion on her life, she lived and ruled at a time when most of the public be-

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lieved in some variation of Christian doctrine. Those believers could not foresee that civilization might form a core around an ideology that was other than Christian of some kind. Christian Protestant men could find little reason to endorse females in positions of either religious or political authority. The best evidence for this comes from the writings of John Knox (1514–1572). After Luther, Protestant leaders tended to teach and preach with polemics. Statements had to be pushed to the extreme and made idiomatic. Protestant audiences, in either their pews or their reading chairs, were not the kind to tolerate a “Te Deum,” they wanted the fire of the Gospel. That probably explains why Knox decided to title his 1558 book The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women (there are some phrases that lose in the translation from Latin to English and some phrases that gain). In those days, Scotland had yet to be incorporated into a Great Britain. Knox was living in England when Mary Tudor wrenched the throne away from Lady Jane Grey, and he thought it would be wise to head north to his homeland where, as it happened, another woman named Mary also ruled. Knox essentially strung together a string of insults and stereotypes about women, threw in a few Bible verses, and made the general argument that the Bible forbade women from exercising political authority. It sounds absurd now, but as A. N. Wilson writes in The Elizabethans (2012), “In 1558, most dispassionate readers of Knox’s pamphlet, whether Catholic or Protestant, while perhaps smiling at its intemperate mode of expression, would have found its arguments persuasive” (p. 38). The year 1558, it so happened, was the year that Elizabeth I took the throne of England. Good Queen Bess reigned well enough that she almost certainly made the masses reevaluate their thoughts about women in positions of political power, but as has been stated, a woman in a position of authority cannot move a society toward either feminism or femocracy. Women have ruled Russia and governed Pakistan without significantly altering society toward either democratic ideals or female equality. More than Elizabeth as queen, did the stage create a sense of democracy and of feminism? Did it help to synthesize the ideas into femocracy? Almost certainly it did. The act of gathering the masses together

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for an event always possessed dangerously democratic overtones. In the Roman era, both Theodosius in 390 and Justinian in 532 found themselves confronted by ochlocratic movements that originated with chariot-racing riots. Gathering people together would not guarantee a riot, of course. The Church massed the commoners all the time. But a sporting event or theater event differed in the sense that the main activities were performed for the masses, not to the masses. A church service, like a modern classroom, leaves the populace feeling like they are under someone else’s control. The agenda is someone else’s, and rules are to be followed. Nothing like this controls the crowd at a chariot race or theater production. That’s not to say that the English theater of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries resembled the Hippodrome during its rowdier moments, but crowds have a democratizing effect and a way of elevating those watching a show to a privileged position. Christians, historically, never cared much for the theater. St. Augustine, in his memoirs, expressed perplexity over why anyone would pay to have the emotions of sadness or fear invoked in them. Oliver Cromwell expressed hostility, as did most Puritans, and forced the closure of the theaters. Something in the theater atmosphere must have seemed seditious, probably because it was. In her 1969 classic Theatre of the World, Frances A. Yates writes, The Renaissance revival of the ancient theatre was based on Vitruvius’s description of the Roman theatre. He also describes the Greek theatre, but this hardly matters for the Renaissance concentrated on the Roman theatre. It also hardly matters what the Roman theatre was really like, for though archaeological research did play some part in Barbaro’s and Palladio’s theories, the main thing was always the text of Vitruvius. (p. 116)

Vitruvius (c. 70 BCE–15 CE) crafted the blueprints for buildings and also wrote books about architecture. Christian monks rediscovered his work during the early Renaissance period, copied his books, and eventually Vitruvius formed the inspiration for English theater design. Yates notes that Vitruvius focused on the amplification of voice and sound in the theater. Voice amplification was the only way that a writer could release words to a large audience in the pre–printing press days. Yates

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writes, “The Vitruvian theatre is most emphatically an actor’s theatre, not a scene painter’s theatre” (p. 122). By this she presumably means that the focus of a play had to be on the ability of the players and not on special effects or the scenery. From the Italian Renaissance, theaters based on auditory amplification spread to London. Yet, the Church had been invested in special effects like chiming clocks, stained glass windows, and vaulted ceilings since the thirteenth century; why would the stage shy from them? The simple answer is that the Vitruvian stage cost less. Yates writes, The argument which I am putting forward is that the Shakespearean type of theatre represented as never before since antiquity the most important aspects of the ancient theatre as described by Vitruvius, its aural, musical, and cosmic aspects, that the designers of this type of theatre knew something of classical theory on these matters and produced an adaptation of the ancient theatre which was actually closer to its spirit and function as the vehicle of poetic drama than any other Renaissance adaptation. On this hypothesis, the paradox presents itself that it was actually the nonclassical aspect of this theatre, its flexible mode of indicating change of scene, which preserved it from the suffocation of the perspective scenes which destroyed the true characteristics of ancient theatre. (p. 129)

The original Globe Theatre opened just outside London—a sign of official municipal disapproval—in 1599 and could hold about 1,500 people. The roof, if closed, went by the name of “the Heavens” and was painted to look like the daytime sky. Actors could fly down from hidden doors in the Heavens or pop up from hidden doors in the stage. “Groundlings,” as the guests who stood around the stage and participated in the staging of the plays by shouting and hooting at the action were called, occasionally tossed things onto the stage. Because the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, the troupe that founded the Globe, were as lacking in funds as most actors, candles proved unaffordable and so the plays went on during the day. Disapproved by the official authorities, with a stage and scenery that impressed audiences with effective change, the theater must have formed an atmosphere of close-knit sedition. Seats cost little so commoners could attend, further democratizing the entire experience. And if theater-goers attended the plays of Shakespeare, what did they encounter?

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In his Shakespeare (1998), Harold Bloom writes, The idea of Western character, of the self as a moral agent, has many sources: Homer and Plato, Aristotle and Sophocles, the Bible and St. Augustine, Dante and Kant, and all you might care to add. Personality, in our sense, is a Shakespearean invention, and is not only Shakespeare’s greatest originality but also the authentic cause of his perpetual persuasiveness. (p. 4)

Greek mythology and theater lacked the liveliness of character that creates personality. Achilles, like Superman, lacks the vulnerability that would create character. Odysseus and Penelope come across as caricatures of Greek ideals, not individuals. The two of them were purposedriven: Odysseus to get home and Penelope to be pure when he got there. A woman listening to the Odyssey might come away with a lesson on how to guard her sexuality but not with an individual sense of herself. Name your famous Greek characters from the plays: Oedipus, Antigone, Medea, Electra, Agamemnon. Do they make you smile like the mention of Falstaff? Do they invoke the intense love and eventual mourning that does the mention of Juliet? Sophocles makes the plot happen to Oedipus, and the character himself just drives the plot. When Sophocles writes of Antigone defying an order by her uncle, the nefarious King Creon, he simply does not give the girl a personality. Sophocles likely tired of the Greek literary habit of putting Stoic ideals in the bodies of supermen like Achilles. So how well does Stoicism hold up when a teenage girl, like Antigone, practices them? The play contains an interesting plot-as-ethical-exercise, but Antigone herself comes across as righteous and melodramatic. She is not a character you would want to know in real life. Shakespeare created new dimensions for human dynamics. One could not imagine a woman sitting in a sixteenth- or seventeenthcentury pew, of any denomination, and leaving the experience feeling a sense of personality. She would not have gotten the notion that a sassy attitude, or a fun-loving approach to life, could be positive. She would not have gotten the idea that an expression of sexuality could be fun or that references to sex could be funny. The same would be true if we imagined a woman from that era watching a classical Greek play. From Antigone, a young woman might

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get the idea that she could stand up to authority if she were then willing to commit suicide in order to avoid horrific torture, but she would not get the idea that she might run off into the forest and meet a lover, or defy her father’s wishes and follow her own wayward emotions, or just make a joke. Most importantly, no female in classical literature, and no woman in the Bible, ever expressed frustration about the restrictions that women felt in society just because of their gender. In classical literature, women lie, love, and mourn, they kill and obfuscate, they defy, and they worship and they carry the babies of Gods but they do not express frustration at the societal role their gender has forced upon them. This is not to say that Shakespeare wrote, in the beginning, to create a consistent feminist personality within his characters; rather, his writing likely evolved along with audience reactions. Theater historians often note that men played the role of women in the great era of London’s stage, but that matters less than the fact that women made up a prominent part of the audience and, it must be remembered, Shakespeare and the acting company needed the plays to produce a profit. Shakespeare’s first play, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, features a friendship between two young men, Proteus and Valentine. Valentine loves the duke of Milan’s daughter, Silvia, and she presumably loves him back. Then in the final act of the play, when Proteus ends up alone (he thinks) with Silvia, he makes sexual advances. Modern audiences might see the character-in-distress-saved-at-thelast-moment scene as cliché, but an audience of the late sixteenth century might have encountered it here for the first time. Proteus appears to harbor what would now be called “toxic masculinity.” He shows Silvia his sexual interest in her, and when she rejects and rebukes him, he counters with the chilling phrase “I’ll woo you like a soldier, at arm’s length.” Proteus intends to rape Silvia as much to salve his ego as to fulfill his lust. By rejecting Proteus, Silvia has demonstrated her female power to humiliate him. But as a male he could escalate the encounter and win by force. That the audience would have understood the “soldier” reference to mean rape is a reminder of the horrors that women faced when invading armies or roving, out-of-work mercenaries took control of villages or towns. (St. Augustine in his Two Cities of God seemed to conceive of rape only in the circumstances of a marauding army.)

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Shakespeare scholars and theater goers tend not to consider The Two Gentlemen of Verona Shakespeare’s best effort. And as Harold Bloom points out, “poor Silvia never utters another word in the play after she cries out ‘O Heaven!’ when the lustful Proteus seizes her to commence his intended rape. What is the actress playing Silvia supposed to do with herself during the final hundred lines?” (p. 39). But this is Shakespeare’s first play, written and performed first in 1589—about a decade before the Globe opened. In his second play, The Taming of the Shrew, Shakespeare drew audiences in with a woman, and her will, at the center of the play’s plot. The most curious aspect of The Taming of the Shrew is the play-within-a-play format: the plot takes place in a parenthesis when Christopher Sly, who has had a few too many, gets thrown out of a tavern. Some nobility come across the bum and convince him he’s a noble too who should watch a play with them. The play is The Taming of the Shrew. There’s no way of knowing why Shakespeare used this device. It could have been for the purpose of delighting an audience of commoners with an early comedic scene, similar to the classic short cartoons that played before black-and-white films, or it may have provided a layer of emotional distance between the play and the audience, sort of like how someone might take a real situation and make it hypothetical for the purpose of conversation with a friend. Did Shakespeare find this necessary because Shrew is such a subversive play? The core of the plot has the rapscallion Petruchio wooing Katherine (Kate), who is the shrew, or the woman who fails to display the characteristics of fun-loving submissiveness that her sister Bianca expresses naturally. At any rate, Petruchio desires to marry Kate because she comes with a prodigious dowry and because Petruchio’s friend desires Bianca, but her father will not allow Bianca to marry anyone until he has pawned Katherine off on a suitor first. All of this explains how Petruchio manages to marry Kate and captivate her in his castle, where he intends to break her will and make her a submissive woman. The play’s tension emanates from the question “Will Kate be tamed?” Petruchio starves her, shoves her around (and in some variants, does worse), and tries to break her with what would today be called operant conditioning. In Petruchio’s world, the analogy was falcon training. Yet Kate keeps her dignity in the play’s middle. Consider this portion of act

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4, scene 3 where she and Petruchio shop for a hat. The money to buy the item is his and so he humiliates her for her choice. Kate replies, Why, sir, I trust I may have leave to speak, And speak I will. I am no child, no babe. Your betters have endured me say my mind, And if you cannot, best stop your ears. My tongue will tell the anger of my heart Or else my heart, concealing it, will break, And rather than it shall, I will be free Even to the uttermost, as I please, in words.

“And speak I will,” Kate says. When she states that she is no child and no babe, is she referring specifically to her relationship in the moment with Petruchio or expressing a general frustration with a society that refuses to let a woman express an independent mind without being considered a shrew? This controlling boor, Petruchio, has all but purchased her for the price of being willing to put up with her lack of submissiveness. She’s too smart for him, and “My tongue will tell the anger of my heart / Or else my heart, concealing it, will break.” She might be expressing a general frustration on behalf of her gender or a specific frustration involving her circumstances. Kate’s heart will break contiguously with her will, and this is the moment when she, in a reflective mode, understands the full extent of her entrapment. And to make the situation more egregious, Petruchio responds with adolescent insults, too stupid to see how he broke her or too emotionally dense to care. The intent of a playwright, even Shakespeare, does not always mean much. Actors will make the play live through their performances, and a sarcastic sneer or an eye-roll can alter the meaning of any words and shift the context. However, one might see Kate speaking her words in a stage whisper, almost to herself, while Petruchio’s sophomoric jokes seek to shout her down. Kate realizes her predicament in this scene but refuses to break quite yet. Her words reflect the first reference in Western literature to female frustration at having the intelligence to see what is possible, to hope for a freedom from the constraints of marriage and male-dominance, but to be shackled to some undeserving loudmouth who possesses power only because of his gender.

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To that end, the play itself might not matter, only that scene. How many women in the audience recognized Kate’s frustration and felt the sentiment reflected back into them? Nothing in Greek literature equals this moment. Antigone standing up to Creon was a situation so far removed from reality as to make Antigone’s actions only hypothetical, a vehicle for the transmission of Stoic philosophy. But Kate, standing there suffering her husband’s berating remarks while trying to hold together her dignity—that was Stoic behavior in a commonplace situation. And she knew it could be better, and the disjunction between the reality and the possible generated her frustration. Feminism was not born with the playing of Shrew but it was recognized as a desire. It could be argued that this puts too much structural pressure on a single scene, but nothing like this existed in Chinese or Muslim culture; no public portrayal of a woman’s yearning for more existed there and neither did feminism until transported from the West. Shakespeare was an actor’s writer; he created the words but the performances generated the meaning. To just read the end of The Taming of the Shrew is to be left with ambiguity. The words indicate that Kate has learned her lesson, that’s she been tamed, but that does not mean that Shakespeare or the actors wanted the audience to take this positively. In the final scene of the play, Kate speaks eloquently about how she has been tamed while Petruchio continues on with his adolescent boasting. A work of genius leaves a little room for others, the readers, the actors, the audience members, to perform and participate. Shakespeare was not a director, and the ambiguity of the passage allows for various interpretations. Petruchio the character does not come across as all that bright; nothing in his character tends toward reflection. The actor playing him can only shout, in a braggadocious tone, the last line. But how does Kate read her words? Does she utter them submissively, like a Stepford wife? Does she spit them out with sarcasm so that her taming is an outward realization of the inescapability of her position coupled with an internal desire to maintain her dignity? Or, like Winston Smith in 1984, has she finally learned to love? For the purpose of the development of femocracy, the interpretation does not really matter. Kate is such a powerful character, she controls the central question “Will the shrew be tamed?” The actor playing Petruchio will face more limitations on his performance: the words he

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speaks possess little potential for variations. Kate, however, is unique, and the actor or actress who portrays her inherits a vast potential for rewriting the play onstage; she controls the presentation of the script. In the original production, a man may have played Kate, but that matters as little as a white man playing Othello. A woman-as-character is fully in control of The Taming of the Shrew. To skip from Kate to Volumnia does an injustice to the great female characters of Shakespeare’s creation, but Juliet, Cleopatra, Desdemona, Beatrice, and Helen do not really express the same sense of frustration with the role of a woman in society. Nor do they exercise the same kind of power over the play through the role as Kate does. The actress playing Juliet, for example, can really only utter, “Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art though Romeo?” in one way. Her actions throughout the play, running away from her family and eloping with Romeo, even her suicide, are all aligned with her feelings. When a character does what she feels like doing, she’s not expressing frustration, and the actor is then robbed of the power that ambiguity gives to a part. Coriolanus, likely written and performed in 1608 (and not at the Globe, but at the more urbane Blackfriars), is named after the character Caius Martius, a Roman general and member of the patrician class who is given the honorific “Coriolanus” (conqueror of Corioli) because of his skill in warfare. His mother, Volumnia, takes pride in the accomplishments and reputation of her son but receives no credit for her work: the Romans cannot connect Volumnia’s skills as a mother with Coriolanus’s skill as a warrior. Volumnia seems unimpressed with her son from the first introduction of her character, telling her daughter-in-law Virgilius, “If my son were my husband, I should freelier rejoice in that absence wherein he won honor than in the embracements of his bed where he would show most love.” She knows her boy: Coriolanus sees the masses only as people to be impressed or dominated; they exist only to reflect his glory. The plebians need not be appeased. Another male character, adolescent-like, romps in and shouts for a march to the capitol. Volumnia, on the verge of trying to reach her son, gets cut off. Her daughter-in-law speaks not at all and the action reverts back to the men who drive the political events. Coriolanus, bragging and belligerent, possibly trying to intimidate his mother, is told by her that

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his “valiantness” came from her breast. She “mocks at death,” and she made him, not the other way around. Later in the play, Coriolanus tells his mother, “If you had been the wife of Hercules, Six of his labors you’d have done, and saved Your husband so much sweat” (p. 90). Volumnia carries an aura with her that seems otherworldly. When a tribune of the people named Sicinius encounters her, he asks, “Are you mankind?” (p. 92). She seems inhuman. Sicinius gets chewed out for his question and a few lines later, after Sicinius is left with Volumnia and another tribune, Sicinius Why stay we to be baited With one that wants her wits? Volumnia I would the gods had nothing else to do But to confirm my curses. Could I meet ’em But once a day, it would unclog my heart Of what lies heavy to’t Menenius You have told them home; And, by my troth, you have cause. You’ll sup with me? Volumnia Anger’s my meat. I sup upon myself. And so shall starve with the feeding. Come, let’s go. Leave this faint pulling, and lament as I do, In anger, Juno-like. Come, come, come. (pp. 94–95)

Connecting Volumnia’s words to the rest of the play reveals frustration as the major aspect of her character. She made Coriolanus, and all these men are enamored of him while she is forced to knit and watch. She frightens the men, but they insult her with too-familiar questions like “Are you mankind?” Volumnia’s frustration might be described as a universal emotion, or at least more than Kate’s was in The Taming of the Shrew. Volumnia then makes peace in the most feminine of ways: she communicates with her son and diverts the violence. Menenius declares, “This Volumnia is worthy of consuls, senators, patricians, A city full” (p. 131).

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She gains something of a public reputation, but as a peacemaker, not a conqueror, and the two are not given equal esteem in the Roman Republic or anywhere in history. The masses always saw a lack of violence toward them as weakness. Volumnia’s rise in status comes as a detriment to her son’s reputation, and the mob butchers Coriolanus in the end. Was that Volumnia’s will? Is this her play? A superficial reading of Shakespeare might make his plays seem out of touch, or “problematic,” in terms of how women and sexuality are treated. A feminist backlash, something which seems to have left Harold Bloom completely undone, formed in Western universities after the 1960s. This might be best expressed by Sylvia Plath’s main character, Esther Greenwood, in The Bell Jar (1936). Esther is a young woman who is majoring in English at a university, and at one point she reveals something of her attitude toward the classics, hoping to be like a fellow student “also in honors [who] had managed to never read a word of Shakespeare” (p. 96). This is reflective of a more militant scholarly attitude, and Plath’s main character lumps Shakespeare in with the “smug men writing tight little couplets” in literary history. His works were something to avoid for young women looking for enlightenment in their reading lives. The Bell Jar’s brilliance is in the reflection of that feeling toward the literary canon, the feeling that there might be other forms of meat to sup upon. Equally as interesting as Esther’s comment is the comment of Romola Garai, a young theater actress who hosted a 2018 episode regarding Measure for Measure of the PBS special “Uncovering Shakespeare.” Measure is the most outwardly feminists of Shakespeare’s plays, with a petty tyrant trying to take advantage of his brief authority to perform sexual violence on a well-intended woman. Garai declares the play to be the best that Shakespeare ever wrote. Would that be a new feminist re-ordering? Macbeth and Hamlet as of less significance than the first play to really highlight the struggle of women? After Shakespeare’s death, his scripts were collected and printed in the First Folio, a volume that, along with the King James Bible, formed the foundation of English literature. The plays of Shakespeare continued being performed and taught, making him a universal author, but the most significant historical effect of his work was to develop characters

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who desired feminism but could not alter society to make that level of equality a reality. The theater itself, with its raucous crowds and democratizing prices, helped to develop a mentality of mass participation. These factors would synergize with the individuality of Protestantism, the spread of the printing press, a scientific assault on ancient authority, and eventually the ideals of the Enlightenment to develop a feminine consciousness. KEY POINTS AND APPLICATIONS TO EDUCATION •  The thesis that ancient stage plays had democratizing effects on politics is well known. How well does that thesis fit the English stage of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? •  How should a feminist read Shakespeare? Even if one sees antifeminist themes in his plays, how might those plays have contributed to the development of feminism? •  Outside England, Japan developed the most impressive theatrical tradition. After researching Japan’s theatrical history, explain why Japan did not develop democratic ideals in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the way that Western civilization did. Does this tell the historian anything about the importance of Shakespeare?

3 THE ENLIGHTENMENT

The

historian’s definition of the Enlightenment has it that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the relationship between the individual, the government, and society shifted toward democratic institutions and a general openness to new people and experiences. The Enlightenment broke individuals out of a tribal mindset where others, be they of another nationality or religion, stopped being sources of hostility. Many modern historians and philosophers still understate the scale of the Enlightenment despite attempts by modern authors like Anthony Pagden and Steven Pinker to both defend it as a historical, and to extol it as a political, force. According to Anthony Pagden in his book The Enlightenment (2013), the Enlightenment, while confined to a small number of thinkers, created globally minded philosophers, people who saw nationalism as a human-made creation that could cause unnecessary strife between peoples. Another aspect of the Enlightenment, and still the most controversial, involved religion. Pagden writes, It is undeniably true that the Enlightenment was profoundly antireligious. There were unmistakably “enlightened figures,” particularly in Southern Europe, who were obviously sincere believers. . . . But by and large, the major figures of the eighteenth century, if they were not exactly 29

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atheists, certainly had no time for the deities of any of the world’s monotheistic religions. (p. xv)

As was stated earlier, Christianity itself simply lacked the foundational aspects of equality necessary to develop feminism. Because of this, the Reformation could attack certain aspects of the Catholic hierarchy, and therefore act as a democratizing force, but these reforms still operated within the context of Christian theology and civilization. Christianity, no more than Islam, Hinduism, or Confucianism, simply cannot sustain, and certainly not propel, feminism. Thus, feminism could only develop from non-religious sources of thought. The seventeenth century provided a non-religious source of thought in the scientific method, but not until the late nineteenth century. In his book about the seventeenth-century Age of Genius (2017), A. C. Grayling writes of the 1688 Glorious Revolution to say that England’s parliament managed a “complete and unequivocal rejection of the divine-right doctrine and in its place were put the principles of parliamentary government” (p. 287). And furthermore, the Glorious Revolution “established two linked points—more accurately, the reverse and obverse of the same point—the sovereignty of Parliament and the rejection of the divine-right doctrine. . . . Control of national finances and the armed forces lay with Parliament, and with those two things lay everything” (p. 289). John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government, significantly published in 1689, was not a revolutionary call-to-arms, but a post-facto call for justification. When Locke writes of a symbolic human, “for hereby he authorizes the society, or which is all one, the legislative whereof, to make laws for him,” the “he” here is a universal and hypothetical citizen. A free person in a state of nature only enters into society by creating and consenting to a contract with the government. We have already seen that the English considered themselves freer than the continentals, and Elizabeth’s speech regarding tyrants as she stiffens the upper lip of her soldiers in 1588 indicates that even English sovereigns found it necessary to wrap themselves up in democratic overtones from time to time. In traditional historical narratives, Locke’s philosophy gets connected to both the ongoing Enlightenment as a philosophical movement in Europe and then, eventually, to the political miscreants in the North

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American colonies who would eventually create a declaration of independence and a constitution. Even if Locke inspired the American Revolution, which is a questionable proposition (as will soon be argued), the most significant historical effect of his writings was not to inspire democratic movements but to provide an analogy to the condition of marriage and the status of women within that often-tyrannical institution. Mary Astell (1666–1731), who had been educated by an ecclesiastic uncle, grasped Locke’s reasoning and drew parallels to the societal position of women in matrimony. Astell writes in thick sentences, using archaic language, but we can see in her writing some of Martin Luther’s sarcastic wit. It may be that the major influence on Astell was not Locke but John Knox. She seems to reference John Knox’s notorious The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women. More specifically, she later drives forward with an argument about women in positions of power. For if by the Natural Superiority of Their [men’s] sex, they mean that ever Many is by Nature superior to every Woman, which is the obvious Meaning, and that which must be stuck to if they would speak Sense, it would be a Sin in any Woman, to have Dominion over any Man, and the greatest Queen ought not to command, but to obey, her Footman: because no Municipal Laws can supersede or change the Law of Nature. (p. 561)

The memory of Queen Elizabeth’s mostly benevolent and occasionally glorious reign must have still been fresh. Astell evokes a caricature: one could hardly imagine a queen being somehow beneath her own footman, and if a man could kneel before, and even serve, a woman in those circumstances, then why not in others as well? Astell’s reasoning highlights, again, the significance of Western civilization’s medieval past where historical circumstances separated the religious and secular authorities. The catholic Church prevented anything as monstrous as a woman in charge and thus preserved in its official institutions the kind of hierarchy it promoted in marriage and family life. The secular powers always sanctioned, to a degree, women in authority if that benefitted the bureaucrats around them. Allowing women to exercise political power, however, turned out to be bad for a society based on the patriarchy.

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Here is the crucial passage from Astell, and the reason why the Enlightenment’s break with religion had to occur for femocracy to form and spread: “But the Scripture commands Wives to submit themselves to their own Husbands. True; for which St. Paul gives a Mystical Reason (Eph. V. 22 & c) and St. Peter a Prudential and Charitable one (I Pet. iii), but neither of them derive that Subjection from the Law of Nature” (p. 564). If philosophers justify a hierarchy, in society at large or in marriage, based on Christian values, that’s fine; the Bible contains no shortage of misogyny. However, as Astell points out, to try and justify this genderbased hierarchy with a law-of-nature argument is another proposition entirely and one that cannot survive logical analysis. In a state of nature, the subjection of women cannot be regarded as a given just because of a little sexual dimorphism, and as Astell previously noted, women had ruled over men in Western civilization quite often without cataclysm. In the history of Greek philosophy, the thinkers of Ionia on the western half of the Greek isles, most of whom asked questions that would today be placed under the heading of Chemistry, are known as the preSocratics. Uncharacteristic for philosophy, this term puts across a simple meaning: these philosophers lived, thought, wrote, and taught before Socrates. Astell and a few other female philosophers might adequately be described as pre-Wollstonecrafts in that they created the foundation for a philosophy that Wollstonecraft would fully express in 1792. The men of the Enlightenment tried to answer the challenge that Astell put forth. Whether they actually read her is not really relevant here, but one suspects that many a thinking person discovered the contradictions inherent in trying to justify a gender hierarchy based on natural law. The male philosophes, of course, found a natural law that kept women in their place, the key difference between men and women, in fact. Women could carry and birth children, what could be more natural? Before looking at Rousseau’s take on the subject of women, I should state one great truth about femocracy itself: the synthesis of democratic ideals and feminism cannot fully occur without cheap, plentiful, and effective means of birth control. Certainly nothing like that existed during the heyday of the Enlightenment. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who held the opinion that the freedom existent in the state of nature was superior to the constrictions of civilized life, nonetheless wrote that nature subordi-

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nated women. In his 1762 novel Emile (a veiled essay about education), he said much that would cause any feminist to grit his or her teeth, but especially this: Even if there were these long intervals, which you assume, between the periods of pregnancy, can a woman suddenly change her way of life without danger? Can she be a nursing mother today and a soldier tomorrow? Will she change her tastes and her feelings as a chameleon changes his color? Will she pass at once from the privacy of household duties and indoor occupations to the buffeting of the winds, the toils, fragile, now robust? If the young men of Paris find a soldier’s life too hard for them, how would a woman put up with it, a woman who has hardly ventured out of doors without a parasol and who has scarcely put a foot to the ground? (p. 573)

At this point in history, Europeans knew enough about the rest of the world to recognize that women in tribal societies seemed plenty tough and that none of them carried parasols. Yet, Rousseau argues that no matter what the conditions of a society, civil or uncivil, men will be physically superior. “When women become strong,” he wrote, “men become still stronger; when men become soft, women become softer; change both the terms and the ratio remains unaltered” (p. 573). An immoral man in his personal life, Rousseau repeatedly impregnated a servant woman and then dropped the babies into the filth of orphan homes where they almost certainly died. His philosophies regarding civilization had it that free-born humans suffered from the chains of a corrupting civilization. Human nature was good, and if sexual dimorphism existed in a state of nature then it also exists in a state of civilization. He does not, it should be noted, compare soft and civilized men with those women in a state of nature. The problem with Rousseau’s argument is the same issue with so much anti-feminist rhetoric in the modern era. Rousseau measures women by masculine standards: can women serve as effectively as soldiers? In the eighteenth century this argument, like soldiers with their packs, would have carried more weight than it does in the modern era. Men set standards based on masculine values such as muscular strength or aggression and then chide women as inferior for not being able to meet those standards. Feminine characteristics, and these are

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not limited to only women, tend toward pain endurance, cooperation, and concern for the feelings of others. Men who count themselves superior because they can march farther in a military formation than women make a spurious argument. A true femocracy will evolve when men are judged by their ability to meet feminine standards. If Christianity could not uphold a true feminist movement, it likewise could not be used as the basis for the emancipation of slaves. Like Islam, Christianity broadly upheld slavery and hierarchy. Some variations of Christianity, like Quakerism, proclaimed anti-slavery principles, but the Quakers practiced a faith diluted by Enlightenment philosophy where the faith was not in the Bible or in a hierarchy but in a set of egalitarian principles. Quakerism will be discussed later, but it suffices here to say that neither Catholic nor Protestant doctrine in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries said much about slavery as being evil. Slavery came as a hanger-on to civilization. War created captives and the same type of force that allowed for conquest could also coerce the conquered into labor. But after 1492, two historical forces converged. First, Spanish cruelty and disease depopulated the Americas, and, second, the West African slave trade repopulated the Americas. For centuries, West Africa went by the nickname “Gold Coast” because that precious metal flowed from Africa into Europe where it formed a rough currency. In the early sixteenth century, especially after Spaniard Francisco Pizarro ransomed the Inca king for twenty-four tons of gold and silver, Europe no longer needed rare metals; they needed bodies to work in the humid fields of Latin America. The commodities that Latin America produced can still be discerned in their names as “Brazil” means “dye wood” and Argentina is named after “silver,” which is symbolized AG on the periodic table. In his second voyage of 1493, Columbus brought sugar cane with him, and the crop flourished in the soil of Hispanolia. Fermented sugar makes rum, and that became the primary commodity of the triangular trade routes. Rum functioned on the Atlantic Ocean in the same way that cigarettes do in a prison: mostly as currency but sometimes to be imbibed. European traders, the Portuguese especially, traded with West African slavers for West Africans who had been kidnapped and held in cells on the coast, and the ghastly journeys across the Atlantic followed.

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Slavery, like imperialism, required the participation of local elites. Europeans rarely, and maybe never, actually raided for slaves in the African interior. Instead, they facilitated an economy that rewarded West Africans for kidnapping members of rival tribes or for selling off their prisoners or anyone who fell afoul of the tribal elites. During the early era of the Enlightenment, when the philosophical focus was still on England and her parliament, the philosophy of individual freedom failed to extend to the slaves. However, as we have seen, the state of nature argument could be used to justify a hierarchy in the same way that religion could. The racist justification for slavery became a twisted symbiosis of the two, with preachers too often proclaiming a biblical basis for the enslavement of Africans and the Enlightenment ideology proclaiming a natural hierarchy of the races. The argument is a classic fallacy: create conditions in which a group of people is forced into conditions of poverty, illiteracy, and so forth and then blame a natural disorder among the people themselves for those conditions. The scale of the world’s coercive labor systems in the eighteenth century, at the time of the Enlightenment, remains hard to comprehend. In his book Bury the Chains (2005), Adam Hochschild includes this shocking statement: But this was the world—our world—just two centuries ago, and to most people then, it was unthinkable that it could ever be otherwise. At the end of the eighteenth century, well over three quarters of all people alive were in bondage of one kind or another, not the captivity of striped prison uniforms, but of various systems of slavery or serfdom. (p. 2)

The trans-Atlantic slave trade differed from, say, Russian serfdom in a few important ways. Russian serfs labored for masters who spoke the same language, worshiped at the same church, and had the same skin tone. Also, Russian serfs largely lived their lives in the place of their birth. The horrors of serfdom where families could be sold apart and vicious beatings administered on the whims of the boyar elite could be described in comparative terms with the treatment of slaves in the New World. Serfs, Indian debt slaves, and haram girls all suffered from coercion, and to try and compare the various forms of servitude to determine which was worse is not historically useful except to say this: West African

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slaves suffered the torment of being kidnapped and the horror of the slave-ship voyage across the Atlantic. About 95 percent of those slaves arrived at ports south of Florida, and in the West Indies and Brazil the slavers took mostly the healthy young men who could withstand the harsh work of the sugar plantations. In those plantations, the men were worked to death, usually within a few months or years, because it was simply more cost-effective to replace them by tapping into the slave trade than it was to house, feed, and create conditions by which the slaves could reproduce. In the North American British colonies (eventually turned states), the harshness of the conditions of servitude were lessened slightly only because the cotton and tobacco that grew on the plantations could be picked with less intensity of labor than was necessary to cut and grind sugar cane. This meant that women could work effectively in the fields. The slavery of the North American colonies differed from that of Latin American (“North America” is a geographic term and “Latin America” is a cultural term, but for the purposes here, the reference is to any south of Florida on the eastern coast of the Americas) because of the presence of women. Over time, this meant that new slaves could be produced in the North American colonies, and therefore the slave trade itself meant less in North American than it did in Latin America. The trans-Atlantic slave trade led to world history’s most significant period of demographic shift as, currently, virtually everyone living in the West Indies is descended from West African slaves, and Brazil has the second-largest black population in the modern world. But again, the section by Adam Hochschild brings up a question: If slavery was ubiquitous in the world, and if the conditions of slavery were worse in Latin America, and if slavery or coercive labor systems of another kind existed in Russia, India, and China, then why did the manumission movement begin in Europe and North America rather than in these other regions? Again, the answer must be Protestantism and not in the sense that Protestant doctrine sanctioned an anti-slavery sentiment but in the sense that Protestantism shattered Christian dominance and encouraged the development of literacy. In terms of Christian history, the era from 1517 to 2013, with the election of an Argentinian pope, might be described as a great transfer of Catholicism away from Europe and into

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Latin America, but the Catholic Church sanctioned slavery and discouraged literacy. Of course, the Enlightenment is often associated with France, where Catholicism dominated even in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but the Catholic Church controlled the religious sphere of French life only, not the entire social sphere. The Church was diminished in its ability to control public thought and life and it existed, for the philosophes, as an institution to be criticized and, when the French Revolution erupted, eventually attacked. Economically and socially, slavery created a new Western civilization in part by supplying the massive demand for sugar, much of which got poured into cups of black coffee in France, England, and North America. In that era before zoning laws, a coffeehouse could be put up almost as quickly as a lemonade stand; entrepreneurs could just put a few tables and chairs in a room, brew some pots, and invite the public in. While in places like Vienna the number of people who could enter a coffeehouse was limited, no such laws existed in London. The first English coffee house, Pasqua Rosee’s Head, opened in 1652, and, by 1739, Londoners could choose from between 550 coffeehouses. That was in a city with only about 650,000 people. A cup of coffee came cheap, and unlike spirits, it could facilitate intellectual conversation. The poor could find some level of social equality with the rich in a coffeehouse, and those attuned to the stock market could read reports there. Political discussions, often in the forms of complaints against authority, took place there as well. England’s King Charles II, the man who chartered England’s first scientific society, tried to ban the coffeehouses as breeding grounds for seditious talk. The houses surely were that, but the public ignored the ban, further evidence that being a king was not as divine as it had once been. All of this furthered democratization of society, and the concepts of liberty and social contracts began to spread in such a way as to create a new social structure and set of cultural norms. And that brings the narrative to the American colonies. Several books exist that detail the contributions of women in the American colonies and to the founding of the United States; there is no point in copying and pasting some wellknown quotes from Abigail Adams here. However, the development of

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democratic ideals in the colonies does need to be explained here if only because the traditional narrative contains so many misunderstandings. The grievance at the core of the American Revolution and encapsulated in the phrase “No taxation without representation” (also uttered or shouted in Ireland at the time) shows the frustration that the colonists felt about not being able to join in a parliamentary democracy, albeit with limited participation, that they rather liked. As anti-British sentiment grew, especially after bullets flew at Lexington and Concorde and Thomas Paine’s Common Sense flew from printers in 1775, the king increasingly became the focus of revolutionary momentum. King George III (1738–1820) did not really carry much political authority; his ancestry was German, from the Hanoverian line, and he was only there because he was smart enough to have a grandfather who was not Catholic. King George I (1660–1727) got an invitation from the English parliament to be king after the Glorious Revolution because one of the provisions parliament implemented had it that no sovereign could be Catholic. The regal search committee had to go all the way to Hanover to find someone with a plausible royal bloodline who also happened to be Protestant, and that’s how the English ended up with a line of German kings. But a king of any kind still proclaimed divine right as his source of authority, and this brings us to Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) and his Declaration of Independence. Jefferson is often called a hypocrite because he wrote words about liberty while simultaneously holding slaves and racist thoughts; however, he was hardly enlightened on race relations and there is little evidence that he meant to include blacks or women among the “all men” mentioned in the Declaration of Independence. While Jefferson certainly struggled with the morality of slavery as an institution, his record on his beliefs regarding the humanity of African Americans is ambivalent at best. He was even rather wishy-washy on the morality of slavery. This was, after all, a man who was called “the Negro President” by opponents because he was elected over John Adams with a minority of actual votes cast, taking office only because of the overrepresentation the three-fifths clause gave to slaveholders. If Jefferson cannot be considered a paragon of Enlightenment virtue regarding race relations, we also cannot assume, as is too often the case, that he was influenced by the philosophy of John Locke. In fact, Locke’s

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effect on Jefferson may be the most pernicious myth of the Revolutionary generation. In his book Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, Gary Wills writes that there is no evidence that Jefferson ever owned or even read a copy of Locke’s Second Treatise, and “we have no reason to keep assuming that a Lockean orthodoxy explains the early formation of Jefferson’s political thought” (p. 175). So what did influence Jefferson? Probably syllogistic thought. Jefferson’s sentiment “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights” was not intended as a grand statement about human rights but rather as a logical syllogism. The Declaration is like a page from one of Leonardo Da Vinci’s notebooks that must be held up to a mirror to be read. The mirror to the Declaration is the doctrine of the divine right of kings. Once the Declaration is held up to its reflection, the real purpose of the document becomes apparent—and the place that formal logical thinking, rather than a belief in a vague divinity, has in American history can be restored to its proper status. The simple concept of the divine right of kings likely began right along with the inception of human civilization. It is the assertion that the ruler derives his or her right to govern from supernatural authority. One person, the ruler, is elevated above everyone else, and this is justified by saying that the deity-of-choice of the people has decreed this. This leads to the following syllogism: A. The monarch gets his or her power to rule from God. B. Therefore, anything that the monarch says or does is sanctioned by God. C. Therefore, people should be subjected to the power of the monarch and serve and obey him or her. If the divine-right syllogism can be thought of as a building, then its foundation would be the premise that the king (of Britain, in this case) obtained his powers to rule from God. Let us pause a moment and remember that the Declaration of Independence was written to King George III.

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How would King George III have read that phrase? As a general philosophical statement about the nature of humanity or as a direct attack on his notion of divinely sanctioned privilege? Again, a king made up the primary audience of the Declaration, and the Continental Congress was telling the king that no man could be born above others. That is, the rebels in the colonies no longer accepted the philosophical base of the king’s authority. The Declaration is the divine right inversed. Jefferson’s syllogistic god gave power not to one person but to all persons. It created a new base for a political syllogism, one that looks like this: A. The king is not born with more rights than everyone else. Given this new base, if all men have rights granted by a creator, then what is the purpose of government? If government is not sanctioned by a higher power, then it cannot grant rights to people. So what is its function? Obviously it must be to protect natural rights. So now we have the second part of the syllogism: B. Therefore, governments exist to protect those rights. And finally, the logical conclusion of this syllogism, but one that is rarely spelled out: C. Therefore, citizens are under no obligation to obey governments that violate their god-given rights and in fact are justified in overthrowing those governments. The reference to a creator here is intended as a syllogistic base, something that someone as schooled in logic and rhetoric as Jefferson (and Adams and Franklin for that matter) would have readily understood as a necessary precondition for a logical argument. Hence it should not be taken to refer specifically to a deity. Nor should it be inferred that one must believe in a rights-giving god to believe that humans have the right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” One can obviously believe in the sanctity of human liberties without believing that they were handed down by a divinity. After all, it was disbelief in a tyrant-sanctioning god that was the real rub between the American continentals and the Europeans. Or one can just as easily posit, as many do, that such a god is directly in opposition to human rights. This Declaration-as-syllogism interpretation is not new, but it is one that has a proud history. America’s finest president, Abraham Lincoln, seemed to base his entire American philosophy around this vision of the Declaration. Consider what he said in one of his debates against Stephen Douglas.

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That is the issue that will continue in this country when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent. It is the eternal struggle between these two principles—right and wrong—throughout the world . . . from the beginning of time. . . . The one is the common right of humanity and the other the divine right of kings. . . . No matter in what shape it comes, whether from a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle.

Lincoln’s words remind us that the sentiments in the Declaration’s syllogism run counter to any form of tyrannical logic whether it comes from the government, religions, or coercive owners of labor. The American Constitution and our evidence-based system of law are both built upon the core philosophy so succinctly stated in the Declaration. God cannot be found in the Constitution, but careful reasoning can be, and thank logic for that. What we see with the Declaration of Independence is Thomas Jefferson acting much like Isaac Newton: tossing out the received systems of the time and starting over with fresh principles. From those fresh principles Jefferson constructed a specific argument for a new type of government. Yet, Thomas Jefferson is a minor philosopher in history, a transitional figure whose lone intellectual contribution consisted of encapsulating already existing theories at just the right time. Political theorists overstate his importance because the Declaration led to the Revolutionary War and to the Constitution, and the direct line of cause and effect there seems fairly simply to state and understand. However, the most significant historical effect of the Declaration was not in the creation of an American republic but in the inspiration, by analogy, of early feminist doctrine. The same is true of the French Revolution and the political outcomes of both the American and French revolutions; neither the American Constitution nor Napoleon are as important in terms of global consequences as the rise of feminism. In some ways, the American and French revolutions acted in history as cannonball technology once did. The immediate effect of the cannon was to alter late medieval warfare by allowing besieging armies to knock down castle walls, but that was not the longest lasting or most important effect. The historical legacy of the cannon came instead for the analogy

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the trajectory of the cannonball provided Isaac Newton as he thought and calculated in his private room. Still the American Revolution affected women differently from other forms of eighteenth-century warfare in some specific ways. To begin with, the pre-revolution boycotts turned everyday actions, such as making homespun clothing, or drinking something other than tea, into political actions. Women who sewed clothing did so specifically because they understood that the action harmed the British economy. Of course, women played more significant roles than this before the entire revolutionary era, but the purpose of this book is not to highlight women in history but to discover the trends that led to the development of femocracy. In the late eighteenth century, the most important immediate effect of the American Revolution would not have been seen as the creation of a constitution or the election of a president (as in “one who presides”). The United States in 1789, the year that George Washington took office and the year that the French Revolution began, was not impressive. Instead, the United States was a cobbled-together collection of thirteen former colonies, unified barely beyond the level of a confederacy, and with a flawed Constitution upon which dangled ten worthless amendments. The Constitution added almost nothing to the liberties of the newly formed Americans. Even the free white men barely enjoyed more freedoms than would have been afforded them under English law. The Constitution did not specifically forbid slavery, which meant a tacit endorsement of enslavement when state laws allowed it, and the revered Tenth Amendment amounted to James Madison’s sarcastic joke against James Mason and the Anti-Federalists. The Anti-Federalists wanted a bill of rights, and Madison thought it was silly to spell out exactly what everyone was allowed to do. Still he enumerated rights that the people already had and then, with the Tenth Amendment, stated that if anything was not specifically mentioned in the Bill of Rights that meant the right was deferred to the people, not the government. That statement rendered the other nine amendments

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pointless and highlights (as if it needed highlighting) the role that cynicism always plays in republican politics. Most significantly, the Constitutional framers crafted a constitution based on an analogy with English history and law. In English history, the traditional division of power ran between Parliament and the monarch, with Parliament deriving power from a limited democratic process and the monarch being invested with authority via the Almighty. Jefferson and the Constitutional framers might have seen themselves as the heirs to the English parliament continuing the fight against the king from across the Atlantic. Thus, they failed to foresee the development of political parties. It was supposed to be the legislative versus the executive, not one party against another. This deserves pointing out because the Constitution’s immediately recognizable flaws, such as allowing slavery and disenfranchising women, turned out to be correctable. Even this seems less impressive when one considers that Russia, of all places, ended serfdom (or slavery) in 1861, two years before the Emancipation Proclamation and four years before the Thirteenth Amendment. Even Brazil only trailed the United States by less than thirty years in eradicating legal slavery. And then there was the fact the early United States, with its compromised Constitution and shabby republic, had been won by France. French military aid, more than Washington’s genius or the Green Mountain boys, or anything else, defeated Britain. This occurred only because the French fought the British globally at the time and saw in the American insurrection an opportunity to peel a British colony off the map. French involvement in the American Revolution broke the royal treasury. Even worse, the United States invoked an anti-regal philosophy of government. French philosophes could now look across the English Channel at a Britain that thrived with a limited monarch and then all the way across the Atlantic where a new government, without a king or nobility at all, now existed. Why should the French themselves labor under a medieval political institution where the nobles and the hierarchs in the Catholic Church paid no taxes themselves while acting as economic parasites on the working people?

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KEY POINTS AND APPLICATIONS TO EDUCATION •  What effect did Enlightenment values have on the abolitionist movement? •  By using Russia as a control group, how can the student of world history determine the importance of the abolitionist movement on the development feminist ideology? •  Mary Astell might be credited with being the first person to point out that while Christian theology might justify female subordination, Enlightenment philosophy did not. How did male Enlightenment philosophers respond? •  What does a world historical perspective, where students study broadly within the time period of the Enlightenment, lend to an understanding of the era? •  Democratic ideals created both the American Constitution and feminism. Which of these is the most historically significant?

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Class conflict and not gender conflict generated the discontent of the French Revolution, but the French Revolution created a feminine consciousness in a way that no prior historical event in world history had. The French Revolution largely had the effect of making women in France realize that they were a class within a class, and that this created overlapping loyalties. Marie-Antoinette (1755–1793) provided the best example of this. After being held prisoner by the radicals and put on trial, she fended off increasingly filthy accusations that were being hurled at her. The most fetid of these was that she had engaged in incestuous activities with her eightyear-old son. When the accusations hit her ears, Marie at first refused to reply at all but, when pressed, finally shouted, “If I do not respond, it is because nature refuses to answer such a charge made to a mother. I appeal to all the mothers who are here!” The women in the audience reportedly murmured and grew restive in approval of her response. Although Antoinette’s reputation is built on an apocryphal phrase involving cake, her response to the allegations of incest has the most importance for history. In fact, this may be the first recorded moment in world history where a woman of the nobility made an appeal across the classes to other women based on a shared experience. Women in the audience, even if briefly, identified more with Antoinette’s femininity 45

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and her experiences as a mother than they did with the male prosecutors. With radical class-based movements becoming a consistent feature of Western life in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, women increasingly had to make confusing decisions about identity. Should a common woman identify with her class or her gender? In A New World Begins (2019), Jeremy Popkin makes it clear that questions about gender and society made up a core component, or maybe even the core component, of the French Revolution. Popkin relates how women’s issues were not far behind the issues of class in the public’s consciousness. Popkin’s book is an impressive piece of traditional history and much more inclusive of women, but to “remember the ladies” is not enough; the French Revolution’s most significant long-term effect was the unleashing of feminist impulses and therefore should be seen not as a class conflict with a feminist subheading but as a feminist movement with a class subheading. Also, Wollstonecraft’s classical work may have been written in revolutionary Paris, but as will be argued soon, it’s not clear that the revolution had much more impact on her work of genius than it did on the chemistry experiment of Antoine Lavoisier (1743–1794), the man who discovered the law of conservation in the middle of the Parisian uprisings. Wollstonecraft must be put aside for a moment, as her Newtonian genius must be given the analysis that it is due. It suffices to say, at this particular point in the narrative, that the specific argument here is not to say that the French Revolution directly inspired her writings. Rather, it seems that the revolution acted on her in much the same way that the 1666 plague acted on Newton or that the French Revolution acted on Lavoisier: it was an interruption in daily routine that gave her time and perhaps even created a trauma that she wanted to look away from the world (and therefore inward) to create a work of genius. In his essay “The Salon of 1846,” Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) wrote of the painter Horace Vernet as “a soldier who busies himself with painting; I hate this art thought up to the beat of drums, these canvases daubed at the gallop, this painting fabricated by pistol-shot, just as I hate the army, armed power and anyone who clanks weapons noisily around in a peaceful place” (p. 87). Military movements have the same effect on

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history, with soldiers clanging around and making so much noise that it appears they are more important than they are. For now, the French Revolution must be analyzed, with world historical methods, from the vantage point of the twenty-first century, and that view reveals the revolution to have been the first eruption of femocracy, where democratic ideals synthesized with feminist impulses and began to generate a new mindset. Traditional historians fail to see this because the methods of the historian only allow a short-term focus on events, and at the time the violence of the revolution and the rise of Napoleon make too much racket for the long-term effects of the French Revolution to be recognized. The men of the French Revolution, when they would try to exclude their female counterparts, could not always see that the democratic ideals they pronounced made them hypocrites to the women. One male revolutionary leader got roughed up so badly by female protestors, upset by their exclusion, that he went to the establishment police for help. Yet, the analogy was too clear for everyone to see, and the hypocrisy too strong of an insult, for revolutionary ideals not to be spread beyond the original group of male rabble rousers. Popkin asks how could women, sitting in the stands, watching it be stated that male Jews and male slaves deserved equality, not wonder why the logic did not apply to them? These were people used to attending the theater, to booing and cheering the action in front of them, to participation in the events taking place on stage. With anger as their meat, some of the women of France decided to write their own parallel document, The Declaration of the Rights of Women and Female Citizens. Olympe de Gouges (1748–1793), a playwright and early emancipation activist, penned this women’s declaration and published it in 1791, one year before Wollstonecraft’s Vindication. To keep the focus on this great work, the biographical details of de Gouges should be stated first. After 1791, she continued to agitate for feminism and she voiced misgivings about the murderous nature of the radical phase. This included her opposition to the killing of Louis XVI in early 1793. The political thugs in the revolution, eventually, arrested de Gouges too and she lost her head, if not a voice made immortal by her writings, in November of 1793.

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The Declaration of Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen, has, as its first line, “Man, are you capable of being fair? A woman is asking: at least you will allow her that right. Tell me. What gave you the sovereign right to oppress my sex?” With this phrase, she mimics in some ways the great argument of Astell: if you do not base your argument for inequality on Christianity, and if the state of nature cannot form a solid enough base for an argument of inequality, then “what gave you the sovereign right?” Most famously, de Gouges declares, “A woman has the right to mount the scaffold. She must possess equally the right to mount the speaker’s platform.” This is a clever rhetorical flourish and The Declaration of Rights of Woman (so-called for clarity’s sake) directly connects with the democratic ideals expressed in both the American and French revolutions. Nonetheless, it’s a mimic, a sarcastic device used to expose the hypocrisy of the revolutionary men. Because it was written in French, its significance was drenched in blood by the radical phase and then trampled by soldier’s boots in the era of Napoleon. De Gouges’s work, like the 1789 Women’s March on Versailles, could not form the momentum for femocracy. Then there is also this; de Gouges was not a genius. The Declaration of Rights of Woman demonstrates that the conditions of the time, the revolution in the air, were not enough to create a synthesis of democratic ideals and feminism. Mary Wollstonecraft, however, did possess that rarest color of flame that we refer to as historical genius. Wollstonecraft and her work cannot be analyzed without an understanding of the importance of bookish culture. Printed books allowed for the large-scale distribution of carefully crafted arguments, and this in turn created an environment of private thought and reflection. We have already seen how individuals like Luther, Bacon, and Newton used isolation to read, think, and write. Luther may have been possessed by that the rare demon named “graphomania”; he generated so many volumes that some historians have questioned whether he ever thought anything he did not write. But to focus on only the isolating aspect of the culture of the book would be not to see another aspect of it. Research indicates that women tend to interrupt less often in arguments than men, to be more respectful of the feelings of others, and to be less likely to take an aggressive tone in debate as this might strain or tear social relationships. To read,

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to think about, and then to counter someone’s argument in writing reflects feminine characteristics. A woman could write in a private room, without men glaring at her, without the shaming, without facing a mass of voices demanding that she stay in her place. Other women could then read those words too, in a private environment, and do so without worrying that they strained relationships or hurt someone else’s feelings. Writing as a profession or activity already appealed to many eighteenth-century women probably because it could be done privately and the act of writing did not depend upon the approval of a group of men. Ann Radcliffe (1764–1823) was a British novelist of the Gothic genre. When Ann was a child an aunt of hers, upon dying, bequeathed to Ann a collection of books. In her early twenties, Ann married a journalist and the two traveled across Europe. The study of architectural ruins may have inspired Ann’s love of ghost stories. Eighteenth-century intellectuals lived in a time of cultural shift, when industrialization made the medieval period seem dreamlike. To see the stone corpses of medieval buildings everywhere must have caused a sense of dysphoria and inspired tales that the spirits of the dead also inhabited those ruins. In Lisa Kröger and Melanie Anderson’s book Monster, She Wrote (2019), the authors write, “Today, Radcliffe is considered not only a pioneer of her genre, but also a voice for women’s rights. Her particular (and incredibly popular) take on the female Gothic focuses on the abuses women suffered at the hands of men, especially through traditional institutions like marriage” (p. 24). Among the ghosts and the mad monks, readers could feel the horror of being trapped in an abusive situation or institution. Crucially, female readers could do this in private, in what today might be called a safe space. Wollstonecraft deserves to be categorized as a historical genius, put in a pantheon with Newton, Darwin, Gibbon, Smith, or Einstein. Part of the definition of a genius is that the product, the work of genius must transcend any specific field. To go further, if genius is determined by its effects, then Wollstonecraft outpaces Newton. In 1969, human beings landed on the moon using Newtonian physics, but young women also appeared on Yale’s campus as students for the first time; women in the universities are simply more important to the modern era than the moon landing was.

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If we judge genius by the positive effects it creates, then Wollstonecraft outpaces them all. Evolutionary theory would have, indeed did, develop without Darwin, and even Relativity Theory would have had its day without Einstein. Probably no one would write about the decline and fall of the Roman Empire without Gibbon, but the effects of his grand work cannot be described as nearly as far-ranging as Wollstonecraft’s. It is also not the case that if Wollstonecraft had not written her work that someone else would have. De Gouges is not the Alfred Russel Wallace to Wollstonecraft’s Darwin. As was mentioned earlier, the Declaration of the Rights of Woman contained too much satire to make it timeless; satire is its own art form, and de Gouges’s work is a high form of it, but satire marks a work as specific to its time, and the Declaration of the Rights of Woman cannot be described as a timeless work. It is one that expresses frustration, yes, one that decries the lowered status of women, yes, but one that created a lasting impact on the structure of society and on the creation of philosophy? Well, that would be up to Wollstonecraft. Of all the great thinkers, Wollstonecraft is most like Newton. Mathematics is not a separate branch of thought from philosophy; it operates with the same construction of argument but not through the same means. The primary force of Newton’s thought was in its precociousness. He threw out first principles and with them the entire structure of ancient physics upon which they had been built. James Gleick wrote in his biography of the natural philosopher, Isaac Newton (2007), of the inspiration that held Newton when he constructed the Principia in the mid-1680s: Though he had dropped alchemy for now, Newton had learned from it. He embraced invisible forces. He knew he was going to have to allow planets to influence one another from a distance. He was writing the principles of philosophy. But not just that; the mathematical principles of natural philosophy. (p. 124)

This is precisely what Mary Wollstonecraft would do, and to argue that she is different from Newton because he crafted his argument in the language of mathematics and she crafted hers in a language of natural rights philosophy is like saying we should not compare Aristotle with Lucretius because the former wrote in Greek and the latter in Latin.

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Now the reason that Wollstonecraft should be treated as separate from the activities of the French Revolution, despite her nearness to the action, is that her actual writing seems to be provoked by Jean Jacques Rousseau and her genius piqued by the frustration of living in a society where the virtues of intelligence, her virtues, found no reward in a social structure dominated by men. Unlike Newton, however, Wollstonecraft’s biography does not reveal a deeply asocial nature. She was not, like Newton, asexual or perhaps tacitly homosexual but emotionally and physically attracted to the opposite sex. A child of Romanticism and the Enlightenment, she thought and felt with unique passion. Born in 1759, Mary was the second-oldest child in a family of seven and she received little attention from her parents. Her father, Edward, suffered from the common enough affliction of alcoholism and his family in turn suffered from his drunken behavior. In her excellent 2015 book, a dual biography of Mary Wollstonecraft and her more-famous daughter Mary Shelley titled Romantic Outlaws, Charlotte Gordon includes this passage about Mary’s father: He would hug his wife and kiss his children, then overturn the table or hit the nearest child, perhaps because the cat had knocked something over, or rain had blown in an open window. One awful day, for no apparent reason, he hanged the family dog. The irrational nature of this act made it all the more horrific. For the rest of her life, Mary would hate the sound of a dog crying, as it brought back what she called the “agony” of her childhood. (p. 14)

More details about her childhood would only further the point; once Dad hangs the dog, the childhood can simply be described as unhappy. Mary’s much-abused mother, Elizabeth, died in 1782, in Mary’s twentythird year, and this shattered what little family unit Wollstonecraft still had. Mary sewed for a living while living with the family of a friend named Fanny Blood and eventually the progressive-minded young women opened a school for girls. During this time, Fanny got married and, three years later, perished in childbirth. Mary would match her intellect against the era’s most significant intellectuals, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) and Edmund Burke (1729–1797). Rousseau was comfortably dead by the time Mary picked up her pen, and her first significant work was titled Thoughts on the

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Education of Daughters: With Reflections on Female Conduct, in the More Important Duties of Life. When published, the work came in at less than fifty pages, but it was in a genre of child-development works created by Rousseau when he published Emile, a novel about childraising in which he extolled parents to leave books out of education and let the kids run outside until they reached adolescence. Rousseau seems to have been possessed of the kind of narcissism that makes people immune to their own hypocrisy. First, a male preaching freedom for men while encouraging women to know their place, and then a child-abandoner who writes a book about parenting; but he was all the rage in France during his lifetime and well after. Mary’s little book was the first to express the frustration and pain that women suffered in society, and it did not condescend to women in the way that anti-vice pamphlets did: Mary explained the condition of women but did not moralize that certain types of behaviors might lead a woman to become a street tramp. Mary, a young woman, did not absorb the reigning thoughts about women and education at the time. Later Wollstonecraft would address the work of Rousseau more directly with her 1788 work Thoughts on the Education of Daughters. She also wrote Elements of Morality, part of which decried the constricting forms of women’s fashion, but she did so under the pseudonym of a German man. As was previously noted, Mary lived in a great era of Gothic novels, many written by women, but if she was influenced it was not in the positive sense. She felt the novels provided no intellectual nutrition. They were just fables that weakened the mind without actually creating new thoughts that might liberate women. Her work up until this point had been mostly about the female experience in society and providing a new way for her and other young women (the audience for books about philosophy and education) to think and interact in that society. But Mary would now accept a new intellectual challenge from none other than Edmund Burke, an Irish politician who argued against revolutionary ideals in his 1790 pamphlet Reflections on the Revolution in France. Burke writes in sentences that often stultify readers, and he favored gradual constitutional changes and specific limits on governmental power. Society should not be overturned based on abstract notions of change because, he wrote, this would inevitably cause the kinds of disruptions that lead to power vacuums and then dictatorships. Writing

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like this during the early and exciting days of the revolution made him seem like a fud, but those who read him after Napoleon saw a prophet. When Wollstonecraft read Burke, she recognized the kind of man who patted himself on the back for his willingness to pat other people on the head. He wrote about society in the same maddening tone as men wrote about women, thinking that “What can we give you to make you happy?” type of questions were as good as the equal opportunity that would allow someone to be in a position of authority herself. How could those in positions of power not see that the subordinates all wanted freedom from the idiocy of those in power? Here is where the significance of a bookish generation comes in. As much as modern feminists might like to see Mary as hard-headed and hard-charging, she was not. She was sensitive and shy and lived in a world where she faced psychological and emotional shaming for challenging male authority. She began writing her response to Burke, what eventually became the Rights of Man, but as Gordon writes, Halfway through writing, Mary broke down. It hit her, quite suddenly, that she was going head-to-head with one of the most powerful men in England, debating principles the majority of Englishmen regarded as cornerstones: the sanctity of property, the preservation of inheritance, and the essential value of the aristocracy. In despair, she travelled over to [her publisher, Joseph Johnson’s] house, tail down, and told him she was going to quit. Johnson, who by now knew how to handle her moods, let her make excuses—her ill health, her poor endurance, her lack of a formal education—and then said he would destroy the pages she had already sent him and that she did not need to finish, especially if she did not think she was up to it. No approach could have been more effective. She later admitted he had “piqued her pride.” (p. 152)

A young woman in this era might not have been able to take on someone of Burke’s stature if he stood behind a podium and across a debate stage. The entire edifice of society was designed like a church, with women shrinking back in their pews while a man stood at the lectern and dictated the appropriate place in society, and the proper ethics, that women should adhere to. This was made worse by the effect that older women, those who absorbed the ethos, had on enforcing these societal standards. A young woman sitting in a pew would never raise her hand

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and invite a debate, but she might read in private and write a response. Mary did. A Vindication for the Rights of Men came out in 1790 in pamphlet form. Wollstonecraft began by stating that she had started reading Burke’s work for the purpose of amusement but his words angered her enough that she decided to create a counter argument. In some ways, this first of Wollstonecraft’s Vindications can be described as anarchic; Mary writes to tear down all forms of hierarchical control, recognizing those controls as being arbitrary distinctions that restrict the freedoms of people at the bottom of the hierarchy. Burke defended property, and in the eighteenth century that still meant defending slavery. In her pamphlet, Wollstonecraft went further in her arguments for the cause of individual liberty than any thinker or historical figure in either the American or French revolution. Liberty-minded buyers gathered up Wollstonecraft’s pamphlet so quickly that the first edition evaporated in just a few weeks; however, like the original version of Paine’s Common Sense, that pamphlet lacked a name on the cover. The second edition included Mary’s determinedly female name on the front and a mild outcry ensued. All the major review publications of this bookish era read her pamphlet and reviewed it in terms that ranged from respectful to ecstatic. Having taken on Burke and won, Mary now possessed the confidence to fully express her genius. Importantly, Mary enjoyed the act of writing. At the table with her pen, she could achieve equality, be recognized for her talents, and express her creativity. In the introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of Vindication, Miriam Brody writes, Mary Wollstonecraft was the first major feminist, and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, written in the Western tradition when the issue of the rights of man was bringing revolution to the United States, to France, and threatening even to shake the venerable English Parliament, is the feminist declaration of independence. Wollstonecraft dared to take the liberal doctrine of inalienable human rights, a doctrine which was inflaming patriots on both sides of the Atlantic, and assume these rights for her own sex. No women’s revolt followed the publication of the Vindication. Indeed, if one had, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman would belong only to the historians. Instead, Mary Wollstonecraft’s argument has a freshness and immediacy of attitude as if the author herself had only now entered the contemporary debate on women’s rights. (p. i)

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An excellent analysis like Dr. Brody’s can only be improved upon by saying this: the revolutions on either side of the Atlantic amounted to much less historically than does the authoring of Vindication by Wollstonecraft. The idea of a woman’s revolt against men is absurd; no Atlantic Ocean roils between men and women in the way that it did between the American colonies and mother Britain, and no class-based legal system put women specifically into separate estate as was the case in France. It was not the case that members of the different estates mixed in marriages, raised children together, and lived or died by the fortunes of the weather and harvest. The only way in which a movement toward female equality could occur was through the propagation of feminist ideals through books; millions of individual enlightenments, not a revolution of the mass, would create feminism. This process proved more effective and certainly less bloody than both the American and French revolutions. Wollstonecraft’s gift, nurtured by an oasis of free-thinking intellectuals and publishers, allowed her to write and to develop a network of readers. Someone like her could not have won esteem in a debate format or rise in government or industry, but the dispersion of her books and the proliferation of letter writing and newspapers allowed her to become a part of a nurturing network. The local hayseeds might jump up and down in outrage over a woman making such declarations about equality, but who cared about that when rave reviews from Thomas Paine rolled in? Being a woman, Wollstonecraft could daily see how philosophical contradictions and incomplete philosophies impacted females. Just as in the early seventeenth century Francis Bacon could see how the educational structure failed to embrace the new methods of science, or how, a few decades later, Isaac Newton could see that the conception of the solar system was incorrect because it was based upon false premises, or how a century later Adam Smith understood that the economic conception of mercantilism derived from false analogies and factually unsupported premises, Wollstonecraft saw that everything was wrong about the treatment of women. Yet, because her subject affected over half the human race and would radiate across the centuries from her generation and region to all future generations and regions, her work must be of greater import than that of any other.

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The lady began with, In the present state of society it appears necessary to go back to first principles in search of the most simple truths, and to dispute with some prevailing prejudice every inch of ground. To clear my way, I must be allowed to ask some plain questions, and the answers will probably appear as unequivocal as the axioms on which reasoning is built; though, when entangled with various motives of action, they are formally contradicted, either by the words or conduct of men. (p. 19)

The first sentence strikes the reader. Society in its present state is wrong, out of alignment with reason on every inch. Wollstonecraft wants a full-scale realignment of society so that the reality of daily life for women is aligned with the dictates of reason. As hard as the Enlightenment philosophers had tried to make reason, or nature, or whatever, a system of thought that could both extoll the dignity of the rights of men while also justifying the hierarchical oppression of women, this would not hold up to logical inquiry. She goes on to write, In what does man’s pre-eminence over the brute creation consist? The answer is as clear as that a half is less than the whole; in Reason. What acquirement exalts one being above another? Virtue; we spontaneously reply. For what purpose were the passions implanted? That man by struggling with them might attain a degree of knowledge denied to the brutes; whisper Experience. Consequently the perfection of our nature and capability of happiness, must be estimated by the degree of reason, virtue, and knowledge, that distinguish the individual, and direct the laws which bind society: and that from the exercise of reason, knowledge and virtue naturally flow, is equally undeniable, if mankind be viewed collectively. (p. 19)

If reason is what separates civilized humans from the animal kingdom, or from uncivilized tribes, then take the principles of reason to their real conclusions, untainted by the prejudices and chauvinisms of a society based in false principles. Can there be a larger philosophical statement than this? She later notes that,

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Men, in general, seem to employ their reason to justify prejudices, which they have imbibed, they can scarcely trace how, rather than to root them out. The mind must be strong that resolutely forms its own principles; for a kind of intellectual cowardice prevails which makes men shrink from the task, or only do it by halves. (p. 10)

With these sentences, she declares that male philosophers failed to see the end result of their own philosophical premises. Expressing a new confidence in her cognitive powers, Wollstonecraft notes that only a strong mind can create a new set of philosophical principles and then live by those principles regardless of the pressures of society’s constructs. What makes Vindication historically transcendent is that the work is not provoked by the rage of a woman being mistreated by men so much as the work of a philosopher provoked by the errors in the reason of her fellow thinkers. Wollstonecraft went right after the most prominent philosopher of that era of French history: Rousseau exerts himself to prove that all was right originally; a crowd of authors that all is now right: and I, that all will be right. But, true to his first position, next to a state of nature, Rousseau celebrates barbarism, and apostrophizing the shade of Fabricius, he forgets that, in conquering the world, the Romans never dreamed of establishing their own liberty on a firm basis, or of extending the reign of virtue. Eager to support his system, he stigmatizes, as vicious, every effort of genius; and, uttering the apotheosis of savage virtues, he exalts those to demigods, who were scarcely human—the brutal Spartans, who, in defiance of justice and gratitude, sacrificed, in cold blood, the slaves who had shewn themselves heroes to rescue their oppressors. (p. 23)

The first line of this excerpt indicates Wollstonecraft’s full intent: that her philosophizing be seen as a direct call for the change; the future must be better because logical principles lead to the notion of equality. Then, where Rousseau exhorted the virtues of the very manly Spartans of antiquity, Wollstonecraft sees the Spartans for the hyper-aggressive frauds they were: men who mistook bravery in battle as the only virtue and one that excused them for treachery against the helots they had enslaved. The Spartans worshiped power and force only.

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We glimpse in Wollstonecraft’s words what feminism could have been and maybe still will be. Modern feminism too often invites women to show they are as tough as Spartans rather than to question the idiot-masculinity at the core of Spartan society, and that’s why that masculinity is endemic to the culture. Dozens of secondary schools and universities have Spartans as their mascot, but exactly none are called the feminists. Maybe athletics-as-competition could even be replaced with cooperative activities. How about the Environmentalists? At the core of all bad thinking, realized Wollstonecraft, one can usually find a bad analogy. In her time the men liked to coddle women as a class of people similar to children. The prize characteristic of children is “innocence” and Wollstonecraft sees that standard applied to her sex. The lady writes, Children, I grant, should be innocent; but when the epithet is applied to men, or women, it is but a civil term for weakness. For if it be allowed that women were destined by Providence to acquire human virtues, and by the exercise of their understandings, that stability of character which is the firmest ground to rest our future hopes upon, they must be permitted to turn to the fountain of light, and not forced to shape their course by the twinkling of a mere satellite. (p. 29)

At this point in her argument, Wollstonecraft reaches back into her previous experiences as an educator and author of child-rearing manuals. Education can have two purposes only: One is the indoctrination of the young into a system of thought, and this is not always bad. To indoctrinate means to put a body of knowledge into the mind. Law and medicine, for example, depend upon this; however, education can also be used to help the pupil develop an independence of mind that leads to the implementation of new philosophies; this is the way of the philosopher. Later, when writing about the physical differences between men and women made so much of by Rousseau and his philosophical kin, Wollstonecraft makes this comparison: But should it be proved that woman is naturally weaker than man, whence does it follow that it is natural for her to labour to become still weaker than nature intended her to be? Arguments of this cast are an insult to common sense, and favour of passions. The divine right of husbands, like the divine right of kings, may, it is to be hoped, in this enlightened age, be

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contested without danger, and, though conviction may not silence many boisterous disputants, yet, when any prevailing prejudice is attacked, the wife will consider, and leave the narrow-minded to rail with thoughtless vehemence at innovation. (p. 55)

Wollstonecraft seems to believe that sexual dimorphism acts as the most powerful argument for a male-dominated hierarchy, as indeed it was, given that nature decreed the existences of physical differences. The existence of the dimorphism, she notes, does not make it logical or ethical to separate women from the outdoors and exercise to make them softer than nature would decree. The power that men held to keep women in those positions, a husbandly power, seemed similar in its decree to the divine right of kings. To label that power such, among an audience of the enlightened, was to kill it. Then we come to the justified grievance that remains at the center of feminist concerns into the modern era. The degradation of women, the positions of wives and mothers they seemed force to take, not only subordinated them to men but deprived the female sex of meaningful work. In the middle rank of life . . . men in their youth, are prepared for professions, and marriage is not considered as the grand feature in their lives; whilst women, on the contrary, have no other scheme to sharpen their faculties. It is not business, extensive plans, or any of the excursive flights of ambition, that engross their attention; no, their thoughts are not employed in rearing such noble structures. To rise in the world, and have the liberty of running from pleasure to pleasure, they must marry advantageously, and to this object their time is sacrificed, and their persons often legally prostituted. (p. 77)

To see marriage as a constrictive institution is one thing, but Wollstonecraft argues that it takes the place of meaningful work in a woman’s life. Worse, marriage redirects a woman’s self-improving energies into a form of prostitution. Such statements would have forced women to think about traditional roles and life narratives quite differently from the way in which society sanctioned it. But without God and Christianity, things once considered blessed simply became profane. The section of Vindication above demonstrates Wollstonecraft’s intellectual courage; she follows her arguments even to the uncomfortable conclusion.

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Much is written against Rousseau, but the line with most sting is “all Rousseau’s errors in reasoning arose from sensibility, and sensibility to their charms women are very ready to forgive! When he should have reasoned he became impassioned, and reflection inflamed his imagination instead of enlightening his understanding” (p. 115). Here is a woman accusing a man of thinking with his emotions rather than his mind. Vindication deserves to be read in full, and a summary of the entire work is beyond the scope of this book. A few key components of Wollstonecraft’s argument should suffice to make the point here (and hopefully send readers looking for a copy of Vindication). Near the end of her argument, Wollstonecraft writes, Asserting the rights which women in common with men ought to contend for, I have not attempted to extenuate their faults but to prove them to be the natural consequence of their education and station in society. If so, it is reasonable to suppose that they will change their character, and correct their vices and follies, when they are allowed to be free in a physical, moral, and civil sense. (p. 242)

Vindication is a great work of skeptical philosophy, one that synthesized the passion that Wollstonecraft felt in regard to the place of women in society with the intelligence she wielded as a philosopher. Vindication reads well in a contemporary sense but also overlaps Romantic and Enlightenment philosophies. The lady had spoken. Wollstonecraft established herself as a Newtonian-level philosopher, but unlike Newton she was not asocial, and also unlike Newton, she was a child of the Romantic era. At some point in 1793, Wollstonecraft fell in love with an American writer named Gilbert Imlay. The two escaped the violence of revolutionary Paris and hunkered down in a French suburb. Mary became pregnant but continued to write even as her husband travelled widely for business. In 1795, with a daughter named after her dead friend Fanny with her now, Mary returned to London with Imlay. There she found out that he had affairs with other women while he traveled. Mary twice tried to kill herself, once by leaping from a bridge into the Thames River, but survived these attempts. Feminist historians sometimes note the dichotomy, not a contradiction and certainly not hypocrisy, between the strength that Mary

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showed in her writing and these details of her personal life. How could the author of Vindication be so emotionally affected by her relationship with a philandering mediocrity like Imlay? The answer is beyond the power of any modern analyst, but the trauma of childbirth, especially when Wollstonecraft had lost her friend Fanny in the recent past, may have caused or deepened a depressive episode. The knowledge of Imlay’s infidelities, especially if Mary had hoped that he might provide emotional support, could have driven her to the suicide attempts. No more should be said about the matter as speculation here is hardly helpful, but historically it does not seem to be the case that producing a work of genius improves the mental health or personal life of the genius. In 1796, Mary met an anarchist named William Godwin, they married a year later, and Wollstonecraft died of uterine infection, a common problem among the women of the era, just days after giving birth to a baby girl named Mary Godwin. Wollstonecraft’s devotion to intellectual creation led her to the writing of the Vindication, a work of genius. She died during the biological creation of a baby girl who would, in time, stitch together her own work of dark authorial greatness. To detail the work of Mary Godwin/Mary Shelley (1797–1851) would take the narrative of this book away from its purpose. Shelley (as she will be called for ease of understanding) would write Frankenstein; Or, the Modern Prometheus, which was published on the first day of 1818. No other book synthesized the major themes of its era, in this case the Gothic, Romanticism, Enlightenment, and themes of the scientific revolution (even themes of Protestantism) as Shelley’s work did. Certainly Shelley’s work is the best example of what Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress) Could produce. That movement, associated with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German philosophers, holds Goethe (1749–1832) up as the standard for alienated-artist-as-genius. Maybe Goethe’s work reads better in German, but all that high-pitched emotionalism fails to age well. Frankenstein, however, has become as universal as Shakespeare and has the advantage of being short and readable. For those who wish to attack the Western canon as biased by its non-inclusion, the fact that Faust is included but Frankenstein is not should be Exhibit A.

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But Shelley’s work cannot be described as promoting femocracy any more than can the poetry of American slave Phillis Wheatley (1753– 1784). Wheatley, who was too young to work in the Southern colonies when she was sold in Boston, grew up as a house slave who labored for a relatively enlightened upper-class Boston family. On a whim, one of the of the Wheatley daughters taught Phillis to read. By the time Phillis reached her teenage years, she had developed into a devoted Christian poet. It disturbs modern literary analysts to no end that Phillis tended to write poems that praised white-male slaveholders, like the preacher George Whitefield and the revolutionary general George Washington. Some modern African American scholars are so troubled by Wheatley’s poetic assertion that providence was involved in her kidnapping and enslavement—this was the means by which she encountered Christianity—that its been asserted that Phillis practiced the art of sarcasm. However, there is no evidence that Wheatley was an early blackpower advocate. Her poetry demonstrated her literary gifts and her Christian faith, but nothing in her work proclaims a philosophy of either manumission or feminism. Wheatley was a girl in a hostile environment looking for approval and she found it. She served, at that time, like the moons of Jupiter in Galileo’s time, as a something outside the orbit of traditional thought, as proof that Africans could write and feel as well as anyone with lighter skin. Phillis promoted the cause of femocracy without ever actually extolling its virtues. Shelley and Wheatley deserve a mention here, but not analysis. Great artists both, but not quite femocrats. After the death of Wollstonecraft, the cause of femocracy would move from the philosophical sphere into the realm of public advocacy, and that would happen through the direct connection, by analogy, to the emancipation movement. KEY POINTS AND APPLICATIONS TO EDUCATION •  How did the printing press, and a culture of the book, create the right conditions for someone like Mary Wollstonecraft to write her work? How did the French Revolution influence Wollstonecraft?

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•  Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein are universally considered to be geniuses in their field. Why do you think that Mary Wollstonecraft is not given the same status? •  What marks Vindication of the Rights of Woman as being superior to other works of feminist philosophy that developed about the same time?

5 ANTI-SLAVERY AND THE DECLARATION OF SENTIMENTS

There is no lack of histories about the abolitionist movement, and the

relevance for the topic at hand has to do with the analogy that women found in the abolitionist movement to their own status in society and not with anti-slavery sentiments themselves. Still, to establish how abolitionism facilitated the evolution of femocracy, a few basic points about the movement should be put down. First, the abolition movement evolved from anti–slave trade sentiment. The focus on the slave-trade itself as an evil actually preserved Christian morality, sort of like a Christian might be able to condemn a husband beating his wife without actually condemning the entire institution of marriage itself. Christian doctrine, like that of Islam, clearly upheld the hierarchical control of others’ freedoms in a number of ways, including enslavement; however, the trade itself could be seen as a new and unique evil. It differed from slave systems of the past because of its scale, the random kidnapping, and the conditions inherent in the slave ships. Earlier it was noted that in 1687, Newton penned Principia, and, in 1688, the English were glorified by a parliamentary revolution. Something else of great significance also occurred in 1688. The Germantown Quaker Petition against Slavery marks the first recorded anti-slavery sentiment in the history of Western civilization. The Quakers (originally 65

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a derogatory term but it seems benign enough now, and the term is more convenient than “The Society of Friends”) formed in England about 1650. This was just two years after the phantasmagoria of the Thirty Years War in Germany ended and one year after parliamentarians hacked off the head of King Charles I. The Quakers decided not to argue over theology and developed a set of principles that can only loosely be described as Christian. Quaker theology included the idea that God is love and that every person possesses an inner light that deserves its opportunity to shine outward. When Quakerism transferred across the Atlantic, it apparently took a few decades before a few of the believers in William Penn’s colony determined that Quaker ideals led to abolitionism. In Germantown, roughly correspondent with today’s Philadelphia, four men crafted the petition. In typical Quaker fashion, they derived their conclusions about equality from a vague reading of the Bible. They invoked the Golden Rule, essentially saying, “Would you want to be enslaved? If not, then this is wrong.” It took nearly a century for a formal anti-slavery movement to form. In 1787, the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade formed in England. William Wilberforce (1759–1833), a dour evangelical, led a parliamentary movement to ban the slave trade, and in 1807 the English parliament outlawed the importing of slaves into the country. A year later, the United States Congress, forced by the British Navy’s enforcement of the slave trade ban on the Atlantic, followed the British lead. The United States had imported so many female slaves, however, that the institution could be perpetuated in the country without a reliance on fresh bodies from West Africa. In 1814, the United States and Great Britain decided to expand their moral stance by enforcing a ban, together, on the slave trade. They signed the agreement as part of the Treaty of Ghent, but with the exception of newly formed Quaker and evangelical groups in Europe and the United States, almost no one with influence was yet making the specific argument that slavery as an institution violated Christian, Enlightenment, or constitutional values. While the cause of feminism lost some momentum after the death of Wollstonecraft, the notion that morality should be publicly expressed took the form of the abolition movement. At the same time, feminism

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was coopted by egalitarian movements that focused on class rather than gender consciousness. It would not be enough to say that Wollstonecraft was ahead of her time because she still is; however, the influence that her work exerted would have been on private readers, and the nineteenth century was becoming a time for public movements, political rallies, and eventually warfare. In the nineteenth century, the cause of femocracy branched into a European movement and an American movement. This process is described in the introduction to the Penguin Classics version of John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty and The Subjection of Women (2006). Alan Ryan writes, By the 1850s female suffrage was a live issue; in Europe, this was partly a consequence of the 1848 revolutions, but the United States was experiencing what one might call the pressures of democratic logic: a substantially democratic electoral system of the kind instituted after the American Revolution (1776–1783) has a momentum that eventually ensures that neither property nor gender nor race constrain a citizen’s voting rights. In 1848, the Seneca Falls Convention began the modern suffrage movement. (p. xxiv)

Again, Wollstonecraft’s work was a brilliant piece of philosophy, akin to Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum, but it is just not the case that masses of people read a work of philosophy and then find themselves galvanized to unite for societal change. One might argue that Thomas Paine’s Common Sense achieved something like that, but the extent of that pamphlet’s influence may be overstated (if only because the colonies continued to harbor a high percentage of Tories), and the geographic placement of colonies across the Atlantic from Britain made a separation of colonies from the mother country vastly easier than the creation of female equality. Something had to happen in popular culture for femocracy to be founded. As Ryan indicates in his introduction, Europe’s class-based society remained unsettled after the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era. Radicals in Europe, many of them socialist, continued to see mirages of successful revolution. The notion of a violent overthrow of the system continued to appeal to Romantics even as industrialization spread and transformed the lower-classes-as-peasants into the lowerclasses-as-industrial workers.

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For the poor of Europe, the most significant innovation of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries probably came in the form of potato farming. Potatoes come cheap, and the skin of the potato contains many of the vitamins and minerals that a person needs. If a working person could eat a pound of baked potatoes and procure a couple of glasses of whole milk, then he could put in a day’s work powered by the carbohydrates. This must have seemed like small consolation in an era when smog clogged the air and industrialists sided with the nobles in government to preserve power and siphon money. All of this set back the cause of women’s rights because women were seen as being marbled in with the class structure rather than a group in their own right. After Waterloo (1815) and the defeat of Napoleon, the two major powers responsible for the defeat of Napoleon, Great Britain and Russia, emerged as the new European elites. Great Britain’s influence resulted from its powerful navy. This allowed the British to suppress the slave trade just as it protected the English from a French invasion via the Channel during Napoleon’s peak. British power was more durable than Russian power largely because Russia’s post-Napoleonic influence was based on her victory over the French Grand Armée after Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812. The Russian military did not drive Napoleon out, but as the saying goes, “the Russian land defends itself.” Napoleon invaded Russia on the thinnest of pretenses: because Czar Alexander I violated Napoleon’s trade embargo with the British. The Russian military could not defeat Napoleon, but their tactic-bydefault of retreating into the Russian interior eventually did. Napoleon took Moscow but ruled an empire of ash because the Russians had burned the city down. The French emperor then made a sad retreat back to Paris where the allied forces defeated him soon thereafter. Much drama ensued in between, but that is another story and not relevant here except to say that when Napoleon’s second act closed with the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, it was a British general, the Duke of Wellington, who held the field. This meant that Britain and Russia dominated European power politics and competed with each other for control of Europe and Central Asia between 1815 and 1848. Neither Britain nor Russia was poised to develop femocracy to a fuller extent. Britain did not house plantation slavery, and the popula-

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tion and government could be described as largely anti-slavery after 1807. A formal suffragette movement did not begin in Britain until 1832. In Russia, nothing approaching a feminist movement was extant. In 1825, on the day that Czar Nicholas I ascended the throne upon the death of his brother, a group of military officers tried to pull off a coup. While fighting Napoleon, these officers had found that being stationed in more liberal parts of Europe was preferable to living under a Russian autocracy. Troops loyal to the czar stopped the overthrow, and Nicholas used the full force of his authority from that point forward to turn Russia away from any type of Enlightenment ideology. An irony that will be later explained is that Russia emancipated her serfs before the United States emancipated her slaves and did so without an anti-slavery movement forming at all. There are reasons for this, but for now it enhances the argument here that femocracy in the nineteenth century did not form in either Great Britain or Russia because both lacked a large-scale anti-slavery movement that would eventually create an analogy with women’s rights. In addition, the concept of class made it more difficult for women to separate their specific problems from those that were endemic to the lower or upper classes to which they belonged. The British would pick up on femocracy after the American Civil War, but that was largely a result of John Stuart Mill becoming the philosophical heir to Wollstonecraft and the political heir to Wilberforce. Mill is an important force, but chronology demands that he wait. The citizens of Great Britain distrusted revolutions because the one they’d had in the mid-seventeenth century led to the dismal theocratic dictatorship of Cromwell. British democracy might not be all that inclusive, but it was good enough. Democracy, to most Russians, seemed an alien ideal that ran counter to every one of the empire’s traditions, and the Russians were too isolated, uneducated, and calcified to embrace Europe’s 1848 revolutions. In fact, the Russian army acted decisively to stamp down the revolutionaries in that year. Once again, Russia, without really possessing much in the way of military, economic, or cultural strength, presented itself as a major European force. But this was illusory: the Russian distance and the Russian winter defeated Napoleon, not the army, and the revolutionaries that threatened the Hapsburg Empire and the other conservative states of

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Europe were untrained and poorly equipped. Yet, this was enough to convince the Russians of their European supremacy for a while longer. When Nicholas pushed Russia into the Crimean War (1850–1853), he intended to take the Black Sea Peninsula from the Ottomans but the British and French came to the aid of the sultan. For the first time in the nineteenth century, Russia faced a modernized Western military. The subsequent Russian defeat so humiliated Nicholas I that the stress likely killed him. His successor, Alexander II, saw the connection between Russia’s inept military, her backward economy, and the agrarian serfs who kept Russia trapped in a medieval economic system. On February 19, 1861, Alexander II issued the Emancipation Manifesto, which freed the serfs but made them buy the land they worked on. The serfs became peasant sharecroppers in much the same way that American slaves would just four years later. All of this needed to be said to say this: the anti-slavery movement in the United States was unique. While anti-slavery activities and laws both occurred in Great Britain and the United States, none of them took on the form that they did in the United States and that was because the United States had formal documents in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution that created what Ryan calls “the pressures of democratic logic.” That pressure could be as equally applied to the status of women as it could be to the status of slaves. The anti-slavery movement began about the time that Karl Marx (1818–1883), who must be reviewed for context, developed socialism into a theory of history. Mill especially sought to directly further the cause of feminism but Marx actually shaped the next phase of the movement more significantly because he created the idea of historically defined groups that acted in conflict with one another. The notion of historically defined groups that interact with other historically defined groups begins with Marx’s class-based thesis of history but eventually extends, by analogy, to civil rights. In 1848, the year of Europe’s revolutions and the year of the Seneca Falls Declaration, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels published The Communist Manifesto and, with it, invented a historical system in which class conflict acted as the force giving history its velocity. In some ways Marxism strangled feminism in Europe and not just by coopting the revolutionary impulses of the era into class antagonism but

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also by ignoring the special status of women as a group that was singled out for great levels of oppression. Marx funneled all of history into class antagonism, and all of the actors into two classes. It’s a simplistic vision of history, not much superior to the race-based historical classifications of the Nazis, and it can only be applied to certain sections of Western civilization; however, the appeal seems to have been in the notion of identity: to be in the proletariat was to be in a class of people who faced historical oppression from others, and this oppression was the force that made a nineteenth-century factory worker feel some connection with a fifteenth-century peasant. By analogy, could not women see themselves, more easily in fact, as a historically defined group subject to oppression? This brings us away from Marxism and Europe to a tea table in Waterloo, New York. In 1848, a group of five women gathered there: Lucretia Mott (1793–1880), Martha Wright (1806–1875; Mott’s sister), Mary Ann McClintock (1800–1884), Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902), and Jane Hunt (1812–1889). Stanton, the wife of one of the country’s most prominent abolitionist speakers, dominated the conversation by voicing her frustration regarding the traditional roles of women in society. Stanton and Mott had developed their friendship at abolition rallies, and both found themselves provoked to action after the administrators at a world anti-slavery rally in London refused, because they were women, to let them speak in 1840. Stanton’s family was Brahmin; they lived in fine homes taken care of by servants and essentially behaved like New World Victorian nobles. Stanton, in that regard, was similar to many of that era’s revolutionaries. Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Bolivar all possessed enormous wealth for the time but seemed piqued by their lack of access to the absolute upper echelons of power. Stanton lived a life materially superior to most men in the United States and Europe but material comfort only gave her more time to think about the lack of equality and respect that women suffered from. The nineteenth century was a great era for reform movements. Upper-class women, especially those who were active in a progressively minded church, could find an outlet for political impulses, a use for their education, and access to meaningful work by acting through these organizations. Miriam Gurko wrote in The Ladies of Seneca Falls (1974),

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The female anti-slavery societies proved a good school for the ladies who were later to work for woman’s rights. They learned how to organize and work together, and how to handle the vociferous criticism they received. They learned the techniques of circulating petitions and holding conventions. They learned how to take direct and often dangerous action by working with the Underground Railway, sheltering the fugitive slaves in their homes and even, when necessary, driving wagons to the next station. Above all, they learned to speak before an audience. It is difficult today to grasp the implications of this. In the early nineteenth century, women simply did not address a public group. It was considered not only beyond their capacities, but was frowned upon as improper, indecorous, unfeminine, irreligious, against both God and nature. (p. 35)

This statement provides more proof for two points that are key to the creation of femocracy. First, feminist ideals could not have been expressed originally without a culture of the book, and second, the anti-slavery rallies that became a constant feature of progressive life in certain parts of the United States provided not only a philosophical analogy between the status of slaves and the status of women but educated women in the means of public agitation and democratic participation. Most of the women who arranged the Seneca Falls Convention that took place over the course of two days, July 19–20, 1848, in Seneca Falls, New York, were Quakers. Only Elizabeth Cady Stanton was not, but the specific religious affiliations of the women mattered much less, had always mattered much less, than their shared cause. She and Lucretia Mott had planned the convention for the better part of a decade, and three hundred attendees, with just about three dozen of them being men, came to hear the lectures, see the presentations, and feel a shared sense of community. Everyone knew that the convention had to end with some type of signed resolution, but the attendees could not decide whether the right to vote should be one of the demands. Incredibly, Lucretia Mott argued against the provision while the most forthright proponent of it was a man, Frederick Douglass. Douglass was the only African American in attendance at the convention, and he proved himself to be one of the era’s most eloquent philosophers of human rights. Forty years later in 1888, Douglass gave a speech before the International Council of Women in Washington, DC, and spoke these words:

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But we have heard this old argument before, and if we live very long we shall hear it again. When any aged error shall be assailed, and any old abuse is to be removed, we shall meet this same old argument. Man has been so long the king and woman the subject—man has been so long accustomed to command and woman to obey—that both parties to the relation have been hardened into their respective places, and thus has been piled up a mountain of iron against woman’s enfranchisement. The same thing confronted us in our conflicts with slavery.

“We have heard this old argument before,” says Douglass, and by that he means the divine right of kings or any other philosophy conjured up for the purpose of justifying an asymmetric and arbitrary power relationship. Douglass grasped the simple truth: The justification for oppressing women was only a slightly different species from the one used for justifying slaves, and that justification had its ancestor in the governmental tyranny of divine right. The first portion of the Declaration of Sentiments that developed from that summer convention needs to be analyzed for its historical and philosophical force. When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one portion of the family of man to assume among the people of the earth a position different from that which they have hitherto occupied, but one to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes that impel them to such a course. We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men and women are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights governments are instituted, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. Whenever any form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of those who suffer from it to refuse allegiance to it, and to insist upon the institution of a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly, all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves, by

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abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their duty to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security. Such has been the patient sufferance of the women under this government, and such is now the necessity which constrains them to demand the equal station to which they are entitled. The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world. He has never permitted her to exercise her inalienable right to the elective franchise. He has compelled her to submit to laws, in the formation of which she had no voice. He has withheld from her rights which are given to the most ignorant and degraded men—both natives and foreigners. Having deprived her of this first right of a citizen, the elective franchise, thereby leaving her without representation in the halls of legislation, he has oppressed her on all sides. He has made her, if married, in the eye of the law, civilly dead. He has taken from her all right in property, even to the wages she earns.

In an attempt to mimic the Declaration of Independence, the authors of the Declaration of Sentiments achieved a connection between democratic ideals and women’s rights. This was the same tactic employed by abolitionists and, it should be noted, a point of rhetoric used by Lincoln in his famous senatorial debates against Stephen Douglas. The Declaration of Sentiments stretches the metaphor too far. Women in American history and their relationship to men simply is not analogous to the conditions of the pre-Revolutionary colonists and their relationship to Great Britain. The Declaration of Sentiments might have been effective as a piece of public relations and as a satire that might have exposed some of the hypocrisy in American political life, but editorial cartoons accomplish the same thing, and the United States has never lacked for clever bits of satire. In terms of philosophy, the Declaration of Sentiments more closely relates to The Communist Manifesto than the Declaration of

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Independence because women are treated as a specific class who have been historically oppressed by another class. John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) is the feminist who brought femocracy to its philosophical conclusion; that is to say, Mill fully synthesized democratic ideals and applied them in a logically coherent way, without contradictions, to the conditions of women. Mill accomplished this with his 1869 work The Subjection of Women while at the same time using his position as a member of the British parliament to propose extending voting rights to women. If it matters, and it might, Mills lacked the genius of Wollstonecraft. While historians might to try to explain the background and context by which new thoughts arise, genius still maintains a mystery. A genius conjures. Mary Wollstonecraft possessed a unique philosophical talent and this can be determined because England and France did not lack for philosophers and they all lived through the same conditions as Wollstonecraft, but none produced a visionary work like Vindication. Mary was also untrained in a philosophical school. She was not constructed by a group of teachers and indoctrinated with a method that might have constrained her thoughts. None of this is true for Mill, and while The Subjection of Women is the completion point of femocratic philosophy, it is hard to argue against the thought that if John Stuart Mill had not written it, it would have appeared in the papers of another writer. Mill was constructed to be a child prodigy in ethical philosophy and in particular a branch of philosophy called Utilitarianism that had been developed by the English philosopher and lawyer Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832). Bentham’s great philosophical work, Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, was published in the revolutionary year 1789, more proof that the chaos of the era, with flags and democratic principles being waved around amid the stink of the slave trade and the sound of cannon fire, stimulated the thinking of some of world history’s most impressive thinkers. Bentham sought to find some sort of basis for an ethical philosophy and settled upon the notion that an ethical action was one that did the greatest amount of good for the greatest number. Anti-utilitarian arguments sometimes take the form of “if four people were stranded on a desert island, it would be good for the group if one person were eaten

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by the other three.” This would not be the case even if one considers the inherent problems that would come with trying to prepare and eat a human corpse on a desert island. Presumably, none of the four would want to be eaten so a general agreement that no one gets eaten might be seen as being for the greater good. If we remove the scenario from the desert island, it’s hard to find any conditions where three people deciding to eat one person would be beneficial for the group. This is true particularly if we start to consider the anxiety-inducing effects that the logic of cannibalism would have on everyone else. At some level, Utilitarian philosophy is an offshoot of Immanuel Kant’s (1724–1804) famous categorical imperative. Translations from the German vary, but Kant’s philosophy can be paraphrased in the question “If my action were made a universal rule, would it be positive for humanity?” The categorical imperative causes much moral confusion because, like the i before e except after c rule that children learn when they first encounter English spelling, it works well enough most of the time. Ethics, however, permits no universal rule because the word “universal” remains open to interpretation. For example, let’s imagine an ethical English philosopher-soldier in a World War I trench with twenty of his comrades. Half a mile across from our soldier, twenty German soldiers sit crouched down in their own trench, weapons in hand. If our English soldier decides not to fight and everyone in both trenches follows his example, this will work out well for everyone in true Kantian fashion. However, if the philosopher-soldier decides not to fight and the Germans fail to be inspired by his ethics, then his action merely leads to the destruction of the other soldiers in his own trench. If “universal” is defined by our soldier and the other British soldiers in his trench, then deciding not to fight is suicidal. If all forty soldiers involved in this scenario decide not to fight, then everyone wins (until they are courtmartialed, that is). Bentham took James Mill (1773–1836) as a protégé around the year 1808, two years after the birth of James’s son, John Stuart Mill (referred to hereafter as J. S. for clarity). Bentham and Mill both held the ambition to create a complete logical system of ethics that could displace the arbitrary medieval systems, including the legal structure, that had evolved

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in the past primarily to protect the unearned privileges and wealth of the noble elite. If philosophers were to claim that reason and logic should dictate how a society should be structured and governed, then reason and logic needed to be unassailable in its defense of a new structure. This was still an era when royals held authority and could make claims that a divinely inspired monarch proved to be a superior system to rule, and so philosophy had to confront the challenge. Bentham and Mill knew it was not enough just to intuit the superiority of freedom. Mill and Bentham decided to construct J. S. as a philosophical prodigy so that he could fulfill, if Mill and Bentham could not, this great destiny on behalf of humanity. As an adolescent, J. S. seems to have been distressed by the way his mother was treated by James, and something about the female condition in general distressed him. A young J. S. traveled through the neighborhoods of the working poor and passed out literature that explained and extolled the use of birth control. Apparently, as a teenager, he thought that the female condition could only really be improved when women had fewer children. In this, his youthful intuition proved to be correct. James Mill worked for the British East India Company. J. S. entered into his father’s profession, but the strain of holding a job while trying to hold himself up to his father’s philosophical expectations proved to be too much. J. S. suffered a breakdown. The work at the East India Company did not likely cause the disruption: J. S. worked in England at a desk. It is not clear what J. S. suffered from but if the definition of a mental illness is that the problem interferes with someone’s ability to proceed with daily life, then whatever affliction beset J. S. would qualify. J. S. would later attribute, in writing, his philosophical education for the breakdown. His intense indoctrination had isolated him from people and left him emotionally unfulfilled and unstable. After the breakdown, however, J. S. would reconstruct himself under new terms. To that end, the romantic life of J. S. is relevant to his philosophical work. At some point right after what might loosely be called his mental breakdown, J. S. met a woman named Harriet Taylor. A year younger than Mill, Taylor had been married to a Unitarian druggist since she was eighteen years old and was a mother of two children, plus being pregnant with a third, when she and J. S. met.

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Mill and Taylor entered into a particularly odd nineteenth-century affair, one in which they professed a romance of the mind. Taylor’s husband did not seem to care, and both J. S. and Harriet may have seen acts of sexuality as being depraved in men and degrading to women. The sexual mores of the nineteenth century, in an era that lacked effective means of birth control and when childbirth and the aftermath killed women in droves, are too complicated to dissect in an aside. Yet, it appears that Taylor and J. S. considered their romance to be both Platonic and ideal, and Taylor’s husband at least tolerated the situation. On Liberty, published in 1859, might be described as the book that fulfilled J. S.’s potential that had been nurtured all those years ago when he had been a lad struggling to learn his Greek. In that work, Mill completed an argument, begun by the Enlightenment philosophers, on the superiority of ethical and political systems that enhance, rather than detract from, individual freedom. In some ways, On Liberty was the philosophical end result of the Protestant Reformation since it built upon concepts of individuality while also moving beyond Christianity as a cohering force for human society. On Liberty made it to the canon and is one of the Great Books taught in any school that values the classical liberal education, but it was not the culmination of J. S.’s thought and it was not his greatest work. If it is his most influential, it is only because of the narrow-minded focus universities have in choosing works of literature that fit the prevailing narrative regarding the trajectory of Western thought. The Subjection of Women, published in 1869, should be considered the pinnacle of J. S.’s philosophical life and it should be, if not as a replacement then alongside, a member of the canon. Eventually, Harriet Taylor’s husband died, and she married J. S. in 1851, when he was in his mid-forties. She died of consumption in 1858, just a year before On Liberty was published and it’s possible that she played a role as coauthor (J. S. insisted she did), but the nature of a coauthoring relationship is never clear. In the period between Harriet’s death and the publication of The Subjection of Women, J. S. won a seat in Parliament and, in 1866, put forth a bill that would have legally granted suffrage to England’s women. In 1867, parliament voted women’s suffrage down, and in 1868, the voters punished Mill for his progressivism by voting him out of office.

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Since The Subjection of Women perfectly synthesizes democratic values with feminism and in doing so purges hypocrisy from democratic philosophy, it deserves to be analyzed in full and respected as the completion of femocracy as a philosophy. As a social movement, femocracy continues to evolve but the philosophical basis of the movement was complete with this 1869 publication. Philosophy and reality can be different things, and the conditions of women in the Western world would not significantly be altered by the words of Mill or even all that much by the eventual success of the women’s suffrage movements. As Mill and Stanton and everyone else understood, a woman could not engage in the truest expression of liberty, meaningful work, while engaging in the drudgery of childbearing and rearing. Two things would be needed for that to change, the first being cheap and effective means of birth control and the second being the opening of formal educational institutions to women. Those two narratives will feature in the coming chapters. Mill begins simply enough with this paragraph: The object of this essay is to explain as clearly as I am able, the grounds of an opinion which I have held from the very earliest period when I had formed any opinions at all on social or political matters, and which, instead of being weakened or modified, has been constantly growing stronger by the progress of reflection and the experience of life: That the principle which regulates the existing social relations between the two sexes—the legal subordination of one sex to the other—is wrong in itself, and now one of the chief hindrances to human improvement; and that it ought to be replaced by a principle of perfect equality, admitting no power or privilege on the one side, nor disability on the other. (p. 133)

The essay begins weakly, with Mill writing as if he is just expressing a personal opinion rather than a universal truth. Yet, it was an era of grand pronouncements and maybe Mill had seen enough of those. Yet, Mill still creates two plain statements: it is wrong to subject women because of the damage that creates to women and, furthermore, the subjection of women holds back progress for all of humanity. This argument almost directly mimics the nineteenth-century secular arguments against slavery. Yet, Mill still has to create an argument to answer the question of

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why equality of the sexes should be seen as philosophically and culturally superior to inequality. The aspect of the argument in Subjection that differs from previous works of political philosophy is this: Mills assumes natural rights theory to be the default position, the given, and that anyone who philosophizes in favor of a hierarchy must develop the full burden of proof. Mill writes, In all other cases, the burthen of proof is supposed to lie with the affirmative. If a person is charged with murder, it rests with those who accuse him to give proof of his guilt, not with himself to prove his innocence. If there is a difference of opinion about the reality of an alleged historical event, in which the feelings of men in general are not much interested, as the Siege of Troy for example, those who maintain that the event took place are expected to produce their proofs, before those who take the other side can be required to say anything, and at no time are these required to do more than show that the evidence produced by the others is of no value. Again, in practical matters, the burthen of proof is supposed to be with those who are against liberty; who contend for any restriction or prohibition; either any limitation of the general freedom of human action, or any disqualification or disparity of privilege affecting one person or kind of person, as compared with others. (p. 134)

In modern academic language, Mill would be stating that the null hypothesis is that people should be equal and free, and that extraordinary proof would be needed to argue for inequality and restriction. This is not to say that the “burthen of proof” could never be met—inequality exists between parents and children and restrictions can occur when the circumstances are extraordinary (for instance, in a pandemic), but the ordinary state of human society should be free and equal. At this point, Mill will turn his attention to the philosophical arguments that favored inequality between the sexes. He begins by noting that the basis for the inequality of the sexes evolved arbitrarily and had never been put in competition with a society that focused on equality. In the first place, the opinion in favour of the present system, which entirely subordinates the weaker sex to the stronger, rests upon theory only; for there never has been trial made of any other: so that experience, in the sense in which it is vulgarly opposed to theory, cannot be pretended to have pronounced any verdict. And in the second place, the adoption

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of this system of inequality never was the result of deliberation, or forethought, or any social ideas, or any notion whatever of what conduced to the benefit of humanity or the good order of society. It arose simply from the fact that from the very earliest twilight of human society, every woman (owing to the value attached to her by men, combined with her inferiority in muscular strength) was found in a state of bondage to some man. (p. 137)

How women have suffered from a little sexual dimorphism! Rousseau used that fact to justify the oppression of women and here, Mill sees it as the original cause of an unjustified oppression. Mill is a superior person and philosopher to Rousseau, however, and sees that justifying centuries of male dominance over women based upon a little extra testosterone and muscle is to leap too far from a small premise. How, asks Mill, does the fact that men contain more natural muscular strength then lead to the conclusion that all women should be subjugated to men in all times? Furthermore, Mills notes, the argument for the subjugation of women derives from the same discredited argument for the enslavement of men. He writes, In early times, the great majority of the male sex were slaves, as well as the whole of the female. And many ages elapsed, some of them ages of high cultivation, before any thinker was bold enough to question the rightfulness, and the absolute necessity, either of the one slavery or of the other. By degrees such thinkers did arise: and (the general progress of society assisting) the slavery of the male sex has, in all the countries of Christian Europe at least . . . been at length abolished. (p. 138)

Here again the concentric circles of analogies are established. If the arbitrary rule of kings was wrong and the arbitrary rule of slave-masters was wrong, then by what line of reasoning can the arbitrary rule of men over women be declared right? Mill does not live in an era (as we in the twenty-first century do) where one can merely assert such things and have them be accepted by acclamation. He must argue, and does. Some will object, that a comparison cannot fairly be made between the government of the male sex and the forms of unjust power which I have adduced in illustration of it, since these are arbitrary, and the effect of mere usurpation, while it on the contrary is natural. But was there ever

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any domination which did not appear natural to those who possessed it? (p. 144)

The analogy between governmental tyranny over subjects and between men over women is apt, says Mills. The two arguments for male dominance, then, are that women are not physically forced into their positions, and, furthermore, if women are so unhappy then why do they not rebel? This is a frequent argument that those in positions of power use to justify their abuse. Slaveholders asked the same question, as if rebellion could only come in the form of a mass uprising and as if acquiescence to commands equaled happiness. This philosophy still gets employed in the modern workplace where employees always have the freedom to quit so their failure to exercise that freedom must equal a satisfaction with the corporate structure. Mill recognizes the ruse. All causes, social and natural, combine to make it unlikely that women should be collectively rebellious to the power of men. They are so far in a position different from all the other subject classes, that their masters require something more from them than actual service. Men do not want solely the obedience of women, they want their sentiments. All men, except the most brutish, desire to have, in the woman most nearly connected with them, not a forced slave but a willing one, not a slave merely but a favourite. They have therefore put everything in practice to enslave their minds. The masters of all other slaves rely, for maintaining obedience, on fear; either fear of themselves, or religious fears. The masters of women wanted more than simple obedience, and they turned the whole force of education to effect their purpose. All women are brought up from the very earliest years in the belief that their ideal of character is the very opposite to that of men; not self-will, and government by self-control, but submission, and yielding to the control of others. (p. 148)

Although Mill almost stretches over into conspiracy theory territory here (certainly a cabal of men never sat around and planned an educational system that would oppress women), he nonetheless touches on one of the more pernicious aspects of femininity and one that, as shall be written about in a later chapter, modern women often express as being inexplicable and maddening: the desire not to offend. Obedience

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causes less disruption and, for women who are socially attuned to one another and to authority, disruption causes pain. Mill actually reaches back for an old argument, employed by Mary Astell and decried by John Knox, that women in royalty can hold and use political power. From this he states, “The social subordination of women thus stands out an isolated fact in modern social institutions; a solitary breach of what has become their fundamental law; a single relic of an old world of thought and practice” (p. 153). Mill has countered the arguments for women’s subjection skillfully and done so by drawing upon the public feeling that slavery cannot be justified. Even after the American Civil War that was a feeling probably more widespread among the British than the Americans, but the philosophy would have appealed to the progressively minded on either side of the Atlantic. Philosophers who supported the subjection of women from a philosophical rather than religious vantage could only rely on one more argument: female subjugation, by relegating women to the important work of wives and mothers, benefitted society. Of all the arguments for female subjugation this one was probably the trickiest to counter: how would a society of liberated women produce and care for a next generation? Mills writes, The general opinion of men is supposed to be, that the natural vocation of a woman is that of a wife and mother. I say, is supposed to be, because, judging from acts—from the whole of the present constitution of society—one might infer that their opinion was the direct contrary. They might be supposed to think that the alleged natural vocation of women was of all things the most repugnant to their nature; insomuch that if they are free to do anything else—if any other means of living, or occupation of their time and faculties, is open, which has any chance of appearing desirable to them—there will not be enough of them who will be willing to accept the condition said to be natural to them. If this is the real opinion of men in general, it would be well that it should be spoken out. I should like to hear somebody openly enunciating the doctrine (it is already implied in much that is written on the subject)—“It is necessary to society that women should marry and produce children. They will not do so unless they are compelled. Therefore it is necessary to compel them.” The merits of the case would then be clearly defined. It would be exactly that of the slaveholders of South Carolina and Louisiana. “It is necessary that

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cotton and sugar should be grown. White men cannot produce them. Negroes will not, for any wages which we choose to give. Ergo they must be compelled.” An illustration still closer to the point is that of impressment. Sailors must absolutely be had to defend the country. It often happens that they will not voluntarily enlist. Therefore there must be the power of forcing them. (pp. 161–62)

This section marks the most visionary, and the bravest, assertion in the book. Society might need wives and mothers, but it also needs cotton, sugar, and sailors. Just because society has a need, that does not justify using force to fulfill that need. In addition, Mill alludes to the notion that misery acted as the daily companion of the nineteenth-century wife and mother; societal expectations all but forced women into the institution of marriage, and the inevitable pregnancies that followed ruined their health and sapped their energy. A woman who wanted to engage in more meaningful work would have to marry someone wealthy and hope for a little late-in-life leisure time. That class of women, though rare, was precisely the kind who arranged the Seneca Falls Convention and wrote the Declaration of Sentiments. If one flaw afflicts all feminist literature, it is the tendency among authors to continually make the same few points repeatedly but in different language or with different examples. The Subjection of Women, even though a short book, continues on for unnecessary pages with unnecessary further proofs. Still the passage quoted above about women, motherhood, and society encapsulates the argument that will shape femocracy until the modern era. How should women feel about marriage and how should they feel about having children? The institution of marriage, without doubt, developed from patriarchal and religious origins. Marriage itself, however, can be divorced from those origins, and a modern marriage need not be connected to that restrictive history. Yet, the societal pressures upon women, particularly in certain racial and social categories, to marry can be persuasive. Pregnancy and motherhood have the effect of redefining a woman’s identity while at the same time either pulling her out of the mainstream world entirely or making her interactions with that mainstream world more complex and difficult.

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But what if a woman wants to get married and have children? Is she acting of her own free will or as a victim of societal norms she has absorbed? Is marriage a choice or a psychological burka? This must be stated now because the modern phase of the femocratic movement could not begin until cheap and effective means of birth control effectively made the decision to have children, or not, a lifestyle choice. This is why little emphasis in the coming chapter will be put on the traditional narrative of feminists-as-suffragettes and anti-liquor campaigners. KEY POINTS AND APPLICATIONS TO EDUCATION •  In what ways did the abolitionist movements create a new direction for the development of feminism? •   Coercive labor systems existed in most civilizations during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Why did the United Kingdom and the United States have abolitionist movements whereas Russia and Brazil did not? What did other paths to abolition look like and why were those not necessarily connected to a full-scale feminist movement? •  The end of slavery and the development of feminism can both be connected to the abolitionist movement; what other effects branch from abolitionism? •  John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty is generally included in the great canon of philosophical works. Why is The Subjection of Women generally not included?

6 BETWEEN THE SUFFRAGETTES AND BIRTH CONTROL

Readers expecting a history of the suffragette movement will be disap-

pointed to not find it here. In its place, however, an explanation for why that movement should be seen as less than historically significant for the march of femocracy will be given. Wollstonecraft and Mill provided philosophical purity, but by the end of the nineteenth century the rise of femocracy had been coopted by, and suffered considerable damage from, the suffragette movement. It was probably inevitable that this would occur as large-scale political movements need to declare some kind of end goal to coalesce individuals into a movement that usually has a legislative goal as its aim. The issue with these narratives comes as a part of the problem, generally, with traditional history: a few big names take over the narrative, and the dates of marches and the passing of legislation become the focus of the history rather than the daily lived experience of individuals. The suffragette movement, as a history, suffers from what might be called the progressive legal fallacy of historical evaluation. For historians, this makes the work easier as it’s possible to focus on well-document marches, conventions, and speeches. Laws get passed and recorded and this makes research structurally sound. This is common in the history of British imperialism in India, where Gandhi (1869–1948) becomes the peaceful protagonist in an 87

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anti-imperial drama that not only ends racist imperialism in India but also proves the superiority of non-violent means of protest over violent revolution. That Gandhi achieved, relatively speaking, nothing at all can be proved historically. He’d been protesting for thirty years in India without much effect, and the British only left because postwar political and economic circumstances left them diminished. And when they did leave, India’s Hindus and Muslims butchered each other into two separate states, one of the results of which can be described as the world’s most dangerous border between Pakistan and India. Then Gandhi got shot about the same time that the world saw, via the Holocaust, that non-violence sometimes just makes it easier for the psychopaths to kill you. This narrative also does something more pernicious in that it preserves a founding mythology: the American Constitution is flawed but allows for change based on the will of the people. Mass movements successfully move the Constitution to a more inclusive vision of democracy, and the history of the abolitionist and suffragette movements prove this. This congratulatory narrative allows Americans to feel, sometimes, a connection with their government and laws but historically it does not amount to much. It took a war and a compromised congressional session (with the defeated South absent) to end slavery with an amendment. Although the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 certainly added women as actors in the democratic republic of the United States, its passage cannot be said to have changed the daily experience of women to any great degree. In 1920, the fertility rate in the United States was still about 3.3 children per woman compared with 1.8 in 2019. A rate of 3.3 children per woman is comparable to the rate that women have children in what the World Bank calls the Arab World where Islamic clerics largely forbid birth control and opportunities for women remain limited. The English parliament granted suffrage to women in 1928, but France did not follow until 1944, partly because French feminism focused more on the impact of birth control on society and because even after the revolution, the Catholic Church still held considerable power over France’s culture. Again, femocracy is not about women participating in government; it is about how the logic behind democratic ideals created and propelled

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feminism. The mistake would be to equate women’s suffrage with equality in society. Just because women suddenly developed voting rights as citizens does not mean that attitudes about work, education, marriage, and child-rearing changed. Nor does it mean that new attitudes about cooperation, aggression, and sexual consent developed. In fact, it could be argued that an excessive concern over the right to vote sucked energy away from more meaningful aspects of change and also promoted the pat-on-the-back notion that the system worked and the matter could be considered closed. In other words, the success of the suffragette movement cannot be considered a victory for femocracy because it is historically unclear how the right to vote improved the material conditions of women or changed societal visions of the status and place of women. Too much focus on the suffragette movement also has the effect of turning feminism into a sidebar to history. History Year by Year (2013) includes this insert: The right for women to be given the vote was advocated by political campaigners around the world. New Zealand was the first country to give women the vote in 1893, the Australian in 1902, Finland in 1906, and Norway in 1913. The Suffragette Movement in Britain heated up during the early twentieth century with women given the vote in 1918. The United States followed in 1920. (p. 241)

Under that, the reader is treated to a black-and-white photograph of a British woman held by three male bobbies as she squats herself into dead weight and clutches a lamp pole while screaming. The men all look calm and the photo feeds into the analogy of a toddler throwing a fit. The caption next to the photograph reads, “Raising Awareness: Women did everything they could to capture the public’s attention and the campaigners in Britain were particularly violent. They took part in acts of civil disobedience, smashing windows and chaining themselves to railings in the streets” (p. 241). This is not to shame the book. This is the mainstream, historical way of depicting the suffragettes, but much is revealed about this kind of narrative treatment. “New Zealand was the first country to give women the vote” mimics language often seen in the history of slavery where the United States “gave” or “granted” freedom, as if this amounted to

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some paternalistic act of charity rather than the correction of an immense injustice. The depiction of suffragettes as dour or hysterical persists in the stereotype of feminists—as if the desire for equality in a society that, maddeningly, not only promoted mediocre men but kept out extraordinary women was not responsible for provoking sometimes explosive acts of frustration. The narrative is one of women complaining and agitating until they finally exasperated the men in government. The passage of voting rights amendments and laws is often seen as a triumph, as if the ability to vote in elections with gerrymandered districts and a bizarre, vote-suppressing, electoral college system meant any more to women than it ever has to men. For the purposes of the history of femocracy, the evolution of the female portrayal of women in literature might be more important than the suffragette movement. In the nineteenth century, it was still the case that the most direct means by which a woman could exert her influence was to do so, as Wollstonecraft had in the previous century, through writing, and the most impressive female authors of the era developed from the same abolitionist foundations as the suffragettes had. Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896) wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) as an expression of her abolitionist views. Stowe had been educated at a seminary school for women where her sister happened to be the headmaster. Educated in classical liberalism, Stowe crafted a truly feminist response to slavery; her book drew upon the emotions of the reader and tried to draw out empathy for the plight of the slave. Consider this passage: It is one of the bitterest apportionments of a lot of slavery, that the negro, sympathetic and assimilative, after acquiring, in a refined family, the tastes and feelings which form the atmosphere of such a place, is not the less liable to become the bond-slave of the coarsest and most brutal,—just as a chair or table, which once decorated the superb saloon, comes, at last, battered and defaced, to the bar-room of some filthy tavern, or some low haunt of vulgar debauchery. The great difference is, that the table and chair cannot feel, and the man can; for even a legal enactment that he shall be. (p. 169)

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Like every other piece of literature from the nineteenth century, this passage suffers from overwriting, but how could a female reader, particularly in the upper class, of the time not have recognized that the analogy of furniture would have likely applied to her status as well? In addition, notice that Stowe creates a visual regarding the “tavern” or “low haunt of vulgar debauchery.” These were spaces of male power where women existed as prostitutes or barmaids. The male slave and the free female saw some common cause in their conditions. Louisa May Alcott (1832–1888) penned what may be the most truly feminine piece of classical literature in the English language. Alcott could not have had a better preparation to be a writer; her mother and father lived in the center of the nineteenth-century American Renaissance in Concord, Massachusetts, and practiced (if that verb will suffice) transcendentalism. Emerson, Hawthorn, Longfellow, and Thoreau frequented the Alcott home. One can only imagine the kinds of conversations that a young Alcott absorbed in her youth. Louisa May was the second-born of four Alcott girls. Life within the sisterhood, with progressive parents, inspired her to write Little Women. If the critic considers timelessness to be a criterion for making a work a genuine classic, then Little Women must be judged as superior to Uncle Tom’s Cabin as Little Women captures a feminine world, with female relationships, where four girls discover themselves through self-improvement efforts while their beloved father fights in the Civil War. Although Alcott spent her early life involved in the abolitionist movement, Little Women is not time-stamped by the politics of the era. Instead, we see four girls developing their own interests largely outside male expectations. The father’s absence and then return at the end of the novel turns the key male character into someone who recognizes the positive changes that his daughters made for themselves in his absence; he does not control their destinies in any way. The book begins with the girls, the oldest being just sixteen, expressing their snippets of frustration, for example, when the character Beth says, “It’s naughty to fret, but I do think washing dishes and keeping things tidy is the worst work in the world. It makes me cross, and my hands get so stiff, I can’t practice well at all.” And Beth looked at her rough hands with a sigh that any one could hear that time. (p. 4)

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Note that Beth is not upset that work has made her hands unattractive to boys, but that it has kept her from practicing her musical instrument. Her frustration is that mundane work won’t allow her to practice her special talents. Collectively, they read a letter from their absent father and then deal with their sadness and frustration in this way: Old Hannah cleared the table, then out came the four little work baskets, and the needles flew as the girls made sheets for Aunt March. It was uninteresting sewing, but tonight no one grumbled. They adopted Jo’s plan of dividing the long seam into four parts, and calling the quarters Europe, Asia, Africa, and America, and in that way got on capitally, especially when they talked about the different countries as they stitched their way through them. (p. 10)

This single passage describes what feminism could have been and what it still may be. Here we see a sisterhood, in both the sense of genetic connection and personal affection, expressing their emotions, frustrations, and fears about the future and then working through those feelings through collective work. The work might have been uninteresting but this was corrected by making the work intellectually stimulating through a geographic lesson that engaged all of the girls. Western civilization will become a full femocracy when men learn to adopt such practices, not when women adopt masculine characteristics. Little Women just about achieves perfection as an expression of feminism; boys are not the central focus of the girls’ lives—self-improvement is. The typical tragedies of mid-nineteenth century life (broken romances, sickness, frustrations with simplistic work, etc.) all feature in the lives of the girls, but they keep their core relationships with their sisters largely intact. The other great American classic of the mid-nineteenth century, Moby Dick, was published seventeen years before Little Women in 1851. Herman Melville (1819–1891) grew up in New York and struggled more than Alcott to make a living and a reputation as a writer. Moby Dick received little attention when it was published, and in fact, Melville’s book really did not receive public recognition or critical acclaim until the centennial celebration of his birth in 1919.

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By that time, American scholars had become interested in the nineteenth century American Renaissance, and Moby Dick seemed to fit the concept of a new American literary canon. Moby Dick is one of those works really only appreciated as nostalgia in the sense that it possessed a limited readership when originally published but became popular later as whaling began to die out as an enterprise in New England. What is Moby Dick about? Captain Ahab might be the most masculine figure in English literature since Achilles. By taking Ahab’s leg, Moby Dick took some of Ahab’s public reputation. Ahab’s missing leg is to Moby Dick what the slave girl Briseis was to The Iliad. When King Agamemnon took Briseis from Achilles, he also took a piece of that great warrior’s reputation. Achilles had to have his revenge on Agamemnon so he pouted in his tent and let the siege of Troy linger on, but that was passive-aggressive action. Ahab could directly hunt the whale that injured him. Ahab wants revenge, dominance, and destruction. He hunts Moby Dick so that he can restore his reputation to his subordinates and his sense of himself as the great captain of the seas. As was the case with Achilles, these masculine impulses lead eventually to self-destruction. Ahab dominates the novel as he does the whaling ship, a man at the top of a hierarchy, uninterested in cooperation, unable to forgive a slight, and indifferent to the emotions or needs of his underlings; his obsession with a whale drives him. Is that the message of the book? Is Moby Dick about the destructive nature of masculinity in the same degree that Little Women is a celebration of femininity? It can definitely be read that way. Ishmael, the main character, early on finds himself sharing a bed (a common practice) with Queequeg, a cannibal harpooner from the Pacific islands when both stay at an inn. Chapter 4 begins with “Upon waking next morning about daylight, I found Queequeg’s arm thrown over me in the most loving and affectionate manner. You had almost thought I had been his wife” (p. 28). Later, when Queequeg invites Ishmael to worship a pagan idol of the islands, Ishmael joins in despite Christian misgivings. He justifies his actions with these words: I was a good Christian; born and bred in the bosom of the infallible Presbyterian Church. How then could I unite with this wild idolator in

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worshipping his piece of wood? But what is worship?—to do my fellow man what I would have my fellow man do to me—that is the will of God. Now, Queequeg is my fellow man. And what do I wish that this Queequeg would do to me? Why, united with me in my particularly Presbyterian form of worship. Consequently, I must then unite with him in his; ergo, I must turn idolator. (p. 57)

By focusing on friendship and the feelings of others, the narrator of Moby Dick often functions in a feminine role, despite being male. The central theme of the novel seems to be the destructive nature of masculinity; the narrator must watch as Ahab destroys the lives around him in pursuit of a whale he intends to forcibly pierce to death. Perhaps the narrator should have told us to call him “female.” His experience is more feminine than masculine, and when Moby Dick is coupled with Little Women, the mid-nineteenth-century American literary movement would seem to be shaping a new kind of feminine virtue. However, this quieter literary movement of Stowe, Alcott, and Melville is not generally seen as important for the restructuring of society toward the feminine. Feminist historians focus on the suffragettes as a first-wave feminism, one designed to achieve political participation. But the quieter literary movement, particularly the values in Little Women, should be seen as the force connecting the concept of femocracy to Wollstonecraft and Mill. The later nineteenth century did see the advent of a new kind of woman: adventurous, masculine, and actively political in some cases. Two examples of publicly adventurous women would be Gertrude Bell (1868–1926) and Amelia Earhart (1897–1937). They are notable because they are two women who were famous for accomplishments outside the realm of the feminist movement and should be noted here because their lives showcase the kinds of decisions that women who wanted to engage intellectually with something outside the feminist movement had to make. Bell was born into an English family that had grown wealthy with profits from industrialization. Like Alcott, Bell benefited from the family connection in an intellectual way. As a girl, she met Charles Darwin, Charles Dickens, and Robert Louis Stevenson. When she reached the right age, Bell went to Oxford University. Official admission of women at Oxford would not begin until 1920, but

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women had benefited from unofficial Oxford education since the 1870s. Bell gained a first (“top of her class” in American parlance) in modern history when she was just twenty. Uninterested in the traditional roles for women, she felt drawn to the Middle East where she acted as an archaeologist and writer. Bell focused her attention and intelligence on what is now Iraq and was largely responsible for creating Iraq’s borders. She became known as the “Queen of the Desert” and used her considerable skills as a writer to detail her experiences in the Arab world. Then when the World War I broke out, she became a respected advisor to the British government and military. A picture exists of her sitting on camelback, right in between Winston Churchill and T. E. Lawrence. She is dressed in feminine attire, but with her weathered face and fur collar, she looks almost like a nomadic traveler from another century. The most interesting thing about the letters and journals that Bell wrote is that she rarely writes anything about the specific experiences or challenges that she faced as a woman. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries cannot be described, as the current era in the West can, as an age of candor. Bell never tells the reader about how she managed her period or how she relieved herself while living solely among men during travels through harsh territory. She seemed to view Arabia mostly as romantic and exotic rather than as backward, poor, and repressive. Almost nothing in her writing would indicate her gender. Consider this journal entry, recorded in A Woman in Arabia: Basra, March 9, 1916 To-day I lunched with all the Generals . . . and as an immediate result they moved me and my maps and books on to a splendid great verandah with a cool room behind it where I sit and work all day long. My companion here is Captain Campbell Thompson, ex-archaeologist . . . delighted to benefit with me by the change of workshop, for we were lodged by day in Col. Beach’s bedroom . . . a plan which was not very convenient for either us or for him. (p. 138)

The mention that she “lunched with all the Generals” comes across as causally as the note of her working during the day with a man in another man’s bedroom. Nothing from this entry indicates anything about Bell’s gender, and that is the norm for her writing. The absurdity of her

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situation is highlighted later when she writes about what an Iraqi Republic might look like. October 3, 1920 If you’re going to have anything like really representative institutions you would have a majority of Shi’ahs. For that reason you can never have three completely autonomous provinces. Sunni Mosul must be retained as part of the Mesopotamian state in order to adjust the balance. To my mind it’s one of the main arguments for giving Mesopotamia responsible government. We as outsiders can’t differentiate between Sunni and Shi’ah; but leave it to them and they’ll get over the difficulty . . . just as the Turks did, and for the present it’s the only way of getting over it. The final authority must be in the hands of the Sunnis, in spite of their numerical inferiority; otherwise you will have a mujtahid-run state, which is the very devil. (pp. 209–10)

At the time she wrote this, Bell could not vote in her own country! This nearly total absence of feminist consciousness must reveal something about her circumstances. Did she simply disengage her overseas activities and her mental state entirely from her gender? For her to dine with generals and get her photograph with Churchill and Lawrence, was it necessary that she leave aside any issues at all involving female equality? How could she write about the Sunni–Shia divide and its potential effect on Arabian politics but not make reference to the repression of women? Was she afraid of being associated with the suffragettes because that would have labeled her a difficult woman and therefore limited her access to power, or did she have to make a choice as to where her intellectual energies should be spent and chose to do so by exerting influence over the Middle East rather than in the first-wave feminist movements occurring in her home country? Ever since Wollstonecraft, and even before her, those who proclaimed a need for female equality had pointed to education as the leveling factor, but the example of Bell shows that education by itself only thrust a woman into a world where she had to make painful psychological choices: should she recognize the plight of women or try her best to act as a man and put those thoughts aside as a sacrifice to engaging in productive work?

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Perhaps another choice that Bell had to make to stay productive in work, and one she considered meaningful, was the decision to not marry and to remain childless. Heterosexual, Bell seems to have preferred affairs with married men. This too might have been a means of protecting her individuality. Becoming a subordinate bride clearly could not have appealed to her, and one can imagine that Bell would have been uninterested in spending her time caring for children when she could be restructuring the borders of Iraq. Gertrude Bell, for whatever personal reasons, rejected, entirely, the traditional role of women as it existed in the transition between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but in doing so she had to also reject the feminist movement as it existed then. This is not to judge Bell but only to point out that inequality forced women into these types of decisions. To preserve her independence, Bell engaged in risky affairs with married men. A psychological analysis of Bell should not be seriously attempted here, but it might have been a fear of marriage that led her to seek out married men for her romances, even if she did seem interested in lifelong commitment after those relationships progressed. An affair kept her in control and allowed her to determine when and where she would romantically engage with a man, and it certainly prevented tedium. Women are more equal when “cheating” than when married. After Bell, the most famous woman to take on an adventurous role was Amelia Earhart. A Kansan, Earhart grew up in a no-nonsense home with a mother who dressed Amelia and her sister in pants rather than dresses, something that caused a slight scandal in Earhart’s upper-class family. By this time girls could attend public school in the United States, and Earhart received a traditional public education but developed life experience when she worked as a nurse during the brutal 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic. At some point in her youth, Earhart developed an interest in aviation and, by 1922, was one of less than twenty American women with a pilot’s license. She flew well enough to be invited to become the first woman to fly across the Atlantic Ocean in 1928, one year after Lindbergh. Unfortunately, her role was as a passenger only, and she seemed to understand that the ride across the Atlantic basically functioned as a publicity stunt; however, this did not seem to distract from the way in which her

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colleagues in flight viewed Earhart, and she was soon considered for a solo flight across the Atlantic. Unlike Bell, Earhart did marry. She had been engaged once, but at some point entered into a romance with her promoter, George Putnam, who already had a wife when the two met. In 1930, after Earhart had disencumbered herself of her fiancé and Putnam had divorced his wife, the two married. Earhart, however, refused to take the last name of Putnam and demanded that she continue with her own career. Perhaps the realization that she could continue on as her own woman if she married her promoter was something that attracted Earhart to him. Whatever the case, she remained independent-minded and, with her close-cut hair, tanned face, and flying-ace outfits, she clearly wanted to be taken seriously for her profession. Earhart did cross the Atlantic on a solo flight in 1932 and continued flying even as she worked as a professor at Purdue University, a renowned engineering and aviation school in West Lafayette, Indiana. Of course, she planned to fly solo around the world but vanished in 1939 while flying in the Pacific Ocean, and the circumstances of her death created a mystery that ensured that her name would endure. Like Bell, Earhart never experienced pregnancy although she did experience some of the responsibilities of childcare as a stepmother to Putnam’s two children. Earhart was not outwardly feminist and may have regarded her refusal to take Putnam’s name as a way to guard her celebrity. Yet, she and Bell both excelled in generally male professions, and as a result they advanced a specific type of girls-can-do-anythingboys-can narrative; however, a femocracy depends upon the influence working the other way, with men adjusting to societal circumstances created by women. Outside of nursing or education, few professions with feminine norms could have existed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Book writing, however, remained one place where a woman could exercise complete narrative control. Evadne Price (1888–1985) lived in both Australia and Britain. She may have been prone to mythologizing her life so the specifics of her young adulthood are not exactly known other than she was married twice, once to a British soldier who died in Africa in 1924.

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At some point in the late 1920s, she read Erich Maria Remarque’s war novel All Quiet on the Western Front and decided to write an answer book that told the narrative of the war from the perspective of female ambulance drivers. In 1930, the book came out as Not So Quiet— under the pseudonym “Helen Zenna Smith.” Remarque’s novel might be considered the finest in the genre of war literature. It not only depicted the ghastly trials that soldiers experienced in the trenches but made a clear enough anti-war statement that Hitler and his thugs banned and then burned the novel. But it was incomplete, and early in her novel, Smith writes of the female experience through the perspective of her main character, Nellie. We are always hungry in varying degrees—hungry, starving, or ravenous. The canteen food is vile at its best, at its worst it defies description— except from Tosh. We have existed mostly on our own Bovril, biscuits, and slab chocolate since arriving in France, and when all is said and done it is a colourless, discouraging diet for young women of twenty-three—which our six ages average—who are doing men’s work. Tosh is the only one who can systematically eat the canteen tack without vomiting or coming out in food boils; but she has a stomach as strong as a horse’s. Also, she has been out longer than the rest of us and is more hardened. At first her inside used to revolt as our still does, but she thinks that in another month or so she could eat what the food resembles without turning a hair. (p. 10)

This passage functions as an interesting reminder, while nodding to readers of Remarque, that women felt the emptiness of hunger in their stomachs as much as the men did. The brilliance of the novel comes from the way in which Smith begins the book by connecting the female experience of the war to that of the male experience by lamenting the food like a man would but then gradually begins to describe the war experience from a woman’s perspective. Later in the book, the main character reacts to some war propaganda. When I read the rubbish praising the indomitable pluck and high spirits of “our wonderful war girls” I want to throw things at the writers. Our wonderful war girls—how bored we are with hearing it! We are not wonderful; there is nothing wonderful in doing what you’ve got to, because

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you’ve let yourself in for it. It’s like having a baby—you’re trapped once you’ve started. (pp. 134–35)

At first, the analogy of war to having a baby seems banal but consider how apt it is. A pregnancy happens to a woman and the circumstances of fetal growth occur in gradual increments until eventually the woman suffers extreme pain, only to find life entirely transformed afterward. Military brass, all the generals and colonels and assorted tough guys, would never use the pregnancy analogy because it makes everyone involved seem passive. Women who give birth must lie on their backs, feet in the air, in a less-than-masculine position. Pregnant women endure, rather than act, just like soldiers. Nellie and her fellow ambulance drivers create a culture of youth, and their problems are more with bitter women than with men. They name their commandant “Mrs. Bitch,” and when Nellie quits the war and becomes a pacifist, her mother and aunt turn on her like harpies. This lengthy passage describes a coming out moment, more familiar in the past, that gives a vivid image of how hard it was for young women, who resisted a failed societal construct, to confront older women who had absorbed that status into their self-conceptions. “We were so proud, Daddy and I, of our two war girls. Every night we used to put your photographs on the dining-table and tears would come to our eyes . . . ” “Yes, while Trix and I were doing the dirty work you wept comfortably over your comfortable dinner table.” . . . No, I will not say it aloud. “I don’t believe in war. I think it’s vile and wrong, mother. It’s a chemists’ war. There’s nothing decent in it. Men are being killed by men, miles away, they’ve never seen . . . ” “Wrong? How can it be wrong? The freedom of the world was threatened . . . ” What the use? The clap-trap of the recruiting platform . . . “I am not arguing, mother. I just don’t believe in war.” She sneers. “You’ll be saying next you’re a conscientious objector.” (She could not be more contemptuous if she had suggested ‘street-walker.’) “I am if they are against the war.” She throws up her hands in horror. “To think that I, your mother, should have to stand here and listen to such dreadful things—almost blas-

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phemous things in the face of the splendid deeds our soldiers are doing in France. A pacifist indeed—an excuse for cowardice.” “I am a coward, mother.” I lean forward and catch her hand to try to make her understand. “Mother, you don’t know what it’s like out there driving those ambulances full of torn men—torn to bits with shrapnel— sometimes they die on the way . . . ” She pulls herself away. “At least they have died doing their duty,” she says. She goes out weeping. Aunt Helen is the first to attack me. She refuses to credit anything so utterly absurd as the tale Mother has told her. Mother is rather like a mother in a Lyceum melodrama when her emotions are stirred, says Aunt Helen jovially . . . It takes the best part of an hour to convince Aunt Helen there will be no resumption of war service. Then she hurls her last bomb! “Unless you return to France I alter my will to-morrow.” (pp. 185–86)

So much makes itself apparent in this scene. Nellie is a young woman disillusioned with authority figures; the older women want to shove her head back down into a position of compliance. The mother twists on Nellie with emotional manipulation and the aunt by threatening to socially and financially expel Nellie. Nellie’s relationship with older women in her life is entirely based upon control; she receives affection and support contingent upon her staying in her place and doing what her parents and her country want her to do. To rebel against that means to isolate herself from family. How many women faced this choice? Women could either conform or isolate, and without education, a means of making a living, or birth control, that isolation meant giving up any kind of intimate relationship with a man and having no support from her family. Those who did stay and conform absorbed the bitterness into their bones and forced the next generation of women into the same choice. This is probably the general plight of women across the world in most civilizations at most times, and for that situation to shift, women need access to education and they need access to cheap and effective means of birth control. A few decades into the twentieth century, at a time when women were controlling the narrative about their experiences in World War I and in society, access to higher level education began to open up to

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women. This would be followed a few decades later by the development of the birth control pill, and these two factors facilitated the shift that led to the development of proto-femocracy. KEY POINTS AND APPLICATIONS TO EDUCATION •  What is a problem with the traditional suffragette narrative of feminist history? •  Literature facilitated the feminism in many ways; how did both Alcott and Melville shape feminism in their novels? •  How did World War I alter the experience of women in Western civilization and how did that experience get worked into the literature of the era?

7 HIGHER EDUCATION AND THE PILL

Up until the end of the nineteenth century, the only profession where women could exert creative control and make money as an individual was through writing. This sometimes came in the form of Gothic romances or in feminist manifestoes. Harriet Martineau (1802–1876) is an example of a woman who made a contribution to the educational field with her writing. Martineau’s life was somewhat typical of other female writers of the era. Raised Unitarian, autodidactic, and obsessed with philosophy, she was also involved in the abolitionist movement. Martineau made a living from her writing and is now considered one of the founders of the field of sociology. She is mentioned here only because her example shows that women in the nineteenth century, under the right circumstances, could be highly educated and make intellectual contributions; however, those contributions would be limited to fields like philosophy, sociology and literature—all endeavors well-suited to individual study and initiative. Outside the early natural-philosopher era of the scientific revolution, the fields of mathematics, science, medicine, and engineering were usually studied in a more formal academic environment, one that remained closed to women. Prior to the eighteenth century, most universities relied on a medieval system of education that the Catholic Church had established well before the era of the printing press. Education without cheap and 103

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accessible books often took the form of rhetoric and discussion, and the Church educational system progressed the student up a hierarchy of learning until the student earned a magister’s degree and eventually, after studying the “queen” of subjects, theology, the student could earn the honorific of “doctor” which is Latin for “teacher.” In 1620, Francis Bacon expressed a new vision for education in his Novum Organum. Bacon wanted scholars to create new knowledge through experimentation and then compile that knowledge in what would now be called a database so that it could be built upon. University personnel, trained to study the classics, would not make that adjustment for about another 150 years. In the eighteenth century, German Universities, led by Göttingen, created the modern PhD system where a doctoral candidate must produce new knowledge to receive a degree. Soon thereafter, the French adopted this system in their system of medical education, and this became the new model of education in the West. Germany, in particular, led the world in scientific achievement for over a century and a half. While this book has established that it certainly was possible, even if rare, for women to be self-educated and to make intellectual contributions, industrialization and a new model for higher education meant that complex jobs in the sciences would increasingly require university degrees and specific licenses. This process increased into the twentieth century until by mid-century a university degree and some kind of formal licensure would have been required to enter just about every profession. Although some institutions did admit women in the eighteenth century, it was not always for degree programs and much of the education was religious in nature. Formal institutions dedicated only to women’s education did not really form until the early nineteenth century, and about ten major colleges offered co-education. The elite institutions of education, the Ivy League, remained all-male in the nineteenth century, but between 1837 and 1889, colleges known as the Seven Sisters opened as all-female institutions where women could receive a liberal-arts education similar to what was offered at Yale, Princeton, and Harvard. The Seven Sisters colleges, all located in Massachusetts, New York, and Pennsylvania, not only provided education to women but also an environment of female companionship away from the expectations of men. Interestingly, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, dedicated to

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science and engineering, opened to women in 1882. Still the male colleges and universities opened first, and the institutions with the most impressive reputations remained Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. Harvard admitted women in 1920 but Princeton and Yale did not open to females until 1969. Now let’s consider 1969 the foundational year for women and the universities if only for the arbitrary distinction that two of the three most well-known of the Ivy League schools opened up to women in that year. The year 1969, being the year of the summer of love and the year of the first moon landing, holds a glorious place in modern American studies, but nothing created a long-term historical effect like women in the Ivy League. A 2017 Atlantic article titled “Why Men Are the New Minority in College” asserted that in the 1970s men in American universities made up about 58 percent of college students, but by 2017 women made up about 56 percent with their numbers trending upward. Also in 2017, women earned more doctoral degrees than men and outnumbered men by 27 percent in graduate schools. If we consider for a moment the significance of this, that women in American colleges and universities are both going into institutes of higher education and going further into institutes of higher education than men, this would seem to be a much more significant consequence stemming from 1969 than the moon landing was. Access to new levels of education, at a time when family planning had become not only acceptable but normalized, opened a new era for femocracy. In her book Yale Needs Women (2019), Anne Gardiner Perkins writes of the way in which women were viewed. A girlfriend was “the most prized piece of chattel in the college man’s estate,” explained one Yale student, but not just any girl would do. She had to come from one of the colleges thought suitable for future Yale wives, and she had to be pretty. If a guy brought a good-looking girl with him into one of Yale’s dining halls, his classmates would show their approval by banging their spoons against their water glasses. Guys who arrived with a date though unattractive would get ribbed about it later. And so the Yale men chose carefully. (p. 3)

From this we see how women who entered an elite male institution also entered a space created around an immature set of male norms. A girl walking into the dining hall, judged outlandishly and loudly entirely

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by her appearance, served only to enhance or detract from the reputation of her male escort. As college campuses increasingly filled up with young women, these norms would shift. The desire for tuition money had driven many of the state schools in the United States to admit women, but for the Ivy Leagues, the supplyand-demand ratio remained in their favor so women could be excluded and the all-male campus became just another signal regarding status. Perkins writes, Even after the wave of coeducation that followed the Civil War, upping the proportion of coed campuses went from 25 percent before the war to 60 percent by 1890, the vast majority of top-tier colleges and universities in the United States stayed all male. Coeducation was solely a symptom of financial weakness, opined Harvard president Charles Eliot in 1873. The colleges that could afford to turn down women’s tuitions—America’s oldest and most prestigious—would continue to do so. Nearly a century later, President Eliot’s prediction held true, and in 1968 the list of U.S. colleges that still banned women undergraduates reads like an academic who’s who: Amherst, Boston College, Bowdoin, Brown, Carnegie Mellon, Claremont McKenna, Colgate, Columbia, Dartmouth, Davidson, Duke, Fordham, Georgetown, Hamilton, Harvard, Haverford, Holy Cross, John Hopkins, Kenyon, Lafayette, Lehigh, Notre Dame, Penn, Princeton, Rutgers, Sewanee, Trinity, Tufts, Tulane, Union, Trinity, Tufts, Tulane, Union, UVA, Washington and Lee, Wesleyan, West Point and other military academies, Williams, and—of course—Yale. (p. 8)

The elite institutions used all-male student bodies as a signal of status: the families with real money sent their sons to the elite institutions. Perkins makes it rather clear in her book that the pressure to open up Yale came from men who wanted access to dating material. As great as the minds on the Yale University faculty supposedly were, none actually seemed to understand that proactive measures needed to be taken to make the teenaged girls flowing onto the campus safe. Co-eds had no protection against predatory men. Female entry into the Ivy League was considered to be either 1) a direct means to tuition money or 2) a concession to the male students who demanded access to young women. The evolution of campus policies regarding sexual assault can be seen as a gauge of the evolution of femocracy. Female

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access to higher education not only served to directly educate women, it provided a place where new norms regarding consent and sexuality could be incubated. Before continuing with this argument, a few points of context should be added. In the twenty-first century, since the advent of online social networking and the interconnection of the little super computers called cell phones, romantic intermingling increasingly has moved online. Sociologists and historians cannot really assess the full impact of this change, but the alterations it creates in human romantic behavior and in societal attitudes might be profound. In the 1970s, young men and women released from relatively restrictive environments, unsure of their ability to interact with the opposite sex and trying to navigate peer pressure and societal expectations, caused plenty of opportunities for misunderstanding and assault. Add a sudden influx of freedom and a bunch of alcohol, and problems involving consent and sex would seem to have been inevitable. The creation of a vocabulary around these issues had to be the first step. As Perkins points out, when a young female student found herself assaulted by a male administrator, she did not report it because it was not clear what she would have reported. In the public mind and in legal vocabulary, rape consisted of an anonymous attacker forcibly penetrating a woman. No legal vocabulary existed, at all, for the male rape of another male until the 1970s. In 1969, unless a woman could prove that sexual activity had been physically forced on her, she would not have been able to file a rape charge. For a male victim, that burden of proof might not even have been enough because the law did not recognize men as victims in this sense. What should it be called when a man in a position of authority puts forth, in words or gestures, the notion of his readiness to engage in sexual behavior with a young woman? What should it be called when a clean-cut male student takes a girl out for a date and then uses physical force on the girl to coerce her into unwanted sexual activity? For the purposes of femocracy, the actual legal and philosophical questions here are less important than the fact that women raised the questions and in so doing, they began to claim the university as a space that would operate under feminine, rather than masculine, norms.

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In the 2020s, women can go online in search of romantic partners and safely determine whom they would like to engage romantically with and when. A man who is romantically interested in a woman would not, as was the case in the past, actually have to ask her out, drop a pick-up line, or “make a move.” An interested girl who meets a man in person can signal her intentions by exchanging social media information, thus moving that portion of the relationship to a safer space online. Technology has made the courting behavior of the past seem not just obsolete but creepy and potentially illegal, which may be one of the reasons for generational differences in attitudes. From 1792 until the mid-twentieth century, the primary focus of public feminism had been the entry of women into the institutes of higher education and into democratic public life. By the 1950s, women were starting to use the very educational tools they developed at the university for the purpose of reshaping the way that women interacted with society. Up until the middle of the twentieth century, issues of sexual harassment and assault could not be found to any great degree in the major works of feminist literature. That changed in 1957. Kimberly Goodwin writes in “Origins and Evolution of Campus Sexual Assault Prevention and Policies” (2020), Rape is by no means a new phenomenon—the references to it in ancient myths, legends, and writings are numerous—but our current understand of rape as a phenomenon is relatively new. Kirkpatrick and Kanin published the first known study of acquaintance rape in 1957 (as cited in Bohmer and Parrot, 1993), referring to the assault survivors as “offended girls.” However, sexual assault as an issue received little attention until the advent of radical feminism, which reached the height of its influence between 1967 and 1975 (Echols, 1989). During this time, feminists worked in small, grass-roots organizing units called consciousness-raising groups. There, for the first time, many women were able to talk about their experiences and to learn that rape was all too common. As a result, some of those women began the rape crisis movement, with the goal of eradicating sexual assault. (p. 1)

A single study published in 1957 had the effect of academically expanding the definition of rape beyond the traditional conception of it. It’s not clear how many of the women who met on college campuses

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were aware of this academic process, but as the feminist groups gathered, an individual experience became a collective one, and the spread of education among this class made it more likely that women would eventually develop a common experience. The synthesis of those experiences would develop into a new kind of movement, and as women began to proclaim sovereignty over their bodies, they also began to claim the university as a space created for female norms. And as women left the universities and moved into the workplace, they brought with them the expectation that campus norms be respected also at work. In 1976, Susan Brownmiller published Against Our Will. Brownmiller was not a scholar; she dropped out of Cornell after two years and spent her youth as an actress and feminist activist. Her interest in rape came about from her experiences in listening to women in feminist circles (she specifically has written that she is not a victim of the criminal act herself). Brownmiller synthesized those individual experiences into a collective culture and stated that the fear of rape kept women in a state of fear and inferiority. Against Our Will lacks the kind of genuine sociological research that would have strengthened her case, and Brownmiller makes nowdiscredited statements about rape and its state in nature (rape has no meaning without a specific definition of consent, which cannot really exist among animals other than humans in a civilization). Also, Against Our Will, as many critics have pointed out, makes some controversial statements about rape and race. Yet, a book can both be flawed in its methodology and important historically. The reception to Brownmiller was effectively to allow a generation of young and educated women to become aware that their fears and values were largely shaped by a maledominated society. Even casual readers of the book would not have to turn very many pages to read this: Man’s discovery that his genitalia could serve as a weapon to generate fear must rank as one of the most important discoveries of prehistoric times, along with the use of fire and the first crude stone axe. From prehistoric times to the present, I believe, rape has played a critical function. It is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear. (p. 2)

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Clearly Brownmiller can write with fire, but her grand proclamations are derived too much from the uncomplicated proletariat-versusbourgeoisie type of philosophy propounded by Marxists. The feminist movement could never be successful with a man-versus-woman philosophy. In this regard, Brownmiller wrote in a similar vein to Malcolm X (1925–1965) who taught simply that whites were devils and that blacks should segregate from them, violently if necessary. Again, the rhetoric appeals at a certain emotional level but the logistics complicate things, and the lived experiences of human beings create too many counter-examples for the philosophy to hold up on a broad level. Yet, both Brownmiller and Malcolm X created broad effects precisely because thoughtful readers could accept part of their theories without accepting the entirety of the argument. In other words, Brownmiller’s readers could certainly accept that a male-dominated culture failed to take rape for the serious crime that it was. Quite a lot needed to change regarding women’s place in the workplace. To use just one example, a scene from 1979 movie Kramer vs. Kramer, which won multiple Academy Awards including Best Picture. The movie, about feminism and divorce, features a scene where Dustin Hoffman’s character, Ted Kramer, desperate for a job so he can keep custody of his son, talks his way into a position at an advertising firm despite the fact that it’s the last day of work before the Christmas holiday. Ted is so excited by his victory that as he exits the office through a discoswinging office Christmas party, he grabs a blonde woman by the neck and smooches her full on the lips then says “Merry Christmas” and walks out. Her reaction is barely recorded, but she does not seem displeased. In just the year 1984, two successful (even iconic) comedies featured scenes involving acquaintance rape. In Sixteen Candles a nerdy boy has sexual relations of some kind with an older “it” girl while she is in a state of blackout drunkenness. In Revenge of the Nerds, the main character, a nerd named Lewis, “tricks” the girlfriend, named Betty, of the main jock character, named Stan. Because Lewis is dressed in a Darth Vader costume, Betty believes that Stan wants to be kinky and Lewis takes advantage of the fact. Both the scene in Sixteen Candles and the scene in Revenge of the Nerds come across as sex-romp comedy, and in both cases the women seemed pleased afterward with the sex; Betty even leaves Stan for Lewis and claims to be in love.

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Popular culture in the 1970s and 1980s mattered especially because in the absence of direct education about sex and consent, people take their cues from such forms of popular entertainment. Confused or immature people (of any age) might see a justification for behavior in media portrayals. In some ways, despite a more vocal feminism, the 1980s can be described as a regression in media depictions of sexuality and consent. The 1978 classic movie Animal House, which pioneered the popular gonzo gross-out comedy genre, featured a male character alone in a room with a girl who has passed out. The male character considers raping the girl, but after a humorous bout of discussion with his conscience, decides against it. These movies appeared in an era when fewer entertainment options were available and that meant that the effect they had would have been more concentrated. Laws against sexual assault and harassment on campus or in the workplace give women an after-the-fact type of protection, and the reporting and reliving of incidents can certainly cause further trauma. A true femocracy does not just consist of laws and rules; a femocracy would be the creation of a culture where a male collegiate administrator would not harass a young woman in the first place, where male behavior becomes dictated by feminine, rather than masculine, codes and expectations—not just a situation where a man respects a woman’s no but where the situation never comes about where she has to say no because the boundaries of the relationship and the intent of the romantic participants get stated from the outset. Those kind of relationships could not have existed in the twentieth century; the language did not exist. Even with the opening of elite college campuses to women in the 1960s, nothing approaching female equality could occur until women could control the number of children they would have in a lifetime. Part of this has to do with the logistical constraints of pregnancy and child-rearing, but in a true femocracy a woman’s sense of self-worth and societal-worth must be divorced completely from motherhood. That could not happen without cheap and effective means of birth control. Birth control and feminism were intertwined from the beginning of the twentieth century and the development of female-oriented publications in the early part of that century reflected this. In her book The Secret History of Wonder Woman (2014), Jill Lepore writes of how that era, often associated with the women’s suffrage movement, also inspired

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the writing of another kind of feminism focusing on birth control, and one often associated with Margaret Sanger (1879–1966). Suffrage was a single political goal. Feminism’s demand for equality was broader, both more radical and more difficult. “I hang in a void midway between two spheres—the man’s sphere and the woman’s sphere,” Inez Haynes Gillmore wrote in “Confessions of an Alien” in Harper’s Bazar in 1912. “The duties and pleasures of the average woman bore and irritate. The duties and pleasures of the average man interest and allure.” Could a life be lived in between? Women involved in the nineteenth-century woman’s movement had often subscribed to the belief that women had no interest in sex—no lust, no hunger, no passion. Feminists disagreed. They wanted to separate sex from reproduction, so that sex for women, could be, as it was for men, about pleasure, not sacrifice. In 1914, Greenwich Village feminist Margaret Sanger founded a magazine call the Woman Rebel. The “basis of Feminism,” Sanger said, had to be a woman’s control over her own body, “the right to be a mother regardless of church or state.” (pp. 20–21)

Sanger, of course, founded the reproductive rights movement that gave us the term “birth control.” Sanger’s mother, a Roman Catholic, endured eighteen pregnancies before dying of tuberculosis at the age of forty. Sanger’s formative years in New York not only had her witness the wretched life of her mother but also the teeming masses that crowded into the city. Women seemed to be constantly pregnant, and little could be done to advance the feminist cause with so many children always underfoot in the crowded city. As a young adult, Sanger worked as an apprentice nurse in upstate New York and saw the botched work that amateur abortionists inflicted on desperate pregnant women. By 1912, Sanger had come out as a full advocate for birth control rights. and she wrote a dozen essays for the New York Call about issues involving female sexuality. Sanger’s legal battle with the Comstock Laws (passed in 1873 to prevent anything deemed informative about sexuality from being promoted in the mail) is a famous part of feminist lore, as was her support for eugenics. The latter has been overblown by right-wing critics who want to make Sanger appear to be a white supremacist rather than a woman who tried to gain

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support for her ideas by tying them to the public health science that was popular at the time. Sanger’s work to promote the basic sexual health and practice of women was not appreciated by the government, who had her charged with a violation of the Comstock Laws. She knew all about the legal game and its fixes so she fled to England. Lepore writes this remarkable passage: In England, Sanger collected information about contraception. She also met Havelock Ellis, a doctor, psychologist, and theorist of sex. Ellis celebrated sexual candor, sexual expression, and sexual diversity. His 1897 book, Sexual Inversion, which had been banned, treated homosexuality with sympathy, as did his six-volume Studies in the Psychology of the Sex. To discredit the idea that women were without passion, Ellis argued that the evolution of marriage as an institution had resulted in the prohibition on female sexual pleasure, which was derided as wanton and abnormal. Ellis insisted on what he called “the erotic rights of women” and criticized heterosexual men who, “failing to find in women exactly the same kind of sexual emotions that they find in themselves . . . had concluded that there are none at all.” Erotic quality, Ellis insisted, was no less important than political equality, if more difficult to achieve: “The right to joy cannot be claimed in the same way as one claims the right to put a voting paper in a ballot box,” he wrote. “That is why the erotic rights of woman have been the last of all to be attained.” (p. 89)

What this passage shows is that in the years just before women gained voting rights in the United States and England, feminism had already branched into a new phase regarding a self-conception of the female body. For a woman to control her reproductive rights, she had to be educated in the means of production, and a discussion about the pleasures of sexual activity could not be left out of this. If sex were not solely for reproduction purposes, then it also had to be about pleasure. This branch of feminism lay largely dormant as a result of the suffragette movement, and then, when sex again became a topic of feminist discussion, the topic was more about defending against unwanted sexual activity than about how to have wanted sexual activity. The latter discussion could not really occur until birth control became available.

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The two intellectuals who held this branch of feminism and sexuality together through the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment and the advent of the Pill were Alfred Kinsey (1894–1956), the famous sex researcher from Indiana University, and Simone de Beauvoir (1908– 1986). Kinsey studied human sexual behavior from a sociological standpoint, but his purpose seemed to be largely about freeing human sexual activity from the conformist bonds of societal expectations. Beauvoir and her husband Jean-Paul Sartre (1908–1980) worked within French existentialist circles, and in 1949, Beauvoir ’s two-volume work The Second Sex was published. The book sold well, and her primary argument about men being the standard around which society was built, with girls having to force themselves into compliance, is a foundation critique in feminism that exists to this day. It is, perhaps, the very concept upon which so-called third-wave feminism depends. Beauvoir’s intellect ranged widely across philosophy and mathematics, but so did her sexual appetite, and she and Sartre opened their marriage. The key concept of this era of feminism might be the development of the question How should women feel about their own sexuality? and how that remains not only unanswered for many women today but a source of controversy within feminism as a movement. Women should not feel shame for their sexual impulses, but does that necessarily lead to promiscuity? What if women, particularly those in long-term relationships, tire of having sexual relations with a husband? Should she feel free to break her sexuality, as Beauvoir did, away from her concept of marriage or should she endure sex for the benefit of her husband’s need for sexual release? Answers do not exist for these complex questions, but it is interesting to note, and this should be stated at the beginning of this discussion, that male contraception is largely limited to condoms and vasectomies. The former can be ineffective, and the latter should be regarded as permanent. Most men who opt to become sterilized surgically do so only after they have made a conscious decision to either not have children or to not have any more children. Furthermore, all of the drugs developed for male sexuality are marketed to increase libido, sexual stamina, and so forth while none at all exist that would decrease sexual virility. If a woman in a relationship with a man wants less sex or no sex, why is there no option to decrease the male

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libido to the level of his female partner? There are many assumptions built into these questions, and certainly there are plenty of examples of women who gain a desire for sex while her partner loses it, but the purpose of pointing this out is to show that the sexual conversation in Western culture remains complicated and overwhelmingly framed by masculine values and terms. It is simply hard to imagine, in the twentieth century and even in this early part of the twenty-first century, that a pharmaceutical company would develop a pill for men to take on a regular basis that would lower their sperm count to nothing on a temporary basis. The birth control pill does cause women to have fewer periods, which brings their bodies more into alignment with what would be expected for a hunter-gatherer woman who would have spent much of her early life in a state of pregnancy and lactation. However, it could also be argued that the excessive creation of seminal fluid and testosterone causes men to engage in all sorts of behaviors not well-suited to civilization. The arguments for a male pill are at least as good, and probably much better, than the argument for the female version, but that will be addressed in the final chapter. It is telling that not even Margaret Sanger considered the notion of a pill that would create temporary male sterilization an option. Sanger wanted a temporary medical option as a means of birth control and approached several scientists with her question. Only when she met Gregory Goodwin Pincus (1903–1967), a hyper-intelligent Jewish doctor and the son of parents who had immigrated to the United States from Poland and Lithuania, did she find success. In his 2014 book, The Birth of the Pill, Jonathan Eig writes of the partnership. Pincus knew about Sanger. Almost everyone in America did. . . . Women would never gain equality, she had argued, until they were freed from sexual servitude. Sanger had once opened the nation’s first birth control clinic in Brooklyn in 1916 and helped launch dozens more around the world. But ever after decades of work, the contraceptive devices available at those clinics—condoms and cervical caps, mostly—remained ineffective, impractical, or difficult to obtain. It was as if she’d been teaching starving people about nutrition without giving them anything healthy to eat. Sanger explained to Pincus that she was looking for an inexpensive, easy-to-use, and completely foolproof method of contraception,

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preferably a pill. It should be something biological, she said, something a woman could swallow every morning with her orange juice or while brushing her teeth, with or without the consent of the man with whom she was sleeping; something that would make sexual intercourse spontaneous, with no forethought or messy fumbling, no sacrifice of pleasure, something that would not affect a woman’s fertility if she wished to have children later in life; something that would work everywhere from the slums of New York to the jungles of southeast Asia; something 100 percent effective. Could it be done? (pp. 3–4)

To put this moment in the context of history and the philosophy of science, this conversation between Sanger and Pincus, occurring in 1950, should be considered at least as important as when Edmond Halley visited Isaac Newton in the 1680s and challenged Newton to explain the position that the planets took when orbiting the sun. For overall historical purposes, the Sanger–Pincus conversation surely ranks as being more significant that John F. Kennedy’s 1962 speech at Rice University where that child of privilege and possessor of a mediocre intellect employed a sports metaphor to explain the impetus for the dangerous, useless, and expensive goal of putting men on the moon by the end of the 1960s. Perhaps no topic in twentieth-century American history has been as exhaustively detailed as the space race. It fits neatly within a narrative of American triumphalism, and the shooting of penis-shaped rockets at a passive moon while the Soviets helplessly watch does appeal to a masculine sense of history. The only rival to the space race, in the American historical consciousness, is the civil rights movement but that too comes across in masculine terms. Martin Luther King defies death, stands up to authority, and gets gunned down. Women played a role, but like Rosa Parks, only through the use of their iron virtue in the face of an unfair state. Neither the space race nor the civil rights movement can be said to have had the same effect on everyday lives as the birth control pill. J. M. Roberts (1928–2003), one of the founders of world history studies, made this statement in Modern History (2007) on comparing the significance of historical events and how the process can be tricky when historians are trained to look at the importance of battles and policies:

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In thinking of these matters, though, whether 1917 is a more meaningful turning-point than 1919, or whether what happened in Manchuria in 1931 marked a more striking new departure than what happened in Poland in 1939, may not within a few decades seem to matter so much as once we thought. Possibly neither of those dates should be regarded as more noteworthy than, for example, that of the patent filed in 1951 for a compound effective in controlling fertility in women and capable of being administered safely by mouth. That was a landmark in the development of what soon became known, ten years later, as “the Pill,” whose effects have already been immense. (p. 642)

Having established this, he later writes of the Pill as another agent of change that emanated from the Western world into the developing world. To have spread the idea that change is not only possible but also desirable is the most important and disruptive of all the triumphs of the culture— European in origin—which we now call “Western.” Technical progress has often promoted such change by undermining inherited ways over very broad areas of behavior. As already mentioned, an outstanding example has been the appearance over the last two centuries of better forms of contraception, whose apogee was reached in the 1960s with the rapid and wide diffusion of what became (in many languages) known simply as “the pill.” Though women in Western societies had long had access to effective techniques and knowledge in these matters, the pill—essentially a chemical means of suppressing ovulation—implied a greater transference of power to women in sexual behavior than any earlier device. Although still not taken up by women in the non-Western world so widely as by their Western sisters, and although not legally available on the same basis in all developed countries, it has, through the mere spread of awareness of its existence, marked an epoch in relations between the sexes. (p. 683)

As can be ascertained by the title of his book, Roberts still did not take this argument far enough. The subtitle indicates that from the European era to the present, the major story is globalization while technological change and the spread of birth control are subheadings to that. The primary change in world history from the European era to the present must be the creation of femocracy. What other American

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export can be ranked as more important globally than the Pill? From the world historical perspective, the creation of the Pill might be the most important moment in America’s history. In The Birth of the Pill, Jonathan Eig notes that the Bible contains no reference to any form of birth control and that the Catholic Church, through some contrived misunderstanding of mechanical philosophy, taught that activities should only be used based on their created intent; ergo, if sex made babies, then any other use for sex would be considered sinful. Guided by that logic, Pope Pius XI issued a papal opinion about the evils of birth control in 1930. Pincus worked for the drug company Searle, and the company owned the patent to the birth control pill, officially called Enovid, in 1951. The drug company that he worked for, Searle, had to receive approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and this took nearly a decade. Still, the Pill’s implications for sexual and societal life made it well known in the American public and “a Gallup poll showed nearly three out of four people believed birth control should be made available to anyone who wanted it” (Eig, 2014, p. 294). Widespread demand for Enovid already existed by the time the Pill went public. Eig writes, In 1961, four hundred thousand women were taking Enovid for birth control. A year later, that number tripled to 1.2 million. By 1964, Searle began selling Enovid-E with a dose of hormones of only 2.5 milligrams, reducing the cost for consumers to only $2.25 a month and reducing or eliminating the side effects for many. By 1965, more than 6.5 million American women were on the pill, making it the most popular form of birth control in the country. Around this time, as the pill became a bona fide phenomenon, some newspapers and magazines started spelling it with a capital P. (p. 313)

The effects of birth control on population size, women in universities, and women in the workplace can be determined via large-scale data analysis, but the sociological and philosophical effects have yet to be fully developed. For one thing, the Pill made it morally acceptable to chemically alter the female body so that it is better suited to life in modern civilization. If that is acceptable for young women, then why not young men? More will be stated on this in the final chapter, but testosterone production leads to behaviors that do not fit well with civilization. Should young men also be subject to a pill that alters the male chemistry

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in ways that would make life with men easier for women and probably easier for everyone? Also, from 1960 on, it becomes impossible to see the decision to have children as anything other than a lifestyle choice. If one abandons religious principles, then one cannot really think of a good moral or philosophical reason to have and raise children. Many women report being emotionally saturated with choice-anxiety as they age out of their fertile years, but to recognize something as anxiety is to realize that there are other ways, besides actually giving birth and raising a child or children, to manage it. The mainstreaming of the Pill and its general acceptance by the public in the Western world corresponded with a more popular women’s liberation movement, sometimes known as second-wave feminism. This pushed society closer to the coming of femocracy but contained too many contradictions to be truly effective; this era relied upon trying to establish the shared experience of women, but that experience existed too thinly across the spectrum and excluded too many people of color. The full aims of the feminist movement never fully became clear. Feminism-as-consciousness, like proletariat-consciousness, would ultimately fail even as society continued to creep toward femocracy in the West while becoming the central cultural force that reshaped areas outside the West. KEY POINTS AND APPLICATIONS TO EDUCATION •  What pressures led, first, to state schools opening up to women and then (much later) Ivy League schools doing the same? •  Yale opening to women occurred in the same year, 1969, of the first manned moon landing. Why is the moon landing still so much better known? •  How did women reshape the culture of universities from the 1970s to the present? •  Describe the interactions between feminism and science that led to the development of the Pill. Is feminism possible without a cheap and effective means of birth control? •  Why are more birth control options not available for men to take?

8 FROM THE FEMININE MYSTIQUE TO OPRAH

The ability to engage in meaningful work, preferably of the professional variety that pays well and brings public esteem, remained limited for women well into the twentieth century. Although women could access higher education by the nineteenth century, that was partly because they brought tuition money and partly because male students hoped to find marriageable women at the universities. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, female education created a class of educated women who found themselves, right after college graduation, in the role of wife and mother, doing the same work as the uneducated underclasses or, if money was in the family, acting as supervisor over the servants. Public schools became the only consistent workplace where a classically educated woman could use her learning in a productive way in the nineteenth century. Quite a few new states saw public education as a means to progress from pioneer-territory toward member of the Union. To use but one example, when Indiana achieved statehood in 1816 its constitution promised a free public education for all young people. Free public school became a matter of equality and was seen as central to the development of an educated electorate. This need for teachers corresponded with a high number of educated women who wanted to make use of their education, and so women marched into public schooling and became the much-needed teachers. 121

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The unfairness inherent in the public education system, in many cases, only enhanced female frustration. In her 2014 book The Teacher Wars, Dana Goldstein writes of Susan B. Anthony’s experiences with workplace inequality. Over the next two years, Anthony’s enthusiasm for teaching waned. She admired the headmaster who had hired her, but when he retired in 1848, she disliked the new boss, a nineteen-year-old fond of corporal punishment. Though Anthony had been teaching for a decade, her gender disqualified her for a larger role at the school—it was unthinkable that a woman would supervise men. Her stagnant salary meant that she was still living in a tiny, cold room in a relative’s home. In May she wrote to her parents that she now considered teaching a “penance. . . . A weariness has come over me that the short spring vacation did not in the least dispel. I have a pleasant school of 20 scholars, but I have to manufacture the interest duty compels me to exhibit. I am anxious they should learn, but feel almost to shrink from the task.” (p. 34)

Under the best of conditions teaching is exhausting, but the early public education system burned women out by paying them too little and by not offering opportunities for them to engage with school policy. For a seasoned teacher, to be supervised by a teenage boy not much older than her pupils must have felt as such a degradation of status for Anthony that she could barely continue her job. Her experiences as a teacher drove Anthony into social justice work. Goldstein writes of how bad things were. In 1850, four-fifths of New York’s eleven thousand teachers were women, yet two-thirds of the state’s $800,000 in teacher salaries was paid to men. It was not unusual for male teachers to earn twice as much as their female coworkers. These inequalities became the subject of Anthony’s first famous speech, which she made at age thirty-three, at the August 1853 annual meeting of the New York State Teachers’ Association. (p. 36)

Aside from public school teaching, women could also enter nursing, which was considered a female profession (Florence Nightingale established the first nursing school in 1860 while Clara Barton established the Red Cross in 1881) or clerical work, but none of these professions offered much in the way of promotion even when rules and laws did not

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specifically bar women from moving into positions with greater levels of salary and control. Teaching and nursing presumably fit with the nurturing nature of women, and the male assumption seems to have been that women would not want to move into managerial positions. Married women taught or nursed as almost a form of charity work while their husbands made money. Teaching as a profession never has escaped from these false assumptions. Of course many women went to the university, excelled at academics, and then got married and never entered any kind of profession at all. For women who went to universities in the early- and mid-twentieth century, the shift from being on a college campus, where social activities with other women were common and where women could excel in an intellectual environment, to being isolated as suburban homemakers, could be jarring and frustrating. The two most important figures for the spread of femocracy in the West and globally can only be Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962) and Oprah Winfrey. Both used their influence to spread feminist values about freedom, cooperation, and nonviolence. Roosevelt herself might be the most consequential single figure of the twentieth century, certainly more important than Churchill, or Hitler, or Stalin, or her more historically famous husband, and she occupied a position of organizational authority in a way that no woman ever had before when she chaired the United Nations Human Rights Commission after the close of World War II. By becoming the head of a newly made commission (the United Nations [UN] came into being in 1945), Roosevelt could create a role around feminist values rather than stepping into a role already shaped by masculine values. In 1946, President Harry Truman appointed Roosevelt to her new post and, again, this decision is the subject of a historical distortion regarding its importance. Historians tend to treat the atomic bombing of Japan and the recognition of Israel as Truman’s two most important presidential decisions, but the appointment of a woman to head a project of such significance has no historical analogy. Roosevelt had already shown herself to be enlightened about race relations and human rights, and her work as both First Lady and the head of the UN commission should rank her with Abraham Lincoln as one of the greatest figures in American history.

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Like the 1848 Seneca Falls Declaration, the UN Declaration of Human Rights draws upon the Declaration of Independence as a philosophical model. When ratified on December 10, 1948, in Paris, the declaration established a new international norm regarding the concept of freedom and human rights. This norm, undeniably, is based on democratic ideals that evolved in Western civilization. Most notably, for the purposes here, Article 16 reads, 1. Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family. They are entitled to equal rights as to marriage, during marriage and at its dissolution. 2. Marriage shall be entered into only with the free and full consent of the intending spouses. 3. The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State.

Modern readers in the West might consider article 16 to be oldfashioned or even conservative as it contains a certain definitional core regarding marriage as an institution. Women deserved to choose their marriage partners at an appropriate age and be considered equal within that marriage; however, this asserted a Western family model and sense of values over many areas of the world where arranged marriage, child marriage, or the total subservience of the wife in the marriage were not just established cultural norms but rigid religious commandments. Nation states, and not the UN, generate and enforce laws, but the UN Declaration of Human Rights cannot be considered inconsequential because reformers within member states can use the declaration as a means of pressuring their own country to change. There are no Western nations feeling internal pressure to increase the oppression of women. To give an example of the way that non-Western states have reacted to the UN declaration, consider that the Islamic world felt enormous pressure to conform to Western norms about human rights while at the same time continuing to maintain that the Qur’an represented the unalterable word of God. This led, in 1981, to the Universal Islamic Declaration of Human Rights. The authors of that document claimed that the Qur’an represented the perfect philosophy for respecting human rights. The fact that such a claim had to be made, and in such a way, indicates

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that Enlightenment ideals dominated the era. No one in the West felt the need to make the case that constitutions and democratic elections derived from the Qur’an. The UN declared the period between 1975 and 1985 the Decade for Women and pushed for a variety of reforms including pay equity and stricter laws regarding violence against women. The UN actions consisted mostly of meetings, but those meetings were held in Mexico City, which signaled an international shift in attitudes toward regions considered outside the traditional Western sphere. The UN’s activities culminated in the 1979 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, which created a bill of rights for women that was implemented in 1981 and signed by 189 member states. Written in the spirit of Eleanor Roosevelt’s Universal Declaration, the central statements of the convention begin with these words: Any distinction, exclusion or restriction made on the basis of sex which has the effect or purpose of impairing or nullifying the recognition, enjoyment or exercise by women, irrespective of their marital status, on a basis of equality of men and women, of human rights and fundamental freedoms in the political, economic, social, cultural, civil, or any other field.

Although the full vision expressed in the convention’s decree has not been reached, the declaration declares a specific goal expressed by the most significant international body in the world regarding female equality and it expresses that goal in the language of democracy. This means the international trend has been toward the development of femocracy. Unfortunately, the history of this trend finds its origin in European imperialism. Although by the 1960s the feminist movement had been in existence for seventeen decades, the movement continued to progress through individual female writers. Again, writing and publishing existed outside the mainstream professions. The publishing industry never lacked for liberal-minded editors, and women could compete as writers in a business where personal connections, or the good ol’ boys club, mattered less than in business or law. Enter Betty Friedan (1921–2006). Friedan’s maiden name was Bettye Goldstein. She was the daughter of parents who had immigrated to Illinois from Hungary and Russia. Friedan’s family practiced Judaism and had roots in the much-persecuted

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Jewish communities that escaped Eastern Europe. Up to that point, feminist writers tended to be generated by either free-thought or Quaker communities. Orthodox Judaism, no more than Christianity or Islam, cannot ideologically sustain a feminist movement but post-Holocaust Judaism in the West tended to be cultural rather than orthodox. Liberal ideology defined the intellectual lives of many from that community. At college, Friedan dabbled with Marxism as a radical phase but then married and entered, as so many educated women did, the life of a suburban housewife. In 1963 she published The Feminine Mystique, probably the most profound social-movement book since Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The Feminine Mystique looks dense and authoritative, but the book only really serves to reiterate the gripping opening paragraph. In the first chapter, “The Problem That Has No Name,” Friedan writes, The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night—she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question—“Is this all?” (p. 15)

Friedan’s book belonged to an era when the public expected to see big ideas in big books. One wonders how many readers went far beyond that initial paragraph because the rest of the book just presents variations of that first phrase. The result is 350 pages of rage against suburban ennui. Consider just these two passages: But what of girls who will never even write . . . term papers because of the baby’s bottle? Because of the feminine mystique, few have seen it as a tragedy that they thereby trap themselves in that one passion, one occupation, one role for life. Advanced educators in the early 1960’s have their own cheerful fantasies about postponing women’s education until after they have resigned themselves almost unanimously to the early marriages, which continue unabated.

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By choosing femininity over the painful growth to full identity, by never achieving the hard core of self that comes not from fantasy but from mastering reality, these girls are doomed to suffer ultimately that bored, diffuse feeling of purposelessness, non-existence, non-involvement with the world that can be called anomie, or lack of identity, or merely felt as the problem that has no name. (p. 181)

And then later, again, A number of the more disagreeable sexual phenomena of this era can be seen now as the inevitable result of that ludicrous consignment of millions of women to spend their days at work an eight-year-old could do. For no matter how much the “home-and-family career” is rationalized to justify such appalling waste of available womanpower; no matter how ingeniously the manipulators coin new scientific sounding words, “lubrilator” and the like, to give the illusion that dumping clothes in the washing machines is an act akin to deciphering the genetic code; no matter how much housework is expanded to fill the time available, it still presents little challenge to the adult mind. Into this mental vacuum have flooded an endless line of books on gourmet cooking, scientific treatises on child care, and above all, advice on the techniques of “married love,” sexual intercourse. These, too, offer little challenge to the adult mind. The results could almost have been predicted. To the great dismay of men, their wives suddenly became “experts,” know-it-alls, whose unshakable superiority at home, a domain they both occupied, was impossible to compete with, and very hard to live with. As Russell Lynes put it, wives began to treat their husbands as parttime servants—or the latest new appliance. With a snap course in home economics or marriage and family under her belt and copies of Dr. Spock and Dr. Van de Velde side by side on the shelf; with all that time, energy and intelligence directed on husband, children, and house, the young American wife—easily, inevitably, disastrously—began to dominate the family even more completely than her “mom.” (p. 257)

Friedan, writing just two decades after World War II, does not really create any kind of comparative analysis of women across the world except that she notes that men returning from Japan seemed to want an Asian submissiveness in their brides. And yes, it could be stated that Friedan began a process, described in detail by Steven Pinker, by which each generation sees its problems as just as significant as the problems

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of the previous generation even though the scale clearly differs. Thus, being bored in suburbia is equated with being denied marital choice in the medieval period in the same way that a “microaggressive” comment in a university discussion becomes just as egregious as Jim Crow. Yet, the inability to express oneself as a human being, this “problem with no name,” cannot be considered insignificant. Friedan lived in a time period when electricity, cars, clean running water, and household appliances reduced the level of struggle for daily life but also took away from identity. For example, the development of refrigeration might have meant that a child living on a farm would not have to get up in the morning to milk a cow but it also meant stripping the child of his identify as a farm kid. For a woman to be displaced from larger society and then condescended to by an industry devoted to promoting the idea of home economics, this had the effect of depriving millions of women of the opportunity to engage in meaningful work. The 1960s gets remembered for the music, boycotts, protests, and speeches but not for revolutionary books. The Feminine Mystique might be the only one, and even though Friedan wrote with some eloquence on the general history of feminism and about a society dominated by a Freudian sense of masculinity, her writing expressed a shared sentiment among a certain circle of educated women who wanted to engage with work and the world to form an identity beyond that of wife and mother. Because of the times, the immediate analogy before feminists in the 1960s came from the civil rights movement, and this created a series of contradictions inside feminist circles that caused femocracy to sputter. The problem that had a name was “Can women have it all?” Could they have just a few kids, a husband, and a career and be happy? Time has proven that the answer to that is no, but only a few feminists could actually follow the logic of the time to its natural conclusion: that there really is no good reason for a woman to have any children, and the idea of a lifelong commitment to a single man simply does not fit well with any feminist doctrine. Friedan actively believed in America’s grand liberal narrative of protest-to-legal reform and in 1966 cofounded the National Organization for Women (NOW) and became a feminist activist in the mold of Martin Luther King. If the Civil Rights Amendment culminated in the 1964 Civil Rights Act, then Friedan sought to make the Equal

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Rights Amendment (ERA) the legislative culmination of the feminist movement. The ERA ultimately failed, and by the 1970s the feminist movement seemed to lose momentum even as women focused on inequalities between men and women in the workplace and, as previously mentioned, on matters involving rape and sexual assault. Regarding the feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s, the most significant book might actually be the 1967 horror novel Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin. Rosemary’s Baby was intended to be just another one of the gonzo-horror paperbacks that littered libraries and sat on drugstore shelves in the 1960s and 1970s; however, sometimes a book or movie becomes a cultural icon for reasons unintended by the author. (Imagine performing Hamlet for a group of Syrian refugees and finding that the audience can only fixate on the brilliant method Claudius used for killing Hamlet’s father, the rightful king.) The antecedent to Rosemary’s Baby was the 1954 novel The Bad Seed by William March, which was made into a 1956 movie, but the book and movie featured an older child and not a horrifying pregnancy. The Bad Seed did not stick in the culture like Rosemary’s Baby did in post-Pill America. At any rate, the novel Rosemary’s Baby, summarized, is about a young and modern woman who is newly married to an actor. They move into a monumental apartment complex and, after drinking one night, Rosemary dreams about rough sex with a bestial partner. She later discovers that her neighbors belong to a secretive Satanic cult and that she, Rosemary, now carries Satan’s child in her womb. While one could make the case that a fear of secretive Satanic cultists somehow mirrored the Communist Red Scare, the real plotline here is about a woman with an unwanted being growing in her womb, and as the pregnancy proceeds, Rosemary’s fears become more prominent, her anxiety about this responsibility growing with the size of her stomach. Anyone looking for a definitive visual representation of the post-Pill feminist movement should watch the trailer for the 1968 film version of Rosemary’s Baby (directed by Roman Polanski, whose own crimes against women are well-publicized). The prominent scene involves a baby carriage in black silhouette on top of a jagged horizon while the sound of infantile crying plays ominously in the background. For young women of that first birth-control generation, having a child might have

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seemed like a bargain with the devil. Whatever life plans they had could be altered by a single wailing creature that would demand their time, intellectual energy, attention, and money. In 1971, William Peter Blatty’s novel The Exorcist became the next major work of horror. The book featured demonic possession of an eleven-year-old character named Regan MacNeil. The 1973 movie version outdid even Rosemary’s Baby as Regan, played by Linda Blair, levitated, projectile vomited, and turned her head completely around on its spine while under possession of the devil. Like Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist was ostensibly about demonic possession, but audiences might have recognized in Regan the hard-to-deal-with adolescent behavior that inflicts, inexplicably, once-cute little children at about the age of ten or eleven. In 1976, the movie The Omen, about an American diplomat and his wife who discover, after a few clues, that their son happens to be the anti-Christ, was released. The Omen became such a money maker that the creepy-kids-as-devils genre became a staple of Western cinema. The wide availability of the Pill corresponded with the steady creep of marketing and capitalism into the daily lives of Americans. A baby might begin to seem like a purchase that a woman could not take back, one that brought with it a series of restrictive responsibilities for the owner. This time period for feminism might be marked historically as a transitional phase. Even liberated women with college educations faced family and societal expectations regarding motherhood and marriage. Even women who married and then divorced often retained their identity as a mother along with holding on to the children. A change in divorce laws occurred in 1973, the same year that Roe vs. Wade legalized abortion, and while these two changes might be considered advancements for women’s rights, they merely added a “return” policy to both marriage and the earliest months of pregnancy. In addition, 1973 marked the creation of a serious movement among the Religious Right to bring back traditional family values. In the minds of religious traditionalists, of which more than a few were women, feminism brings about loose living and baby killing. The fringe SCUM Manifesto was self-published in 1967 by Valerie Solanas (1936–1988). In it, Solanas made the hateful case that “society should cut up men.” Few people noticed the book until Solanas at-

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tempted to murder Andy Warhol in 1968, and the right-wing seized on her as representative of all feminists. By 1979, evangelical Christian conservatives had coalesced into the Moral Majority and the cause of femocracy began to stagnate as traditional feminists came under a variety of public attacks, most notably from conservative radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh, who popularized the term “feminazi” to describe a caricature of feminists as man-haters who wanted to dominate society and politics with a liberal agenda. The right-wing response to 1973’s changes explains why the traditional study of feminism as coming in waves and culminating in legislative changes really does not show how a femocracy develops. In Western society, the shift gradually comes about when feminine, rather than masculine, values become the default position, when women need not explain their decision to not have children or not marry. As these societal norms and expectations change, the question about women and their role with sexuality becomes complex. Were women who desired to limit their sexual partners wearing a psychological burka forced upon them by traditional expectations for women or were they acting in a manner in alignment with individual values and personal libido? Confusion, backlash, legislative failure, and loss of momentum stalled feminism in the 1970s and 1980s even as birth rates fell and divorce rates rose. This tumult probably reflects a transitional phase in feminism as laws and rules changed ahead of societal attitudes and family expectations. Then, in 1986, The Oprah Winfrey Show debuted and pushed the development of femocracy into a new era. Oprah (b. 1954) represented the congruence of the civil rights movement and the feminist movement by becoming a career-focused, highly influential and wealthy, childless, black female superstar of the culture. She possessed a compelling personal story. Her ambition pulling her out of poverty and sexual abuse, Oprah ran away from home at age thirteen. At some point she became pregnant and gave birth, at age fourteen, to a son who died not long after. By the mid 1970s, before she had even reached the age of twenty, Oprah was working as a news anchor for local stations in Nashville, Tennessee. By 1983, Oprah was starring in a Chicago-area daytime talk show that became so successful that, with the help of the movie critic Roger Ebert, she went national with her syndicated The Oprah Winfrey Show

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three years later. Oprah’s daytime talk show aired for an hour in the afternoon for the next twenty-five years and not only broke ratings records but created a space in the public culture for female norms. Oprah empathized with interviewees; she spoke candidly about her personal narrative of abuse; she struggled with her weight; and she refused to get married or have another child. In a 2013 interview with Hollywood Reporter she said, “If I had kids, my kids would hate me. They would have ended up on the equivalent of the Oprah show talking about me; because something [in my life] would have had to suffer and it would’ve probably been them.” (The other media phenom of the era, right-wing talk-show host Rush Limbaugh, also chose to be childless but faced less scrutiny about his decision [or his divorces] from people on the right-wing who have been less forgiving to women.) Although The Oprah Winfrey Show might be dismissed as tabloid television, the daytime talk format could shift the way in which people talked with each other. Oprah enforced feminist norms in her conversation and appealed, clearly by her ratings numbers, to viewers across racial and gender lines. The every-weekday format, the conversations, the book club, the magazine, all of this created a cultural force of feminine norms and was led by a single woman who not only had no husband or children but did not want them. By the time The Oprah Winfrey Show aired for the last time on May 25, 2011, Oprah had gone through a phase of mega-stardom in her early years only to settle into the DNA of Western and world culture. As a historical force for change, Oprah ranks with the printing press. KEY POINTS AND APPLICATIONS TO EDUCATION •  In what ways has the UN expressed support for both democracy and feminism? •  What would a reevaluation of twentieth-century history do for the importance of the role that Eleanor Roosevelt played in global affairs? •  Compare the effects, regarding feminism, of Betty Friedan with those of Oprah Winfrey.

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•   What are some examples from late-twentieth-century popular culture that reflect the anxieties of motherhood in a more feminist age? •  Women of color have often felt excluded from the traditional process and narrative of feminism. How might a new vision of feminist history be more inclusive?

9 FEMOCRACY IN THE WEST: 2011 TO THE FUTURE

It should be restated here that femocracy is not about women taking positions of political power, especially not when conforming to masculine characteristics. Neither the Iron Lady, Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013), who served as the first female prime minister of England and participated in the destruction of unions and social safety nets while doing nothing to prevent the starvation deaths of Irish prisoners on an (entirely justified) hunger strike, nor Hillary Clinton (b. 1947), who used her authority as a New York senator to support the destruction of Iraq by U.S. forces, really qualify as significant figures in the development of femocracy. Both probably helped to set the trend back. In 2008, none other than Oprah seemed to realize that Barack Obama, who had opposed the Iraq War, would exercise power in a more feminine way than Clinton, and Oprah endorsed Obama in the 2008 Democratic presidential primary. Femocracy cannot be about political issues, but rather an approach to those issues. A woman or man might be pro-life and feminist, but a feminine approach to being pro-life would feature support for widespread birth control, social and economic support networks for single mothers, and increased workplace support and protections for women rather than a masculine approach calling for the banning of abortions and punishment of women. 135

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Neither is femocracy just about full participation. For example, the American Education Amendments Act of 1972 contains a provision known as Title IX. It states, “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.” Although Title IX is often seen as the greatest achievement for feminism since the Nineteenth Amendment, it is another one of those insidious markers of progress that actually hold back a positive movement. What exactly did Title IX achieve? As has already been stated, the major universities opened up to females in 1969 and so the act did little to ensure the ability for young women to achieve an education. The primary effect of Title IX has been to create a new space for female sports in high school and higher education, but this largely just allowed women to try and step into male roles. The law has it that if there is a female equivalent of a sport, then girls cannot try out for the male team, but if there is no female equivalent then girls can try out for the male team. So boys have baseball and girls have softball, basketball is segregated by gender, and occasionally a girl will try out for a kicker on the football team or else will wrestle in a lower weight class where the gender differences on muscle and bone structure have less impact. In practice, Title IX just allows girls to act like boys in male roles and facilitates a culture of masculine competitiveness. The idea that competitive sports might be stupid, a waste of time, and a serious obstacle to the development of physical, mental, and emotional health never seems to enter the discussion. A federal act in a femocracy might declare an end to competitive sports and the eradication, long overdue, of dictatorial coaches. Why not focus on discussion and cooperation and bring an end to the pointless competitions that suck money and destroy the very childhoods of children? A federal act that prevents generations of boys from being thrust into a toxic environment, like a football team, where the health of their brains is sacrificed for the temporary glorification of coaches, the financial well-being of athletic directors, and the fractional entertainment of the people in the stands would be one of the most important acts achieved by a femocracy.

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In June 2020, two young ladies suffered devastating accidents while engaging in extreme sports. On June 6, eleven-year-old skateboarding prodigy Sky Davis went upward on a ramp and the board flew out from under her feet. Since she was at a private facility owned by skateboarding legend Tony Hawk, no safety equipment like a large pad was on the ground in between the ramps where she fell onto the concrete. Sky survived but severely broke the arm she fell on. Her helmet cracked on impact and her skull was fractured in several places. Ten days later, Luce Douady, a sixteen-year-old French cliff climber hoping to make the 2021 Olympics, fell to her death while training in Southern France. These are girls being injured and dying in ways traditionally associated with masculine traits. A culture that promotes reckless endangerment of girls is hardly better than the rape culture discussed by modern feminists. It’s not that girls should be discriminated against when it comes to football, skateboarding, cliff climbing, mixed martial arts, or boxing but that none of these sports should exist at all. The celebration of masculine aggression cannot coexist with femocracy. Why aren’t boys asked to adopt feminine values rather than the other way around? Since the last Oprah Winfrey Show aired in 2011, a new generation has essentially upended the concept of social norms. The normalization of same-sex relationships brings up questions about the traditional structure of family life, and with that, discussions about marriage, monogamy, and especially the decision to have children or not. In some ways, the 2016 book Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed furthered a case made in a notorious 2013 issue of Time that featured a young man and woman relaxing on a beach under the title “The Childfree Life.” The Time story sought to explain why the American birth rate was so low but the cover made the key statement: if children are now optional because of birth control, then children are a lifestyle choice, and the choice to not have children definitely comes with benefits. Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed became a sort of Feminine Mystique for the childless set. The decision to solicit sixteen writers (and therefore introverts) to explain why they did not have children was an interesting one. A theme among the writers was the fear of having to attend, or throw, birthday parties. Writers need prolonged periods of isolation and concentration, and it is easy to see how sixteen writers might

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be an articulate, but not representative, group. Selfish failed to generate a new cultural movement in the way civil rights or feminism did but it did provide a reference in literature for people who were looking to live deliberately without children. Live births will not likely recede further because of a literary movement, however, as big idea books no longer really have the power to move the population anymore. The childless trend will likely continue for three reasons: climate change, consumption culture, and the realization that an anxiety about not having children can be treated with therapy just like any other anxiety. Prior to serious discussions about climate change the pressure seemed to be on young people to have children as a way of making a contribution to society. Children raised in stable homes, went the thinking, go on to be taxpayers and enter into the kinds of professions that keep the world moving. Up until the 2000s, people tended not to think of children as little carbon-producers. Yet, from an environmental protection standpoint, the best way for individuals to prevent the world from warming up is to prevent their own pregnancies. Few people will probably make a decision to have or not have children based on future climate predictions, but for those who choose not to have kids, the climate argument provides a two-pronged moral justification: 1) people create carbon, and 2) who knows how hot the world will be during the child’s life span? Capitalism dominates the Western mind to the extent that many people define themselves by what they consume. As birth control became widely available, the ready analogy is that a child is like a purchase, with hidden features and glitches, that the consumer cannot return. Scientists did not track the rates of autism, for example, until about the year 2000 at which point the search for a cause and hope for a cure began. It is not clear why rates of diagnosis suddenly went up. Everything from vaccinations (a dangerous myth) to a diluted set of diagnostic criteria has been blamed. What might likely be the case is that parents who have fewer children can concentrate more on the characteristics of those children, and for individuals with a buyer’s mentality, the answer is to complain to the manager. An autistic child, like a child with Down syndrome, is not a normal kid with a disease; however, to parents in a culture where children are

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viewed as a lifestyle purchase, the sudden arrival of a defective product might be unwelcome. It could be that autism is not new, but a consumerist mentality regarding children is. Down syndrome can often be detected in utero, and the discovery frequently leads to the baby being aborted, but autism shows up later in the child’s development. Parents with severely autistic children will not usually receive any typically recognizable form of love from the child but will be saddled with an overwhelming and costly responsibility that will last a full lifetime. One might argue that there is no reason for a young couple to decide to produce new children, but how does that logic apply to adoption? Children who already exist need homes and it could certainly be argued that for a stable person or couple to not make a commitment to foster children in need might be considered, to borrow from the title of the previously mentioned book, “selfish and shallow.” A 2018 article in the Atlantic noted that between 1 and 5 percent of children who get placed with a family are “unadopted,” that is, given back. In 2020, the case of Myka and James Stauffer entered mainstream news. Starting in 2016, the couple, who already had three biological children, started a series of YouTube videos that chronicled their decision to adopt a Chinese baby. The child, named Huxley, came with severe special needs, including autism and brain damage from complications during the pregnancy. Myka Stauffer sold ads on her YouTube videos and in media interviews frequently used her platform to broadcast her Christian beliefs. When, after four years, Huxley disappeared from the videos, the subscribers started asking questions. Myka later explained that Huxley came with more special needs than the family was prepared to accommodate and that, despite the biological family’s deep love for him, Huxley had been transferred to a “forever home” with other parents. The Stauffers need to answer a lot of ethical and financial questions, but those need not be stated here. The point of bringing their adoption fiasco with Huxley up is to show how frightening the concept of adoption can be. A stable family, with or without biological children, voluntarily brings a destabilizing factor into the home. The consequences of having a child, either biologically or through the adoption process, that requires special needs can be traumatizing and alter life for the worse. Sometimes, maybe even often, the decision to have children is rewarding and creates lasting relationships, but it’s often devastating.

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The problem with child-rearing, and the reason that many young people are opting out, may be the same problem with marriage as an institution. In capitalist parlance, marriage and children are big “life purchases” and the pressure put on such relationships is rarely sustainable. Statistics can always mislead, but a general consensus of data concludes that about half of American marriages fail (though this does not mean that 50 percent of people who get married will get divorced, since the divorce–marriage ratio is driven up by serial divorcers) and that women in marriages tend to be less happy than the men (long-term data on same-sex marriage is lacking for obvious reasons) and that people with children tend to be less happy than those without children. All kinds of meta-questions can be asked of these studies, for example, “What’s so great about happiness anyway?” But parenting is one of the last experiences in Western civilization that exists outside a capitalist framework. Raising children is a responsibility, not a purchase. But capitalism has created another guiding analogy for young people in Western society. They have gotten used to the idea of early adopters: mastering a technology before it spreads generally to everyone else. That notion has spread to lifestyles as well, with acceptance for homosexuality, transgenderism, and so forth also occurring for early adopters and then spreading to the rest of society. Young people have gotten used to the idea that they will create and push changes in society, and this makes it possible to rapidly break with past traditions like marriage and children. Bad economies, pandemics, and changing climates also make it easier to opt out of traditional markers of adulthood. This all brings up the question Why should the default position for raising children be a two-parent home? The pace of modern life, with jobs, school, and activities puts unsustainable pressure on that kind of relationship. If the pressure does not cause divorce, it almost always creates unhappiness—and disproportionately in women. This raises the possibility that women often enter into marriage and motherhood as a way of conforming to societal or familial expectations as this helps to avoid the anxiety that comes from having missed those markers of adulthood. The idea that anxiety provokes women into marriage or motherhood might not be provable in a scientific sense because societal expectations get absorbed into the psyche of individuals and become personal expectations. This is easy for Westerners to see when, for example, a Muslim

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woman explains why she chooses to wear a burka but is less easy to see in our own culture. Anxiety concerning missing out was a key theme among the female writers in Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed; however, if a woman is having anxiety about whether to have children, then the best way to respond to that anxiety might be with counseling, not by actually having a child. As that concept becomes more prevalent, more women might diagnose their temporary desire to have children as something to be met with temporary therapy rather than a lifelong commitment. In a femocracy, a woman’s societal value and sense of self-worth must be completely separated from her decisions on marriage and childbirth. And it must also be divorced entirely from her relationship with a man. In fact, the most important societal trend occurring among women thirty-five and under might be this: they are increasingly describing their female friendships, as opposed to their married status with a man or significant other, as their primary relationship in life. In her 2016 book All the Single Ladies, Rebecca Traister writes of the dramatic societal shift regarding young people and marriage. During the years in which I had come of age, American women had pioneered an entirely new kind of adulthood, one that was not kicked off by marriage, but by years and, in many cases, whole lives lived on their own, outside matrimony. Those independent women were no longer aberrations, less stigmatized than ever before. Society had changed, permitting this revolution, but the revolution’s beneficiaries were about to change the nation further: remapping the lifespan of women, redefining marriage and family, reimagining what wifeliness and motherhood entail, and, in short, altering the scope of possibility for over half the country’s population. For the first time in American history, single women (including those who were never married, widowed, divorced, or separated) outnumbered married women. Perhaps even more strikingly, the number of adults younger than thirty-four who had never married was up 46 percent, rising 12 percentage points in less than a decade. For women under thirty, the likelihood of being married had become astonishingly small: Today, only around 20 percent of Americans between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine are wed, compared to nearly 60 percent in 1960. (p. 5)

These are trends that offer young women increasing levels of freedom to find meaningful work and to pursue activities they find more

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engaging that marriage and child-rearing. In some cases, the single lifestyle is not a choice for young women but a relationship status brought about by the lack of men whom they could feasibly be married to. Single women are not necessarily lonely, however, and many have found they prefer their friendships with other women to a romantic relationship with a man. In her book Text Me When You Get Home, Kayleen Schaefer writes about how her female friendships, and not a lifelong relationship with a man, are central to her life. These friendships are marked by all of the signposts of romantic relationships, except they’re platonic. But they are love stories, complete with lingering dinners, lots of talk about how wonderful we think the other is, and an understanding that this is a continuing courtship—we’re not letting the other person go. (p. 6)

Much of the new female literature, either in the form of “chick lit” or nonfiction, takes on this type of sing-song tone. Women are happy to be free of constraints and to have their relationships spread out among several different women rather than concentrated on a single individual. In these circles, men sometimes enter for temporary romantic relationships, but the enduring aspect is the friendships. This leads to a question: Could a group of female friends raise a child or children together? If five women made a pact to raise one or two children among them, they would be impervious to divorce, could spread the duties of parenting out so as to avoid exhaustion, and ensure a stable network for the children. Tensions can obviously enter into any kind of relationship, but such a configuration would make more sense than marriage, which puts high levels of pressure on just two pillars. This concept brings the narrative back to the decision that people have to make about having children either biologically or through adoption. Taking care of an autistic child or a child with other types of special needs would be considerably less stressful for one week out of a month, as opposed to constantly, and the same is likely true for children who do not have special needs. Could men enter into such a relationship in a role other than sperm donor? Maybe. In 2010, the Atlantic published Hanna Rosin’s famous essay “The End of Men,” which included this lengthy subtitle:

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Earlier this year, women became the majority of the workforce for the first time in U.S. history. Most managers are now women too. And for every two men who get a college degree this year, three women will do the same. For years, women’s progress has been cast as a struggle for equality. But what if equality isn’t the end point? What if modern, postindustrial society is simply better suited to women? A report on the unprecedented role reversal now under way—and its vast cultural consequences. (www .theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/07/the-end-of-men/308135/)

Men may not need to end, but perhaps the concept of masculinity should. As modern postindustrial society evolved away from masculine values, the virtual world of gaming and the world of sports embraced masculine and aggressive values at the core. The process of masculine gaming began at some point in the 1970s. Tracy Kidder’s Pulitzer–prize winning book about the early years of computer programming, The Soul of a New Machine (1982), includes this eerie section: It was the hour of insomniacs. In the basement of Westborough, the corridors and cubicles stood empty and in shadows. Carl Alsgin’s cluttered little area made a small rectangle of light. Strewn before me across the surface of his desk, like the relics of a party, lay dozens of roughly drawn maps. They consisted of circles, inside of which were scrawled names such as Dirty Passage, Hall of Mists, Hall of the Mountain King, Complex Junction, Splendid Chamber, Bedquilt, and Witts End. Webs of lines connected the circles, and each line was labeled, some with points of the compass, some with the words up and down. Here and there on the maps were notations—“water here,” “oil here,” and “damn that pirate!” In the midst of all this paper sat Alsing’s computer terminal. On the screen of the tube in white letters, like the little voice that whispers in a wild gambler’s ear, this message stood: ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO QUIT NOW? (p. 86)

That game, from which all forms of intricate gaming eventually evolved, went by the title of Adventure. It differed from the popular 1980s arcade games because it could be played on a computer and included a long-term fantasy narrative. Statistics on gaming say all sorts of things: that boys and girls play them an equal amount of time and that games do not necessarily harm boys. Frequently, whenever someone questions whether gaming is good for kids—boys especially—some reference is made, by analogy, to the government’s censorious response to comic

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books back in the 1950s. But gaming of the Adventure sort is not like comic book reading, it’s not even like arcade-style gaming. It pulls people into an alternative world where the game, using the same algorithm as a slot machine, taps into primal reward-centers of the brain. To explore the effects of gaming on young men would be beyond the purpose of this book and Simon Parkin already did an admirable job of it in Death by Video Game (2017), but the scale of gaming puts it, virtually, in almost every home and it attracts kids at precisely the time period of their lives where they might develop lifelong interests in more nourishing pursuits. The definition of an addiction or mental disorder is that it must interfere with your life, and it is possible that, for whatever reason, boys and young men have more trouble managing gaming than do girls and young women. Nonetheless, gaming tends to celebrate masculine virtues like competitiveness and aggression. So do sports. Almost every community in Western civilization, and especially in the United States, has youth sports leagues. Soccer attracts the youth in Europe but sports and school are seen as separate activities. In the United States, junior and high schools offer a variety of sports, for instance, football, baseball, basketball, wrestling, rugby, and track and field, that reward young men for size, speed, and aggression. To promote these values in male-only formats disadvantages young men as they move from school into an increasingly feminist society. In education discussions, one often hears that it is the job of schools to prepare students for the future. If that’s the case then athletics and afterschool activities should focus on socializing boys. Even worse, sports and sports talk saturate the culture so that young men might think the only way to stand out in society is to bulk up and engage in activities that produce no social or intellectual value at all. Type “sex differences in crime” into Google Images and any number of graphs will appear, all of which indicate that men commit somewhere between 85 and 90 percent of all violent crimes. The same aggression so prized in gaming, sports, and war becomes criminal in the context of modern civilization. The male sexual drive, too, remains radically out of alignment with what civilization offers. From the time of puberty, men produce billions of sperm in their testes. The male ability to impregnate women

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seems almost limitless from the time of puberty to death and, because humans do not have a mating season like many other large mammals, the sexual desire remains present for healthy men throughout a lifetime. Men probably produce so much sperm because, especially in a huntergatherer tribe, they were expendable. If only one man returned from a raid or hunting expedition, he could impregnate every female member of the tribe so that the population would recover in a few years. The fact that men produce so much sperm brings up a disturbing evolutionary point: boys are probably meant to die in droves. Risky behavior of all different kinds tend to be associated with boys and this may be driven by some sort of differentiation between civilization and the hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Hunter-gatherers tend not to view children as family “property,” meaning they are raised holistically by the tribe and rarely hovered over. Without that kind of parental guidance, and with familial bonds diversified over a village of children, boys may have just died more often than girls. In modern society, authority figures probably save boys from some of the more dangerous aspects of their behavior. Most straight men (this is a book primarily about women’s history and the point here is about male interaction with women), over a lifetime, will want more sex than is available to them. Making any statement about human sexuality can be problematic, given the conflicting evidence, but a meta-analysis of the data done from an armchair indicates that men will want more sex on average than women, and this leads to a dichotomy in relationships. Sexuality changes over time, with desire going through phases and it certainly is often the case that women might prefer more sex than her mate, but trends are based on the aggregate. However, given that complexity, why is it that the only message that heterosexual couples ever seem to get is “More sex is good”? Consider this: the phrase “erectile disfunction” only has one meaning whereas it should have two. A disfunction is when something fails to work properly for its function. A penis that works too often, therefore, is just as dysfunctional as one that does not work often enough. Since 1998, erectionenhancing drugs like Viagra have been available on American markets and, recently, testosterone boosters join them, but no drug exists that would decrease the male sex drive. Given the high percentages of women who report trouble having an orgasm, a lack of sexual desire, or that have suffered some history of

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sexual violence that makes any sexual activity traumatic, one might assume that a drug which lowers the male sex drive would make a nice profit, so where is it? For males, the onset of puberty comes concurrently with sexual frustration, something that tends to last for at least years and sometimes lifetimes. This is an unnatural byproduct of civilization as all huntergatherer tribes tolerate sexual play among youth in a way that modern society—with laws, restrictions, social media, shaming, and guilt—simply cannot. If a male does find a female partner at some point, there are laws against forcing the girl into sexual activity and strong social taboos against pressuring her into it. This is how it should be. Yet, after a commitment, especially a marriage, it is often or mostly the case that one partner who desires sex (usually the male) actively pressures the other partner into it. In The State of Affairs (2017), Esther Perel writes that this often leads to the woman simply acquiescing. This allows the man to release the pressure of seminal fluid on his prostate but amounts to unsatisfying sexual activity for both the man and the woman. In cases, and there are a lot of them, where sexual violence in the woman’s history is a causal factor in the lack of desire, the sexual activity she is pressured into can cause a reenactment of trauma. This puts the woman in the position of either rejecting her partner’s sexual advances and causing strife in the relationship or acquiescing to sex and reliving trauma; in neither case does this help to build the foundations of a happy relationship. In her book The Witches Are Coming (2019), Lindy West begins her manifesto with a section about a middle-aged man (seemingly an aggregate character) who pouts at a bar because he is no longer allowed to dance. He has been banned from the dance floor because of his tendency to try and grind, an unwanted action, on the young women who are dancing. Although a male-enhancement industry makes billions of dollars every year, a certain section of the male population seems to not understand that modern society has no place for the libido of middle-aged men. The #MeToo movement made it clear than the suggestive comments of older men to younger women always come across as creepy and any kind of sexual activity that occurs between men in middle age and younger women tends to be coercive.

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Cases involving Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, and Matt Lauer all showed how sexual activity can run a spectrum from a distinguishedman-in-power using his power to coerce sex by threatening to hurt or offering to help a career (and often taking advantage of the deferential nature of many young women, many of whom have spent their entire lives trying to be good for authority and have no defenses against someone who wants to harm them) to outright forcible rape. The occasional case of rich-older-male-celebrity-marries-youngwoman should not mislead middle-aged men into thinking of themselves as viable sexual beings with anyone outside of their age range, and usually not even then. Any attempt to establish a relationship with a younger woman simply looks predatory. It might even seem like the primary function of male sexuality, beyond perhaps the initial period of a relationship, is to alienate a significant other or to create trauma in younger women. Several different solutions get proposed for what might generally be called “the problem of libido.” Methods for spicing up the sexual life of long-term couples include pills and creams, open marriage, affairs, counseling, and so forth. For most people, these solutions range from absurd to obscene. Despite some attempts, no female Viagra has been developed, and open marriages and affairs not only create moral complications but would require that people overcome vast logistical obstacles in pursuit of sex. The 2011 move Hall Pass made fun of the idea, apparently prevalent enough among married men to lead to the development of the online affairs-seeking website Ashley Madison (where the vast majority of married men talked to robots, had no sex at all, and then got humiliated when hackers revealed names in 2015), that if they could just get their wife’s permission to do so then they could have sex with other women. The women seemed less than thrilled. It has already been established that long-term but temporary forms of birth control are only available to women, and the birth control pill alters the body chemistry of women. For men, there are no serious longterm but temporary forms of birth control. Men are limited to wearing condoms for temporary and sometimes iffy forms of birth control or permanent sterilization from a vasectomy. Vasectomies remove sperm from the seminal fluid but do not reduce its production and the production of semen is what makes the male and female sex drive so different;

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when seminal fluid builds up in the male prostate it requires some form of release. (Some studies show that a constant build-up of fluid can contribute to prostate cancer.) To further the argument, why not reduce the amount of testosterone that boys get injected with in puberty as a means of reducing sexual dimorphism? In his 2013 book The Sports Gene, David Epstein writes, We all begin life as females. Every human embryo is female for the first six weeks of existence. Because mammal fetuses are exposed to a hefty dose of female hormones from the mother, it is more economical to have the default sex be female. In males, in week six, the SRY gene cues the formation of testicles and, inside them, the Leydig cells that synthesize testosterone. Within a month, testosterone is gushing and triggering specific genes to turn on and others off. (p. 61)

That small embryonic change prepares the body for the large change that comes at puberty. Epstein writes, One of the most pronounced physical differences between the sexes is in muscle mass. Men pack more muscle fibers into any given space in the body and have 80 percent more muscle mass in their upper body than women, and 50 percent more in their legs. As far as upper body strength, this translates to a three-standard-deviation difference in strength. That is . . . of a thousand men off the street, 997 would have a stronger upper body than the average woman. “The differences in upper body strength are about what you see in gorillas,” Geary says. “That’s very big. Gorillas are the most sexually dimorphic of our close relatives. The males are about twice the size of the females. So the overall size difference is more than in humans, but the difference in upper body strength is similar. The reason for the similarity to gorillas reflects how sexual selection has shaped human (and gorilla) athleticism. If you want to know whether the male or female of a given species is bigger and stronger, one piece of information is particularly useful: which sex has the higher potential reproductive rate.” (p. 65)

More than anything else in human physiognomy, this difference in body strength indicates that, at some point in the recent human lineage, male aggression against other males and probably females proved to

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be a successful evolutionary strategy for the male genes. As humans moved into civilization, males developed such activities as warfare and competitive sports that enhanced the differences between the male and female physique. Competitive sports, more than any other single factor in Western culture, not only take time away from more useful pursuits but also create analogies for behavior that influence the way people interact in the workplace and through their relationships with family, friends, and society. Young boys absorb this toxicity and then try to take those types of aggressive behaviors into a new society, increasingly a femocracy, where their aggressions actually harm them. The recent phrase “toxic masculinity” is a perfect description for this phenomenon because toxicity lies in the size of the dosage. At the most extreme dose, toxic masculinity leads to violent crimes and warfare. A good example of toxic masculinity, and an amalgam of all its horrors can be seen here (www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxzd7kKm91c) in a YouTube video taken in 2007 at a Marine Corps base in Iraq. The script of the video indicates that a female Marine made a comment about being able to beat up any of the men, and so a boxing match was scheduled between her and one of the male Marines. This is not hidden as a big crowd of mostly men attends, and it appears that a superior officer, in uniform, is refereeing. Both the fighters wear headgear and what look like 16-ounce sparring gloves, as opposed to the 10 or 12 ounces used in regulation fights. The man is not a physical specimen by any means, but he appears to have some boxing skill and immediately pummels the woman. Even after she turns away, he continues to punch her in the face and head. After she is knocked down, she turns to the ropes and appears to want to quit, but the referee does not stop the fight and she is sent back into the match until repeated punches leave her unconscious on the ground. Whoever posted the video seems to gloat that the woman is “choking on her mouthpiece” in written letters across the screen. The woman does revive, but the gist of the video seems to be that she deserved what she got; the comments under the video certainly indicate that. The video shows macho posturing and false bravery. All those men felt that, because a woman dared to enter a male space, she deserved to be beaten unconscious. Women might be allowed to join the Corps but should not challenge men in the male-dominated arena of sports.

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In the summer of 2020, when an all-male police riot squad in Buffalo, New York, pushed down a frail protestor in his seventies so that the man fell back and broke his head, the officers looked like nothing more than a football team running through a tunnel. Dressed for war or sports, amped up on tough-guy adrenaline, the squad could not seem to think of anything to do to the older man other than shove him down. In short, sexual dimorphism in males leads to such activities as sports that accentuate male strength and this creates analogies for behavior that influence the workplace, politics, and society; however, as women increasingly come to create the terms of society those male characteristics become not only out of place but inappropriate and often illegal. Two solutions present themselves to this problem, although the second is more likely to occur than the first. The first solution would be to find a biological cure for sexual dimorphism. Either women could be made more masculine or men more feminine or some combination of the two. A trend seems to be occurring in this direction anyway as female athletes or fitness enthusiasts often take steroids, growth hormones, and estrogen blockers in some combination to develop more-muscular physiques. A number of these women compete in cross-fit or weightlifting competitions. Even these, however, can give a false sense of female strength in comparison to men. Weightlifting strength is usually measured by the completion of a movement with a weight, and a smaller body-size means that the weights don’t move as far. Still, some of these women are able to develop physical strength well beyond the capabilities of average men in the same size range. It might be possible to safely reduce the natural testosterone injection that affects boys in puberty to limit the amount of size and muscle that develop. Boys could still exercise, of course, but could not develop the kind of outlandish strength gains that sometimes occur with weight training for competitive sports. Given that society accepts, as normal, that pubescent girls can have their biology tampered with through birth control pills, why not boys? If boys and men perpetuate 90 percent of violent crimes, are responsible for almost all police violence, and make up most of the military, would it not make sense to biologically limit masculinity and, with it, masculine virtues?

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This process is already occurring as a cultural trend. The 1980s featured several movie action heroes like Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Carl Weathers who were lumpy with muscles and starred in masculine movies. When the movie Titanic was released in 1997 it featured a distinctively feminist romance, where the main character asserted her will against a marriage she did not want by taking a boyfriend of her choosing. That boyfriend, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, connected with a new kind of sex symbol. DiCaprio possessed feminine physical features and expressed feminine relationship values. About the same time, boy-bands like N-Sync and the Backstreet Boys appeared featuring soft-bodied, nearly pre-pubescent boys who sang love ballads. Girls seemed to prefer the idea of romance with boys who exhibited lesser amounts of sexual dimorphism—boys who were almost girls. Currently, Korean pop (K-pop) stars have become Asia’s largest cultural export and probably the most powerful East-to-West cultural phenomenon since Nintendo video games. The male K-pop stars style their hair, wear make-up, and keep a slight physique. Their female fan base can only be described as ecstatic for them. In Japan, so-called genderless men who dress and act like women have been in fashion for a while now. The trend toward gender deconstruction continues to occur in the more enlightened areas of the United States. Still, it’s unlikely that much demand for a testosterone-reduction program will begin in the United States or Western civilization. What can occur is the tearing down of institutions and media that promote such masculine virtues as aggression or celebrate the sexual dimorphism of the sexes. In movies, for example, a male character tends only to express nonviolent sentiments after a career of using violence, and usually that character has to renounce that nonviolence at the end to kill a bad guy or save a good guy. Action heroes, including superheroes, tend to physically beat the bad guy nearly to death and only practice nonviolence in the thin zone between decapitating and killing the perpetrator. Audiences are okay with the bad guy getting offed as long as the good guy tried to do the right thing but then had to kill the bad guy in self-defense. Masculine values can be seen everywhere in media: in comic books, video games, movies, and social media. Sports exemplify competitiveness and dominance. The 2020 ESPN documentary The Last Dance,

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which is primarily about Michael Jordan, features little but anecdotes about how someone or some group disrespected Jordan and he got his revenge through being hypercompetitive and therefore successful on the court. The fact that he belittled teammates and front office staff is seen as the price for success. No one mentions that Jordan’s six NBA championships did nothing positive for the world. Despite a decade and a half of research about the long-term effects of concussions, young boys across the United States are encouraged to smash into each other at high speed during football games and to throw each other to the mat in wrestling matches. In football, the brain damage comes as a result of trying to score touchdowns, but in boxing and mixed martial arts, inflicting brain damage on an opponent is the purpose. Violence, aggression, and masculinity get celebrated on every channel and then reminisced about through highlights. Purveyors of violence and masculinity, our soldiers, must be thanked, saluted, and given discounts at every store. A true femocracy will cease to permit the cultural purveyance of damaging masculine values. The problems of the future, for example, climate change or global pandemics, will require feminine virtues like cooperation and discussion. Feminine values fit better with the modern workplace and culture, and to cripple boys with a culture that extolls masculine behavior is to abuse them. KEY POINTS AND APPLICATIONS TO EDUCATION •  The decision to have children is now a lifestyle choice. Evaluate the societal impact of that. •  How are modern, younger feminists reshaping the concept of lifelong relationships? •  What role will masculinity play in a femocracy? To what extent should masculine values be extolled in society? •  If it is okay to alter a female hormone cycle with birth control pills, is there any reason why young men should not engage in testosterone reduction so as to ameliorate the leftover effects of evolutionary sexual dimorphism?

CONCLUSION

Femocracy will conclude with a caution and a question. The caution is this: Please do not read this book looking for a political agenda. It is certainly not a feminist manifesto. Femocracy can be read as an alternative narrative to the traditional, politically conservative narrative arc that connects a Western civilization narrative with American history. The counter to that history comes in the form of more liberal variations that focus on the enslavement and suppression of African Americans (the most recent manifestation of which comes in the form of the 1619 Project, an attempt to restructure, for secondary students, the foundation of the American narrative so that it begins not with the Pilgrims landing in 1620 but with the arrival of the first slaves in 1619). The narrative put forth in Femocracy opposes both the conservative and liberal narrative of history equally. The traditional narrative makes little sense and so the opposing narratives cannot do much better. A new synthesis is necessary instead that connects the primary developments of modern history with the arc of Western civilization in a comparative manner only offered through the methods of world history. In her book Invisible Women (2019), Caroline Criado Perez builds upon Simone de Beauvoir’s work from the twentieth century. Perez writes that everything from cell phones to public restrooms are designed with men in mind. Sometimes, as is the case with seatbelts and pregnant 153

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women, the results of this mismatch can be tragic. In other cases, for example, the temperature of homes and workplaces, the result is constant discomfort. Interestingly, Perez chose this for her dedication: “For the women who persist: keep on being bloody difficult.” Although her book is brilliant, Perez’s dedication comes in curious terminology: “being bloody difficult” indicates that a male establishment is still in control and needs convincing. This is a consistent problem in feminism, where a woman “being bloody difficult” finds herself checked by public shaming or described using hurtful words. Some women might be able to push forward through the emotional shaming, but it is time to admit that for most women, the fear of those labels is an effective deterrent. In the modern era, the term “Karen” is used to derogate any white woman who uses hostile language and a sense of entitlement against Starbucks baristas or any minority who causes her problems. A Karen wants to talk to the manager so she can be bloody difficult about all the wrong things. Femocracy will be achieved when feminine norms require that men be bloody cooperative when trying to enter a society dominated by feminine attributes. Women will not always, or even frequently, be comfortable standing up to authority or breaking away from social networks for the purpose of achieving social change. The problem with standing out from the group is that this, by necessity, indicates breaking away from group social bonds. Something needs to shift in the way that we consider the Protestant-to-Enlightenment historic concept of the social contract. The concept of the individual relationship to the government was framed in combative terms (see the Second Amendment) as if individual citizens had to fight governments for control of their own selves. This concept now seems antiquated, and more benign governments might function as providers of equality and opportunity or as agencies that check the excesses of powerful institutions like corporations, sports, and universities. Hopefully this book has corrected some historical distortions and raised questions regarding democracy’s role in creating feminism. The purpose is to connect that history to questions, both philosophical and political, regarding the present. That is what makes this a work about historical education, and while the purpose here was to create a new narrative regarding the history of democratic ideals and feminism, the

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educational purpose is mundane: how we think about history influences our concept of ourselves in relation to the historical moment we live in. Because this is a work of education, it should not end with a grand declaration about history but instead with the humble question promised in the introductory paragraph: “Do we, as a society, want a femocracy?” If so, then having it stated as a goal will be useful. If not, then it is incumbent upon the opponents to explain why their historical narrative and future vision is superior. Yes, we have reached the point where that is necessary and that alone justifies the argument in these pages.

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