Modernity and Bourgeois Life by Jerrold Seigel

Author:Jerrold Seigel [Seigel, Jerrold]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781139373272
Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Assertiveness and instability in the gender system

Despite all these grounds for assigning a distinct set of roles and tasks to women, there is much reason to regard the gender system as already unstable and showing signs of weakness even in the period when it seemed most firmly established. The very idealization accorded to women as wives and mothers created a tension with their subordination to men, helping to fuel demands for equality. Noting that many nineteenth-century feminist critics of separate spheres drew on “the conventional assumptions and discourses of domesticity,” Richard Price describes the Victorian years when the ideology of separate spheres appeared most powerful and uncontested as simultaneously the moment when its underlying instability was becoming uncontainable. The suffragist Millicent Fawcett argued that public life could be much improved if “women’s special experiences as women” could “be brought to bear on legislation”; far from making women more like men the result would be that “the truly womanly qualities in them will grow in strength and power.”20 Although Michelle Perrot does not stress the role played by the special virtues attributed to women in calling the system itself into question, she too notes that the moment when the distinctions were most insistently asserted in France, under the Second Empire in the 1860s, was also the point at which public contestations began to mount, producing a clamorous debate about the need for female education.21

Domestic ideology’s assignment of such special qualities to women was not the only reason for its instability, however. Another was that heightened emphasis on the idea that natural differences between women and men justified assigning separate roles to each was itself in part a response to liberal and Enlightened criticism of traditional assumptions about inequality between the sexes. This connection has been most clearly recognized by Lynn Hunt. In 1790 the Marquis de Condorcet wrote that without equality between the sexes there could be no universal claim to human rights: “Either no individual of the human race has true rights, or all of them have the same ones; and he who votes against the rights of another, whatever his religion, his color, or his sex, has from that moment abjured his own rights.” That the Revolution failed to give reality to such ideas has been regarded by some critics as a sign that liberalism and the Enlightenment mounted no serious challenge to traditional gender relations. Taking issue with these views, Hunt argues that the new grounds for gender division that now began to be asserted were themselves evidence that older and often unexamined premises were losing their force. Late eighteenth-century society (in good part for the reasons we have just given) was in no condition to put such views as Condorcet’s into practice, or to countenance the upheavals that attempts to do so would have brought, so that defenders of male superiority easily had the upper hand. But they could no longer maintain it just as before. Far from merely confirming the traditional proscription of women from public life, “liberal political theory made the exclusion of women much more problematic.

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