yonmei

yonmei @ 08:51 pm: On 19th century women - or how radical feminism becomes normal liberal thinking
This post was written in response to Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell on the feministsf blog. The comment thread there is worth reading, too. I was partially inspired to write this because Google reminded me that 28th July 1866 is the day Beatrix Potter was born - who was denied any formal education by her parents, who was rejected as a student at the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, whose scientific papers were rejected by the Royal Society and ignored by the Linnean Society, who discovered the symbiotic relationship between fungi and algae in lichen, and who was expected by her parents to work for them as their unpaid housekeeper - she did not escape from them until she was 40 years old.

In 1806, the year Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell opens, it was taken for granted as a fact of nature that women were inferior to men.

The laws of the United Kingdom did not permit a wife financial independence from her husband - everything she owned was legally his property unless it was bequeathed or given to her with legal conditions that did not permit her husband the right to take and make use of it at will. (There was a distinction between "personal property" which was a husband's absolutely, and "real property", over which he had only "managerial control".) Anything she earned herself, or anything given to her without such conditions, was his absolutely. It was legal and expected for women not to be allowed to work at the same jobs as men, and for women's jobs to pay less than men's jobs. It was normal and expected for the kind of work offered women to pay them far less than a living wage. It was unheard of - and considered markedly unnatural and strange - for a woman to be educated "like a man".

In 19th-century Scotland, thanks to several Acts of Parliament in earlier centuries, it was normal for a woman to be able to read and write - all children went to local schools to learn the three Rs from the schoolmaster. Even in Scotland, though any intelligent boy could aspire to go to the nearest High School, and any boy who succeeded in going to High School could aspire to going on to university and taking a degree, no girl was expected to do more than become literate and numerate. Even that was more than most girls in England could hope for.

It was legal for a father to leave his daughter a share of the family property (her mother would most likely have nothing to leave) if and only if she married a man her brother approved of. It was also legal for a father to leave his daughter nothing at all, not on any conditions. While entails (by which a property devolved on the nearest male heir, leaving all the daughters destitute) were less common than they had been in past centuries, they still existed.

A woman couldn't divorce her husband. A woman's children belonged to her husband, and if he divorced her (in 1803, this was difficult and expensive, but if he could afford it, he could do it), he could legally prevent her from ever seeing her children again. A husband had a right to sexual use of his wife, and had the right under civil law to prosecute her if she refused him. A husband had a right to beat his wife providing he didn't permanently injure her, and had also the right under civil law to prosecute anyone who tried to stop him from beating his wife: anyone who tried to stop him would have to prove that they had cause to think he might kill his wife. If she left him because he beat her, until or unless he divorced her, he could at any time take anything from her - there are actual instances of a man abandoning his wife for decades, returning to find she'd set up a successful business to support herself (she had no right to be maintained by her husband unless she was living with him) and taking all the money for himself.

And this was all normal - as normal as black people being property. Stephen Black may have been made free by Act of Parliament in 1807, but Lady Pole would not have had the right to legal custody of her children until 1839, nor the right to keep money she earned for herself until 1870.

Maintaining that any of this was unjust or unfair was radical feminism, which was as unpopular and mockable by the mainstream as radical feminism still is today. Arguing that women were the equals of men was just acceptable as light drawing-room chat (Jane Austen touches on this in her final draft of the letter scene in Persuasion) but not as any serious argument for women's legal or human rights.

Women were considered to be the inferiors of men - neither as physically nor as mentally capable. That was normal. A man was supposed to take care of his wife and his daughters - if he didn't or couldn't, well, that was too bad for them. In Pride and Prejudice, Mrs Bennett's desperation to have at least one of her daughters marry a wealthy man was cheerfully mocked by a young Jane Austen: Mrs and Miss Bates in Emma receive more respectful treatment, but their poverty was the state to which Mrs Bennett knew she would be reduced if her husband died leaving any of her daughters unmarried.

Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Anne Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Elliot, Charlotte Yonge - all of them wrote 19th-century novels in which they make clear their mental discomfort as intelligent women living in a society in which they were legally and socially discriminated against. All of them were aware that the treatment women received was unjust. But they lived in a culture in which the inferiority of women and the rightfulness of legal and social discrimination against women was taken for granted as normal. Susanna Clarke was born after a hundred and forty years of feminist activism had greatly changed what was considered "normal" for women: when she writes of that culture, she evidently realised she could not convey either a 19th-century woman's sense of injustice nor a 19th-century woman's ingrained knowledge that this injustice and inequality is normal - and so she asserted that it didn't exist.