7

Feminist icons and role models: White, female and middle class

There are many feminist heroines from the past 200 years. The vast majority of them remain hidden from history, with everyday acts the bedrock of feminist change. As Gloria Steinem puts it, ‘Change does come from the bottom up and it will come from girls and women and men who understand that for us all to be human beings instead of being grouped by gender is good for them, too.’¹ This chapter analyses the western women placed on pedestals as feminist heroines, the iconic feminist prophets who also led the way as role models.² Radical in their time, they were women who actively challenged the status quo and dedicated their lives to transforming women’s place and status in society. The heroines in this chapter are those who were the most recovered and celebrated by the feminist movement for their intellectual contributions. They were feminists who challenged Dale Spender’s assertion that ‘only one sex’ was considered theorists.³ This chapter reveals that intellectual feminist heroines were mostly white, middle class and lived in circumstances that enabled them to pursue their work. Their celebration raises the now awkward grounding of western feminism in essentialist enlightenment thinking that – for all its intersectional intentions – it is now part of history and is too culturally homogenous for 21st-century feminisms. As Karen Offen has argued ‘The campaign to end women’s subordination to men that we call feminism is an ongoing, recurring, enduring political project, with deep roots in the European past.’⁴ Indeed the words ‘feminist’ and ‘feminism’ were first used in the 1870s in French political discourse when ‘feminisme was then commonly used as a synonym for women’s emancipation.’⁵ If there are points of feminist transcultural synergy, mimicking other areas of intellectual endeavour, it was white western theorists from large countries who until the end of the 20th century made up the roll call of feminist heroines. Feminist movements around the world, of course, for example in Asia, were ‘simultaneously transnational in outlook and indigenizing in orientation’ and produced their own national heroines.⁶ In the 21st century the west is paying more attention to ‘global feminisms.’⁷

Examining western feminism’s heroines is useful to reveal the movement’s key features. Up until the end of the 20th century there were two ‘waves’ of feminism with thought and action that grew, peaked, faced backlash and then subsided. Thinking through the metaphor of ‘waves’ can be limiting, especially as it fails to recognise incremental ideological change. Waves are, however, helpful for capturing peaks in activism such as in ‘the organized socio-political movements of the nineteenth century,’ and then a second cluster of activism from the 1970s to 1990s.⁸ Importantly, feminist heroines are often heralded in the waves. And they also captured and interrogated important themes across the waves, such as equality versus difference, the axiom of ‘the personal is political’ and the ever-evolving definition of ‘radical.’

Were feminist heroines a new breed of heroic women? On the contrary, there was much continuity with heroic archetypal themes. Feminist heroines were caught up in the iconography of traditional heroines from the past, such as mother figures and Amazons. They were positioned by the movement as role models who experimented with new ways for women to lead lives. Ironically, by the end of the 20th century, their creation and celebration appeared limited and exclusive. Anti-racist and working-class feminists were uncomfortable with a movement that contained few non-western, non-white or working-class heroines. Most recently, rather than challenge its enlightenment underpinnings, ‘marginal’ and ‘other’ stories add ‘diversity’ to the post-modern heroic framework. The result is an anarchic, random assortment of ‘everywoman’ heroines. This chapter recovers and analyses the western feminist movement’s modern heroic icons who were placed on pedestals as deified feminist ancestresses.

Mary Wollstonecraft

Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–97) was an enormous foundational ‘mother’ heroine of first-wave feminism. Elaine Showalter advances her ‘Amazonian spirit’ and argues that in her life and work she ‘anticipates virtually every idea of modern feminism.’⁹ Wollstonecraft operated amidst a time of revolution, a context that set the stage for feminist discourses that were intertwined with other forms of radicalism. She pondered that if the French Revolution was about liberty, equality and fraternity, then what about sisterhood? At a time when women were rendered socially, culturally and legally inferior, Wollstonecraft argued for extending to women the rights of men as citizens.¹⁰ Gaining women’s equality was to become the key objective for feminist heroines. It is important to remember that at that time the liberal ideology of women becoming equal with men was a radical proposition.

Wollstonecraft became the centre of an intellectual group in London that included poet William Blake, writer Thomas Christie and artist and scholar Henry Fuseli. Fuseli, already married, became Wollstonecraft’s mentor, sponsor and publisher. He paid her rent and bills and arranged a maid so that she could focus on her work. Indicative of her pursuit of alternative lifestyles and social change, Wollstonecraft suggested living in his household. It was an example of liberal ideas that would result in her being cast by mainstream society as a threatening ‘hyena in petticoats.’¹¹

FIGURE 7.1 Mary Wollstonecraft.

Credit: Alamy stock photo Image ID C74N5M: https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-mary-wollstonecraft-eighteenth-century-british-writer-38827760.html

As Miriam Brody has pointed out, Wollstonecraft shook the ‘foundation of the family itself.’¹² In 1789, excited by the Revolution, she went to live in France. She became pregnant by her current lover Gilbert Imlay, wrote An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution while pregnant with her daughter Fanny, and subsequently became a solo parent. Suicidal after breaking up with Imlay, she considered she ‘knew that romantic love was dangerous.’¹³ Her experimental life set the stage for feminist icon challengers of the social norms of their times and who as Elaine Showalter argues were ‘anything but saints. They too stumbled, loved the wrong men, took terrible risks, made bad decisions, behaved foolishly, made people angry, alienated their friends, felt despair.’¹⁴

In carving herself a place as an intellectual and writer, Wollstonecraft also set in place a tradition for feminist heroines to follow in her footsteps. It was a movement where knowledge and education were central in recording, sharing and remembering feminist ideas. In 1792 she wrote the key text A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. In the context of the French Revolution that sought liberty and equality for men, the book challenged women’s subservience to men. Wollstonecraft argued that women also had rights and that they should be equal.¹⁵ In doing so she set out a reforming feminist agenda that has remained relevant to the present.

Wollstonecraft believed there could be no liberty or happiness for anyone as long as women were ruled by men. For her, feminism demanded a fundamental societal shift for the common good. Her philosophy for change argued that women must receive an education. She believed that it was bad for men to be ‘tyrant kings’ and ‘important for boys and girls to have equal training of mind and body.’ With her sisters Eliza and Everina and colleague Fanny Blood, Mary Wollstonecraft started a school for girls in London. A second major argument of Wollstonecraft’s was that women should have the right to vote. Third, they should not be the property of men. Rather, they should be financially independent, earn their own money and enter the professions. Fourth, valorising women’s ‘private sphere’ she argued that ‘domestic work is civil work’ and that it should be ‘subject to the same principles, worthy of the same right to be performed by educated citizens.’¹⁶

Her death in childbirth, covered in Chapter 6, was a poignant example of the reality of women’s lives. Later on, American feminist Elizabeth Cady Stanton considered Wollstonecraft a martyr.¹⁷ Her husband, political philosopher William Godwin, published a memoir of her life detailing the private turmoil that accompanied her quest for social reorganisation.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B Anthony

Signalling an increasingly liberal age, universal men’s suffrage became important in modern times. Unsurprisingly, campaigns for women’s suffrage emerged as the cause célèbre of first-wave feminism and it follows that feminist heroines were often those associated with votes for women. For example, in the United States of America, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B Anthony are the standout iconic pair in women’s suffrage agitation. Unlike Wollstonecraft, Elizabeth Cady Stanton had an image as a moderate, unthreatening, motherly heroine. Fitting the pattern of first-wave feminists as white and middle class, she hailed from a prominent family in Johnstown, New York State. In common with many other feminist heroines, Cady Stanton believed that legal change was the way to women’s equality. She herself wanted to be a lawyer, but at the time women were barred from that profession. Cady Stanton married lawyer and abolitionist Henry, with their 1840 honeymoon including a trip to the world anti-slavery convention in London. Indicative of the inappropriateness of women’s presence in public, at the convention women were kept out of sight behind curtains on the balcony.¹⁸

Henry and Elizabeth moved to Seneca Falls, upstate New York, and it was there in July 1848 with Quaker feminist and abolitionist Lucretia Mott that Cady Stanton organised the first American Women’s Rights Convention. The event became a milestone moment for the first wave of feminism. The women wrote a Declaration of Sentiments based on Jefferson’s declaration of American Independence. Signed by 68 women and 32 men at the convention, it set out the grievances of women and became a foundational feminist document. Its demands echoed Wollstonecraft and included voting rights and political participation for women, property rights, women’s health and education reform, divorce and guardianship of children reform. Elizabeth wrote many articles, lobbied legislators and travelled throughout the country lecturing on women’s issues. She conducted that work from her home base that consisted of seven children and a husband who was often away from home.¹⁹

If Elizabeth appeared a moderate and respectable feminist, Susan B Anthony was radical and edgy. Susan heard about Seneca Falls and met Elizabeth in 1851. They formed an impressive partnership. Susan grew up a Quaker, never married, and was considered unnervingly masculine. Commenting on their working relationship Elizabeth said that ‘I forged the thunderbolts, she fired them.’²⁰ Their way of handling public relations, whereby feminists perceived as less-threatening soothed a scared and wary public, was a method that would recur through modern history. Motherly, feminine, heterosexual feminists were reassuring to a sceptical mainstream. In an early act of suffrage activism, in 1872 Anthony illegally voted in the presidential elections, was arrested, put on trial, convicted and fined. In court she argued that women were both persons and citizens and therefore the constitution already empowered them to vote. Seeking further publicity for her stand, she refused to pay the $100 fine.²¹

Globally, places early to grant women’s suffrage shared the presence of liberal and egalitarian beliefs, a surplus of men over women that could have the effect of placing a premium on women’s value, and an absence of ingrained conservatism to overcome. Fittingly, it was the four western mountain states that led the way for the enfranchisement of women in the United States. The first states to grant women the right to vote were Wyoming in 1869, Utah in 1870, Colorado in 1893 and Idaho in 1895. In the colonising American West, settler women were at a premium for their moral, civil and maternal qualities that would bring order to society. Abigail Scott Duniway emerged as a western women’s suffrage heroine. As a journalist, she published The New Northwest, a newspaper that was dedicated to the cause of women’s rights. Scott Duniway had six sons, nearly died in childbirth and wrote a novel.²²

In 1890, the National Women’s Suffrage Association and the American Women’s Suffrage Association merged to redouble efforts to extend votes for women in the United States. Cady Stanton and Anthony produced the first volume of the history of women’s suffrage. Australia was also early, ably led by Vida Goldstein and other suffragists. The State of South Australia passed votes for women in 1894 and the State of Western Australia in 1899. Before World War I they were joined by other US and Australian States. In 1902 Australia enfranchised women at the federal level.²³ In Finland women gained the right to vote in 1906, and spectacularly, the following year 19 women MPs were elected to the Finnish parliament.²⁴ More generally, Scandinavia was early to enfranchise women, with Norway in 1913 and Denmark in 1915.

But it was New Zealand that in 1893 was the first country in the world to grant all women, regardless of race, the right to vote. Suffragist leaders worked with supportive politicians who believed that women’s suffrage would have a moral and civil settling effect. The suffragist campaign leaders were well organised and hard working. Their methods were peaceful and law-abiding, involving pamphlets, letters, public talks, lobbying politicians and, most evocatively, petitions between 1891 and 1893 that gathered 32,872 signatures, or a quarter of New Zealand’s adult women. After multiple attempts in parliament, in 1893 the Electoral Act narrowly passed.

New Zealand’s most iconic suffragist heroine was Kate Sheppard. In 1887 Sheppard became head of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union’s (WCTU) franchise branch and led the campaign for the vote. Tessa Malcolm writes of Sheppard that ‘Hers was a quietly determined, persuasive and disarmingly feminine voice.’ Like Wollstonecraft, Sheppard ‘was motivated by humanitarian principles and a strong sense of justice.’ Her most famous quote is ‘All that separates, whether of race, class, creed, or sex, is inhuman, and must be overcome.’²⁵

FIGURE 7.2 Portrait of Sojourner Truth c. 1864.

Credit: Alamy stock photo ID 2CCT35B: https://www.alamy.com/portrait-of-sojourner-truth-born-isabella-belle-baumfree-c1797-1883-by-the-studio-of-mathew-brady-c1864-image369322951.html

Sojourner Truth

Also intersectional in their beliefs were many diverse ‘hidden figures’ in feminist history. Currently, for example, diverse actors in women’s suffrage and politics more generally are being recovered and new heroines are emerging. For example, Martha S Jones argues that Black women in America have a strong history of fighting against sexism and racism.²⁶ Feminist and abolitionist Sojourner Truth has stood out as a brave 19th-century heroine who led the way for political change. Her book, The Narrative of Sojourner Truth outlines ‘the unpretending narrative of the life of a remarkable and meritorious woman – a life which has been chequered by strange vicissitudes, severe hardships, and singular adventures.’²⁷ Born into slavery as Isabella van Wagener with Dutch as her first language, and mother to at least five children, she gained her freedom in 1828. Sojourner had visions and said that she was called by God. She became a popular travelling missionary. She also became deeply involved in women’s suffrage, speaking at many gatherings.²⁸ Her legendary ‘Ain’t I a Woman?’ speech delivered at the 1851 Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio, captured her intersectional passion for reform.

Suffrage warrior heroines

The most evocative feminist heroines of the past 200 years were the ‘suffragettes,’ those associated with votes for women. The term is often loosely applied to those who, as part of a modern age of reform, sought votes for women as a way for them to become equal with men in society. As universal men’s suffrage signalled men’s equality, campaigns for women’s suffrage became the flagship cause for the first wave of feminism. As Clare Wright puts it

Suffragists are people who advocate for votes for women. Men can be suffragists, and they were. The term is a generic description of a political position, akin to the terms socialist, capitalist or environmentalist. Suffragettes, by contrast, were a specific group of (mostly) women defined by their membership of certain suffrage organisations at a certain time in British history,²⁹

Between 1905 and August 1914, approximately 1,000 women and 40 men were imprisoned in Britain for their activism. Most were from the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), but some were from the Women’s Freedom League (WFL).³⁰

Britain’s late 19th-century suffrage movement shared characteristics with other parts of the western world. Former secretary of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) Ray Strachey recalled that it ‘was confined very largely to people of the professional and political worlds; it proceeded with reasoned argument, and it would have been incorrect to describe it as in any sense a popular movement.’³¹ The NUWSS united 16 urban groups and as Strachey puts it ‘although they were strong and of old standing, their methods of work were quiet and uninteresting.’ They held public meetings, petitioned parliament and wrote letters.³² The counterpart to the likes of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Kate Sheppard was the moderate Millicent Garrett Fawcett. Fawcett led the NUWSS from 1897 to 1919. It was Britain’s largest women’s feminist organisation, dedicated to women’s suffrage through legislative change. Ray Strachey argued in 1931 that in contrast to a suffragette with Fawcett ‘An unshaken reasonableness was evident in everything she did, whether great or small.’³³

Feminist heroines were frequently connected to historical counterparts. For example, Strachey stated that as a child Fawcett was influenced by reading about Grace Darling.³⁴ Joan of Arc was also an enduring inspiration throughout her life.³⁵ Fawcett herself wrote extensively about heroines in history. In 1889 Some Eminent Women of our Time was published, and in 1908 Five Famous Frenchwomen.³⁶ It was her 1897 book on the life of Queen Victoria that displayed an acute awareness of the importance of the monarch as a feminist influence. Strachey comments

for although, of course, she [Fawcett] knew that the Queen disapproved most heartily of all the evidences of the women’s movement, she believed that Victoria was in herself a living proof of its justification. The Queen might say what she liked about women’s sphere being the home and only the home; yet so long as she ruled the country in the efficient and business-like way she did, she remained a wonderful feminist argument; and Mrs. Fawcett determined to make this so plain in her book that no one could miss the moral.³⁷

Importantly, even if heroines such as Victoria were personally anti-feminist, they could bring about a legacy of feminist outcomes. As Dorothy Thompson has argued, Queen Victoria’s strength and example led the way for 20th-century feminism. Feminist outcomes do not necessarily arise from feminist intentions. From the late 19th century onwards, women around the British world dressed as Queen Victoria, believing that her influence would live on, as well as taking on a little of her mantle themselves. From Victoria’s example, women drew strength for involvement in education, welfare and health initiatives for women, and in pursuing elections to public office themselves.³⁸ They embodied and appropriated her actions in ways that led to feminist outcomes often far removed from the Queen’s intentions.

Fawcett grew up to have a wide-ranging interest in politics, including following John Stuart Mill’s ideas and progress in the American Civil War.³⁹ Marriage to Henry Fawcett, a political economy professor who served in parliament as a radical with Mill meant that she moved in political circles.⁴⁰ When Henry died after 17 years of marriage, the victim of a cold that turned to pneumonia and heart disease, 37-year-old Fawcett continued pursuing political projects.⁴¹ Ironically, she retired from political work in 1919, the year that women gained the limited franchise and the right to stand for parliament. When asked why she was not standing for parliament, she replied that she had 73 reasons; 72 were her age and one was because she didn’t want to.⁴² Signalling her decades-long constant leadership and measured presence, obituaries for Fawcett aptly called her ‘the Mother of woman’s suffrage.’⁴³

While Fawcett’s moderate, and largely politically conservative NUWSS was Britain’s largest suffrage organisation, those frustrated and outraged by a lack of success added militancy and radical activism to peaceful and orderly campaigning. In 1903 the WSPU was formed by Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst in Manchester. Sharing a belief in the power of music, the contrasting pieces chosen by the two groups captured their difference. The NUWSS adopted the measured, patriotic Jerusalem as its hymn,⁴⁴ that amidst the patriotism of the World War I set William Blake’s poem to music by Hubert Parry. Meanwhile, in contrast, the WSPU blasted out Ethel Smyth’s The March of the Women, a tune ‘strong and martial, bold with the joy of battle and endeavour.’⁴⁵

Suffragists and suffragettes both drew upon historical heroines to further their cause. According to June Purvis, as the ‘embodiment of female militancy and its persecution,’ Joan of Arc fittingly became the patron saint of the WSPU. A 1909 parade from Hyde Park to Aldwych Theatre was led by Elsie Howey dressed as a suffragist Joan of Arc in armour ‘with a purple, white and green oriflamme and riding on a large white horse.’⁴⁶ An oriflamme is a knight’s banner stemming from Medieval times. The WSPU chose the colours ‘white for purity, purple for dignity and green for hope.’⁴⁷

Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters

It was the Pankhurst family who became the iconic suffragette feminist heroines. Emmeline Pankhurst, matriarch, widow and militant suffragette resorted to enacting ‘Deeds, not words.’⁴⁸ The media compared her to both Florence Nightingale and Joan of Arc. During their lives, members of the Pankhurst family campaigned for a wide variety of causes, but then and subsequently it is their suffrage work that is the most remembered.⁴⁹ Christabel was the eldest child, followed by Estelle Sylvia, and then Henry Francis, who died in childhood from diphtheria. A second son, also called Henry, died of polio aged 20 in 1910. Adela was the youngest.⁵⁰

The WSPU started out with legal activities. Members were busy ‘asking unwelcome questions at Liberal meetings,’ ‘going on importunate deputations to public men’ and ‘marching in small bands to Westminster Hall to try and present petitions.’⁵¹ As time went on without success, however, Emmeline Pankhurst led the move to a controversial ‘civil war’ policy that included the destruction of property. The movement lost those uncomfortable with that move, such as the influential WSPU leaders Emmeline and Frederick Pethwick-Lawrence in 1912.⁵² There were arson attacks on empty buildings, churches and places of historical interest. For example, there was an attempt to burn down Nuneham House, the home of anti-suffragist minister Lewis Harcourt. In Dublin, Mary Leigh and Gladys Evans tried to burn down the Theatre Royal where Prime Minister Asquith was due to speak.⁵³

Frustrated with a lack of progress around The Franchise Reform Bill, in January 1913 even bigger action was taken. Street lamps were broken, ‘Votes for Women’ was painted on the seats at Hampstead Heath, railway carriage seats were slashed, flower beds damaged and golf greens were attacked and burnt with acid. Telephone wires were cut, fuse boxes blown up and boathouses, sports and refreshment pavilions burnt down. Thirteen pictures were hacked in the Manchester Art Gallery. A new house being built for Lloyd George was bombed and bombs were placed at locations such as the Bank of England. If arrested and convicted the radicals faced up to nine months in prison for breaking glass and 18 months to two years for arson.⁵⁴

Prison became an important site of protest where suffragettes became heroines. Imprisoned suffragettes were subject to solitary confinement, handcuffing, frog-marching and beating. In an attempt to gain the political prisoner status that was denied to them as women, they embarked on hunger and thirst strikes.⁵⁵ Emmeline argued that not only did women have no vote to address their issues, but they were denied consideration as political. Attempts at following official channels to be taken seriously seemed futile.⁵⁶ Emmeline’s heroic message was that ‘Even if they kill you and me, victory is assured’ and Sylvia wrote that ‘Her sole doubt was lest she might die at too small a price.’ At one WSPU rally Emmeline was so weak she had to be wheeled to the platform in an invalid chair.⁵⁷

What became quintessentially heroic for suffragettes was the force-feeding that they were subjected to. As Labour MP George Lansbury told Prime Minister Asquith on 25 June 1912, ‘You will go down in history as the man who tortured innocent women.’⁵⁸ As it did for her followers, imprisonment ‘played havoc’ with Emmeline’s body.⁵⁹ Not wanting to have martyrs on their hands to further the suffragette cause, in March 1913 parliament quickly passed the Prisoners’ Temporary Discharge from Ill-health Bill. It was dubbed the Cat-and-Mouse Act, as suffragettes were tortured and then let out to recover long enough before being sent back to prison. In one episode, after a nine-day hunger strike with only water, Emmeline was released on licence from Holloway. Too ill to be returned to prison, she was taken to a nursing home and recovered with raw eggs and lemon.⁶⁰ In all, Emmeline ‘was released nine times after hunger and thirst strikes, only to be rearrested when her brief respite was up.’⁶¹

Christabel

By 1912, frustration at a lack of progress led to an ever-more militant suffragette position. On trial at the Old Bailey on 15 May, Christabel Pankhurst’s defiant words captured the radical resort of the women:

They say we are going to get heavy sentences. I say we might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb. Let them give us seven years if they like. I am ready for it … we shall do our bit … even if it is burning down a palace.⁶²

Evoking warrior heroines, Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence called Christabel ‘the Maiden Warrior.’⁶³ Militant Christabel viewed the WSPU as ‘a fighting organization.’⁶⁴ She fought for change from exile in Paris as the editor of Suffragette. Christabel also became increasingly interested in issues of morality and sexuality. The new slogan appearing in the Suffragette was ‘Votes for women and chastity for men.’⁶⁵ It was reformer Josephine Butler who had earlier campaigned against the state regulation of prostitution through the appeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts, repealed in 1886.⁶⁶ In her footsteps, Christabel became concerned with a number of first-wave moral maternal feminist causes, including sexual disease control reform.⁶⁷ With reference to venereal disease, in 1913–14 Christabel wrote about Man not as ‘the lord of creation,’ but ‘the exterminator of the species.’⁶⁸ Christabel went on to embrace evangelical Christianity (Second Adventism) and in 1940 settled in California. The Pankhurst sisters led increasingly divergent lives, with Sylvia’s son Richard commenting that Christabel and Sylvia were ‘In no sense kindred spirits, they lived in different spatial, psychological and political worlds, which scarcely impinged on each other.’⁶⁹

Sylvia

Sylvia was the most politically left-wing of the Pankhursts. Former long-time British Labour member of parliament Barbara Castle writes of Sylvia’s ‘extraordinary heroism’ that included eight hunger strikes. On one occasion ‘After twenty-eight hours of this torture she was medically examined and released. She stumbled into a taxi to her Suffragette friends’ nursing home and was put into bed.’⁷⁰ After release Sylvia would be hidden in London’s East End. Castle writes that,

Weak with endless hunger and thirst strikes, she was always racked with pain. It was usually, she said, the second day after her release that she suffered ‘an absolute collapse; twenty-four hours of blinding headache and acute illness of the whole frame.’ She would carry on writing articles, planning meetings and giving interviews from her bed. Sometimes she had to be carried to the meeting in a chair and dosed with brandy before she got up to speak.⁷¹

From 1913 Sylvia broke away from the WSPU to form the East London Federation of the Suffragettes.⁷² Her activism with the poor of that neighbourhood involved fighting for better working conditions and wages, housing, maternity clinics, welfare centres and the provision of factory inspectors.⁷³ Her son Richard later referred to her ‘ceaseless activism’ that involved socialist, libertarian and freethinking beliefs. Sylvia opposed World War I, joined the Communist Party, was active in anti-fascism in the 1930s and died in 1956 in Ethiopia, where she had edited a newspaper and set up a hospital.⁷⁴ Her partner Silvio Corio had died in 1954.⁷⁵

Adela

Adela Pankhurst has occupied an awkward position in history. Verna Coleman suggests that like her father she could be tactless in pursuing different beliefs and causes, causing embarrassment.⁷⁶ Coleman argues that ‘Always in the thick of things, living for drama and excitement, often arrogant, sometimes flippant, but never bored, Adela Pankhurst was largely the product of her enthusiast, activist upbringing in the melodramatic Pankhurst style.’⁷⁷ Her earlier beliefs were socialism and pacifism. Sent to Melbourne, Australia, in 1914,⁷⁸ she married and had children, and continued her socialist, pacifist and feminist activism. Then, in an apparent philosophic flip, in November 1941 she became a member of right-wing Australia First⁷⁹ and was later interned for her pro-Japanese sentiments that argued for an alliance with the Japanese, then members of the Axis powers. Adela later worked with special needs children and died in 1961, a convert to Catholicism.

Feminist martyrdom

In the summer of 1913 the women’s suffrage cause gained its modern heroic martyr. According to mythmaking, on 8 June British suffragette Emily Wilding Davison (1872–1913) ‘threw herself under the King’s horse at the Derby.’⁸⁰ In reality, she died four days later from injuries received after running onto the racecourse and trying to take the reins of the King’s horse.⁸¹ Through her untimely death, Davison became a flashpoint for feminist sacrifice. The cause had a martyr and her 14 June funeral procession through London mourned the extremes necessary to fight for women’s equality.⁸² Cast as a mad extremist by her opponents, feminists such as June Purvis and Liz Stanley and Ann Morley have rehabilitated Davison as a rational heroine.⁸³ Considering her death as a ‘defining moment in British political history,’ June Purvis concludes that Davison ‘was a sensible, level-headed, religious woman, a risk-taker who probably did not intend to die.’⁸⁴ She adds that ‘Although we will never know what went through her mind that fateful day, the suffragettes understood her action, a desperate measure undertaken by a clever, level-headed woman for the cause of democracy.’⁸⁵

In death, Davison became an heroic martyr, taking on an archetypal depth that involved an important spiritual element. Marie Mulvey-Roberts has argued that

a discourse of religiosity had permeated the militants. Joan of Arc was not out of place as their patron saint. The beatification of suffragette heroines, such as Emily Wilding and Constance Lytton, and the enshrinement of the charismatic leaders, Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst, contributed towards an iconography of woman worship and martyrdom.

Emphasising their purity and devotion, the militant and socialist feminist Annie Kenney compared suffragettes to nuns.⁸⁶ In fighting for women’s equality, suffragettes often evoked religious language. For example, in 1909 Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence spoke of suffragettes hunger-striking for their cause, who were then forcibly fed as ‘saints and warriors of today’ who had been ‘called to be partakers of the cross and passion of the martyrs who, by their agony endured for their faith … [and] brought hope, redemption, and release into the world of sin and sorrow.’⁸⁷ As June Purvis argues ‘Although men might control women’s bodies, the spirit could rise, in a Christ-like way, above the physical suffering, despite the personal cost. Such a spiritual victory would eventually convince men of the justice of their cause.’⁸⁸ As Emmeline Pankhurst put it:

I want to say right here, that those well-meaning friends on the outside who say that we have suffered these horrors of prison, of hunger strikes and forcible feeding, because we desired to martyrise ourselves for the cause, are absolutely and entirely mistaken. We never went to prison in order to be martyrs. We went there in order that we might obtain the rights of citizenship. We were willing to break laws that we might force men to give us the right to make laws. That is the way men have earned their citizenship. Truly says Mazzini that the way to reform has always led through prison.⁸⁹

Feminist heroines were acutely aware of the complex multiple identities of women that could unite them, as well as divide, frequently pointing out that treatment meted out by the authorities varied according to class.⁹⁰ For example, heroine Lady Constance Lytton’s experience provided stark evidence of class difference. In 1914 Lytton’s autobiographical account Prisons and Prisoners was published.⁹¹ It recounted how the first two times she went to prison in 1909 she was

given special privileges on account of her rank and family influence. In spite of her protests and her earnest pleadings to be accorded the same treatment as other suffrage prisoners, the snobbish and cowardly authorities insisted in retaining Lady Constance in the hospital cells and discharging her before the expiration of her sentence.

Significantly, Lytton had a medical condition involving a weak heart, which the authorities were aware of and respected.⁹² As Lady Lytton she was examined upon arrival at the prison and sent to the hospital.⁹³

According to Emmeline Pankhurst, ‘Smarting under the sense of the injustice done her comrades in this discrimination, Lady Constance Lytton did one of the most heroic deeds to be recorded in the history of the suffrage movement.’ She cut off her ‘beautiful hair,’ dressed in ‘cheap and ugly clothing’ and assumed a disguise as ‘Jane Warton.’ Arrested in a demonstration at Newcastle, she was imprisoned in Walton Gaol in Liverpool. As Jane Warton she was not given a proper medical examination and was ‘subjected to the horrors of forcible feeding.’ When being force-fed ‘Owing to her fragile constitution she suffered frightful nausea each time, and when on one occasion the doctor’s clothing was soiled, he struck her contemptuously on the cheek.’⁹⁴

Lytton was released after her true identity was discovered, ‘but she never recovered from the experience, and [was] now a hopeless invalid.’⁹⁵ Then in May 1912 she suffered a stroke, was left paralysed down one side and had to be dependent upon the care of her mother.⁹⁶ Her mission to highlight the forgotten women suffragettes and their unequal treatment came at great personal cost and ‘her health was permanently destroyed.’⁹⁷

Constance Lytton and Emily Davison became ‘everywoman’ representing those who had suffered and died for the cause. As Emmeline Pankhurst wrote in her 1914 account My Own Story,

It is not possible to publish a full list of all the women who have died or have been injured for life in the course of the suffrage agitation in England. In many cases the details have never been made public, and I do not feel at liberty to record them here.⁹⁸

First-wave intersections

It is important to recognise that many radical activists were also feminists. Referring to Asia’s women’s suffrage movement, Louise Edwards has highlighted the need to untangle ‘complex connections between feminists and other political lobbyists.’⁹⁹ Her argument can be extended transnationally. An enduring transcultural theme for feminist political heroines was the gendered position that they occupied in their respective movements. Markievicz incorporated elements of feminism as part of her Irish republican beliefs. When it came to everyday matters, despite their egalitarian philosophies, radical movements could be sexist. For example, Anne Haverty notes of Irish women revolutionaries, including Constance Markievicz that ‘In general, however, the women were in the background, occupied with raising funds, printing and distributing anti-enlistment pamphlets, getting first aid boxes together and attending the endless round of meetings that these things demanded.’¹⁰⁰

Another surge of suffragette militancy lasted until the outbreak of war in 1914. Suffragettes put down their arms in order to support the war effort. At least partly as a reward and in recognition of their essential contribution, in 1918 women in Britain over the age of 30 years, with minimum property qualifications, were granted the vote. In America, the 19th Amendment passed in 1920. In a twist of fate, Emmeline Pankhurst had become a patriot and then pro-empire in the post-war years. June Purvis argues that this ‘positioned her not far from the more conservative women of her time’ and made her ‘unfashionable’ to feminists by the end of the 20th century.¹⁰¹

Constance Markievicz stood for election to the British Parliament in 1918. Running for the Sinn Fein political party in the St Patrick’s Division of Dublin, she wrote to the IWFL ‘One reason I’d love to win is that we could make St Patrick’s a rallying ground for women and a splendid centre for constructive work by women. I am full of schemes and ideas.’¹⁰² One of only 17 women candidates in the United Kingdom, she became the first woman ever elected to the British Parliament. In accordance with Sinn Fein policy she did not take up her seat, but instead sat with her party colleagues in the newly formed Dail.¹⁰³

Votes for women is often considered the cause célèbre for first-wave feminists and symbolically it represented women’s equality with men. Overall, women moved to being humans in their own right rather than appendages to men. Stopping violence and abuse of all kinds against women was a major focus. To the new post-war generation, first-wave feminism, with its oft-times maternal feminist emphasis, was old-fashioned and cast as historic. By the 1920s it was possible to look back and view a movement that had emerged in the west, especially in western Europe and the United States of America, as well as Australasia. First-wave feminists were usually – but not exclusively – middle or upper class and highly educated. They were often married to prominent lawyers, academics and politicians and moved in their circles. As in the early days they were barred from a professional life so they organised for reform from the private sphere of women’s clubs. Often growing out of Church groups, there was an emphasis on women’s purity and moral value, with their elevated position in the home used to justify their place in public. The movement often featured liberal intentions of women becoming equal with men and usually from a maternal feminist standpoint. Of course, radicalism of left-wing and pacifist persuasion and intersectionality was present, and humanitarianism was upheld. First-wave feminism achieved many social reforms.

Second-wave feminism

Continuing its western liberal ideological roots, a second wave of western feminist heroines was invented and celebrated. Again, it was the intellectual writers who became heroines, their books circulating, raising feminist consciousness and becoming second-wave feminist touchpoints. Public rallies, legal challenges and women’s organisations worked for feminist change, but their heroines went largely unnamed. It was the feminist authors whose readily available paperback books articulated how many women felt who became feminist icons. Capturing the power of words to change the world, Susan Mitchell argues that ‘in tandem with the activism of the second wave of the women’s movement’ certain bestselling books ‘changed the way that millions of women viewed themselves and their choices.’¹⁰⁴ Mitchell considered that these 20th-century heroines were able to work ahead of slow-changing political structures to be ‘the scribes, the catalysts and pioneers of social revolution which generated the most dramatic and long-lasting changes to our lives that we have witnessed in the latter part of this century.’¹⁰⁵

Mitchell categorised the heroic status of these ‘icons, saints and divas of feminism.’ First, they were icons because their work transformed lives and transcended their era and location, having an ongoing impact.¹⁰⁶ Second, they were modern-day saints for their secular canonisation, and for the elements of worship as well as martyrdom that surrounded them. And third, they were divas stepping out centre stage and ‘singing their literary arias to the world, full-throated and with passion.’¹⁰⁷ These heroines built upon, pushed forward and also challenged heroic archetypes.

Simone de Beauvoir

French feminist writer, academic, philosopher and activist Simone de Beauvoir was the first iconic feminist heroine of a second wave of feminism. She was ‘acknowledged as the modern feminist messiah, the mother of the modern women’s liberation movement, a revered figure whose funeral in Paris was a great public event.’¹⁰⁸ Importantly, de Beauvoir set the stage for an intellectual second wave of feminism that focused on ideas and spread information globally. Toril Moi argues that ‘Simone de Beauvoir is the emblematic intellectual woman of the twentieth century.’¹⁰⁹ Like Mary Wollstonecraft, she set out an agenda that was both new and presented enduring challenges for feminists. When Simone de Beauvoir’s highly controversial The Second Sex was first published in 1949, she couldn’t ‘sit in Paris cafes without people pointing at her and unleashing their derision.’¹¹⁰

Like Mary Wollstonecraft, de Beauvoir was clearly ensconced in European intellectual traditions. She was a top student who studied with famous male thinkers such as existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre. Elaine Showalter argues that it was her early years studying and teaching in a predominantly masculine world that led her to an awareness that women were second class citizens who were defined and objectified in relation to men.¹¹¹ The Second Sex is a marker of the arrival of a western feminist second wave. In that book de Beauvoir importantly argued that ‘One is not born a woman, one becomes one.’¹¹² This articulation of the difference between biological determinism and social construction was a key departure from the engulfing maternalism of the first wave; second-wave feminism would treat women’s biology and motherhood differently. De Beauvoir argued that women were socialised into their roles and that they should not be defined or limited by their biological functions. Significantly, she positioned women as the ‘other’ or the second and inferior sex. Feminism’s focus on theorising around ‘the body,’ self-actualisation and consciousness-raising all owe much to her. Dedicated as she was to exploring alternatives to heterosexual marriage, de Beauvoir was in a long-term open relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre. She chose not to settle down in domesticity with American writer Nelson Algren. And in later life Sylvie Le Bon became her adopted daughter and heir.¹¹³

Emphasising de Beauvoir’s significance, at the end of the 20th century, her biographer Deirdre Bair concluded that

She was largely responsible for creating the current feminist revolution that changed the lives of half of the human race in most parts of the world, and to the end of her days she was eager to challenge any nation or individual that interfered with the rights of women.¹¹⁴

Throughout her life she worked for equality for women, reproductive rights and legal rights through legislative change. As was a feature of the feminist movement, de Beauvoir was connected to a variety of left-wing, radical organisations and causes. She opposed French colonialism in Algeria and US intervention in Vietnam.¹¹⁵ When the activism of second-wave feminism broke out at the end of the 1960s, de Beauvoir became a heroine and ‘spiritual mother’ to a new generation of feminists. From 1970 she held a high public profile as an activist and feminist in the women’s liberation movement.¹¹⁶

Betty Friedan

De Beauvoir influenced the second-wave feminists who followed her, notably Betty Friedan, Germaine Greer, Kate Millett and Naomi Wolf.¹¹⁷ American writer and activist Betty Friedan became an iconic feminist heroine. It was Friedan’s 1963 The Feminine Mystique that echoed the boredom present a century earlier in the writing of Florence Nightingale urging women to awake (see Chapter 4). Carolyn G Heilbrun summarises The Feminine Mystique as ‘rightly viewed as a revolutionary text, inciting women weary of their suburban, dependent life to something more rewarding.’¹¹⁸ Friedan captured the imaginations of largely white, middle-class women who were living the ‘feminine mystique’ – a suburban dream that they now viewed as a nightmare. Friedan expressed a common sentiment held by middle-class women who wanted ‘opportunity, recognition, fulfilment, success, a chance to live their own dreams beyond the narrow definition of “womanhood” that had limited their lives.’¹¹⁹ Friedan wrote of the frustration, anger and guilt that she felt living in post-war baby boom America and called ‘the problem that had no name.’ She described the situation that many women found themselves living in, or were expected to aspire to: living in the suburbs caring for a husband and children with no career. Unfulfilled by living for others, she asked ‘is this all that there is?’ With a focus on liberation, she suggested ‘Who knows what women can be when they are finally free to become themselves?’¹²⁰

Along with a cluster of second-wave feminists, Friedan was Jewish. Susan Mitchell has suggested that the strong Jewish contribution to second-wave feminism may have arisen from role models such as anarchist and feminist Emma Goldman (1869–1940) and politician Golda Meir, or out of an empathy for outsiders and the presence of strong Jewish religious women role models.¹²¹ In addition, more generally, the United States produced many second-wave feminist heroines as part of a culture of nurturing success.¹²²

Friedan played an important part in building the American organisational structure of second-wave feminism. In 1966 she was one of the co-founders of the National Organisation for Women (NOW), dedicated to women becoming equal with men in American society. Friedan wrote NOW’s statement of purpose, ‘The purpose of NOW is to take action to bring women into full participation in the mainstream of American society now, exercising all the privileges and responsibilities thereof in truly equal partnership with men.’ Importantly, there was the intention of being part of a feminist global agenda, of being ‘part of the world-wide revolution of human rights now taking place within and beyond our national borders.’ Friedan concluded her statement:

WE BELIEVE THAT women will do most to create a new image of women by acting now, and by speaking out in behalf of their own equality, freedom, and human dignity – not in pleas for special privilege, nor in enmity toward men, who are also victims of the current, half-equality between the sexes – but in an active, self-respecting partnership with men. By so doing, women will develop confidence in their own ability to determine actively, in partnership with men, the conditions of their life, their choices, their future and their society.¹²³

Friedan was NOW’s first president from 1966–70. During that time she led lobbying the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to enforce laws against sex discrimination in employment, and banning ‘Help Wanted’ ads that were segregated by sex. Airlines were stopped from hiring female-only flight attendants who were required to resign when they married or turned 32. From 1968, NOW endorsed the legalisation of abortion. Friedan ended her presidency by calling for a ‘Women’s Strike for Equality.’¹²⁴

Germaine Greer

If American feminist heroines were largely liberal, out of Australia, via British university finishing school emerged Germaine Greer. Her untamed, feisty determination to push through patriarchal boundaries evoked Wollstonecraft and de Beauvoir. Biographer Christine Wallace calls Greer an ‘untamed shrew’ and sums her up as ‘the maverick of mavericks, flawed, sometimes flailing, but always fighting.’¹²⁵ Germaine Greer overtly intervened in feminist history when she started The Female Eunuch with the sentence ‘This book is a part of the second feminist wave.’¹²⁶ Recognising the moderate and liberal element of Friedan’s feminism, Greer pointed out what she saw as continuity between Friedan, NOW and first-wave feminism. She wrote that ‘There are feminist organizations still in existence that follow the reforming tracks laid down by the suffragettes.’¹²⁷ On the contrary, her track was different. Referring to ‘the old suffragettes’ she wrote that ‘the new emphasis is different. Then genteel middle-class ladies clamored for reform, now ungenteel middle-class women are calling for revolution.’¹²⁸

Picking up on de Beauvoir’s ideas of sexuality, in 1970, The Female Eunuch subversively challenged womanhood, sex, love and society. Greer concluded that ‘Liberty is terrifying, but it is also exhilarating.’¹²⁹ She argued that female sexuality had been ‘masked and deformed.’¹³⁰ Women were cut off from their sexuality to the extent that they were metaphorically castrated like a eunuch.¹³¹ They needed to become conscious, as Greer commented ‘For me it’s about women becoming living beings.’ Self-actualisation and consciousness-raising became a key part of the second wave.

Gloria Steinem

American professional journalist, writer and activist Gloria Steinem emerged as an enduring and widely popular feminist heroine. A feature of second-wave feminism was setting up alternative women’s presses, refuges and health centres away from those controlled by men and patriarchal thinking. One of Steinem’s important achievements was with Patricia Carbine to found the American feminist magazine Ms. ¹³² ‘Ms’ was a new feminist honorific that rejected and offered an alternative to ‘Miss’ and ‘Mrs’ – both titles (honorifics) that categorised girls and women in relation to patriarchy, explicitly through their marital status. Feminists elsewhere also set up similar publications, continuing the first wave’s operation of spreading knowledge through its own publications. For example, from 1972 to 1997, the appropriately named Broadsheet was New Zealand’s monthly feminist publication started by Sandra Coney, Anne Else, Rosemary Ronald and Kitty Wishart. Broadsheet was run by a collective. Its content ranged from feminist politics and economics to arts and culture.¹³³

In 1969 feminist heroine Kate Millett came to public attention with the publication of her bestselling Sexual Politics. The book was a direct critique of sex, power and patriarchy that exposed sexism and misogyny in the works of ‘great’ male writers responsible for the literary canon. Millett aimed to deeply unsettle dominant attitudes and, hoping for social change, concluded that ‘It may be that a second wave of the sexual revolution might at last accomplish its aim of freeing half the race from its immemorial subordination – and in the process bring us all a great deal closer to humanity.’¹³⁴

Especially in its public image, feminism put on a predominantly heterosexual front. Carolyn G Heilbrun has argued that around 1970 Friedan and NOW were anti-lesbian.¹³⁵ Indeed, The Feminine Mystique and NOW’s early years were grounded in heteronormativity, as were the underlying intentions and projects of many first- and second-wave feminists. Fear of the way that radical feminists were treated by public opinion was age-old. In such a climate, feminist heroines with different opinions could be supportive of each other. For example, a bizarre example from 1970 shows the need for feminists to put on a less radical public face than represented in its membership. With echoes of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B Anthony’s relationship, at a feminist conference Gloria Steinem defended Kate Millett against charges that she was a lesbian. Millett’s recent coming out as bisexual had resulted in a media attack on her sexuality. Steinem held Millett’s hand in support through a ‘Kate is Great’ press conference and extended support and solidarity.¹³⁶ Perceived as a liberal, attractive, heterosexual woman, Steinem was able to defend her more radical friends. Winifred Conkling argues that in contrast, Betty Friedan wanted lesbians ‘kept in the shadows.’¹³⁷

Writing about their own lives: the personal is political

In her 1970 collection Sisterhood is Powerful, American feminist Robin Morgan coined the feminist catchphrase ‘the personal is political.’ The phrase both captured the need to recast how power worked and articulated a feature in the work of feminist heroines from Wollstonecraft onwards.¹³⁸ Morgan’s mixing of public and private lives owed much to de Beauvoir, who, for example, had argued that ‘There is no divorce between philosophy and life.’¹³⁹ De Beauvoir followed her conviction through by writing four detailed autobiographical books. For example, the third volume published in 1963, Force of Circumstance, contained comments on current affairs and private relationships from 1945 to 1963.¹⁴⁰ Betty Friedan clearly wrote The Feminine Mystique out of her own life. Her subsequent books and lectures continued to be intertwined with her life experiences. It Changed My Life: Writings on the Women’s Movement (1976) was followed in 1981 by The Second Stage, a book that argued that new current feminist themes included men and masculinity and valuing women’s gendered work. In The Fountain of Age (1993), Friedan took on the issue of ageing from a positive perspective. Her memoir, Life So Far, was published in 2000. After The Female Eunuch, Germaine Greer’s many books often mirrored changing priorities in her own life; Daddy, We Hardly Knew You (1989) on recovering her father’s life and examining family relationships and The Change: Women, Ageing and the Menopause (1991).

Gloria Steinem’s biographer Carolyn G Heilbrun considers Steinem ‘a remarkably open person.’¹⁴¹ Her work also developed embodied themes. For example, Revolution from Within (1992) tackled the importance of women maintaining their self-esteem by looking within themselves. Turning the usual order of Morgan’s phrase around, Steinem advocated that ‘the political is personal.’ Reflecting liberal politics and choice discourse, Steinem argued that every woman should be the centre of her own experience.¹⁴² Courted by the moderate NOW, Steinem was interested in race and class. In 1969 she had an epiphany concerning abortion reform after hearing other women’s stories and relating them to hers.¹⁴³ When she married on 3 September 2000 aged 66 to David Bale she said that she hadn’t changed, but marriage laws had and that made an equal marriage possible.¹⁴⁴ Speaking out against gun violence is her most recent work.¹⁴⁵

After heady times when feminist icons surfed its crest, the tide turned on the second wave. This began happening earlier than often thought. By the early 1970s the radical second-wave ideas had emerged, leaving the hard work of turning ideas into action, often in a difficult climate. One sign of a waning second wave was a second generation’s revision of its ideas. For example, as developed in Chapter 8, Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth (1990) argued that the idea of beauty or glamour was the last thing keeping women from true liberation. In a similar vein to other second-wave feminist icons, Naomi Wolf went on to write more books, and ones that combined the personal and political and spanned a wide range of humanitarian issues. Fire with Fire (1993) challenged women to take on the androcentric paid workplace. Unafraid to illustrate with personal stories and focusing on women’s bodies, there was Vagina: A New Biography (2012), Promiscuities (1997) focused on women’s sexuality and Misconceptions (2001) centred on pregnancy and childbirth. Wolf also wrote on a wide range of humanitarian issues, including LGBTQ+ rights (Outrages: Sex, Censorship and the Criminalization of Love, 2019), the perceived erosion of American freedom (The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot, 2007) and the practice of democracy (Give me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolt Revolutionaries, 2008). She also spoke out for peace and the environment.

As captured by Susan Faludi, there was a discernible mounting backlash against feminism. In Backlash, The Undeclared War against American Women (1991) Faludi noted feminist successes in areas such as legislative change, but documented attempts from the media and lobby groups to stall these advances and to fight back against second-wave advances. In particular, the feminist pro-choice movement was at loggerheads with anti-abortion activists. Faludi concluded that ‘Whatever new obstacles are mounted against the future march toward equality, whatever new myths invented, penalties levied, opportunities rescinded or degradations imposed, no-one can ever take from women the justness of their cause.’ Faludi subsequently wrote about shifting masculinity in Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man (1999). The Terror Dream: What 9/11 Revealed about America (2008) revealed the impact on feminism in the response to that terrorist attack.

A number of iconic works of fiction captured the essence of women’s status in society. More so than the first wave, fiction became an important tool of the second wave. Marilyn French’s novel The Women’s Room (1977) was about women emerging from being victims and objects to authentic subjects. Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1983) won the Pulitzer Prize and was part of feminism’s intersectional ‘spiritual quest’ that involved touching minds and souls.¹⁴⁶ In 1993 Toni Morrison, won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Her work told complex social and cultural stories of the Black American past, as in her most famous novel Beloved (1987). With themes of overcoming adversity and finding strength in community, Maya Angelou’s autobiographical writing and poetry, starting with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969) became a feminist mainstay.

In many ways, second-wave feminists continued the work of the first-wave feminists, directly attempting to increase women’s status in society through equality with men. Both waves advocated for the legal, social and economic reform of society, and of women ‘breaking glass ceilings’ and accessing new areas of work. If the first wave was partly about women’s education and entry into the professions, second-wave feminist heroines were those who had directly benefited. Health and women’s control over their bodies was an important part of both waves. Building upon the first wave, the second was able to extend women’s public participation in society. Both waves protested in the streets, ran their own alternative presses and retreated to segregated spaces. Both waves fostered international connections with Gloria Steinem commenting that ‘The contagion of feminism is crossing boundaries of space and language’ and that ‘Women on every continent are beginning to question their status.’¹⁴⁷ As Steinem put it in 2020 ‘We will not be quiet, we will not be controlled, we will work for a world in which all countries are connected. God may be in the details, but the Goddess is in connections.’¹⁴⁸

Ideologically, always complex, feminism became increasingly diverse. Ideologically, liberal, radical and socialist feminists were represented in both waves. Importantly, there was an ongoing tension between equality and difference – whether women should join an androcentric world and reform it from within, or whether forming a separate and different space was preferable. For all of the tension and complexity over lesbian feminism and cultural radical feminism, the second wave was not diverse enough. By the end of the 1980s there was a crisis of representation concerning in particular racism, Eurocentrism and elitism. In her 1981 book on Black women and feminism scholar bell hooks, drawing upon Sojourner Truth’s 1851 speech, had to ask Ain’t I a Woman?¹⁴⁹ The woman subject ‘herself’ was under question, leading to impassioned generational differences.

The waves also had their differences. While overall the first wave had religious underpinnings and set out to remedy family breakdown, challenging the traditional family unit and supporting contraception and the right to choose an abortion was a big part of second-wave feminism. In the second wave a western ‘designer feminism’ connected to glamour and celebrity, as would become common in feminisms beyond the second wave, played out in literature, the universities and the media. Ironically, second-wave feminists were ultimately about ‘humans’ as an important grouping rather than gender, whereas subsequent third wave, and post-waves took up intersectional identity politics as their raison d’être.

Conclusion

At a 1968 protest in Atlantic City against a Miss America beauty pageant, protesters seeking women’s liberation threw items including bras, high heeled shoes and false eyelashes into a ‘freedom’ rubbish bin.¹⁵⁰ That one event inspired a pervasive media myth of feminists as ‘bra burners.’ As Susan Mitchell has summarised, feminist icons of the second wave were ‘extraordinary warrior queens they have been very vulnerable to attack, but they are also great survivors.’¹⁵¹

With hindsight, it is easy to critically view the limits of feminist heroines and their western, intellectual traditions that could overgeneralise sameness and deny intersectional difference. But context is important: feminist heroines were warriors for social change in challenging times. They often supported intersectional objectives and were allies to those whose voices went unheard. And they were icons and role models to their many counterparts and followers. Overall, feminist icons advocated women having lives of choice, diversity and substance. In the 21st century, the feminist waves and their associated focus on western heroines are up for revision. Rather than knocking feminist heroines off their pedestals, a way forward is to consider feminism’s global similarities and differences and examine how framings of that history create particular heroines. As Chapter 8 reveals, rather than feminist heroines of substance, it was glamour icons, for whom image was at their core, who came to occupy the modern central stage.

Notes

1 Gloria Steinem, I know This to Be True: On Integrity, Empathy and Authenticity (Auckland: Upstart Press, 2020), 59.

2 Winifred Conkling, Ms Gloria Steinem: A Life (New York: Feiwel and Friends, 2020), 130.

3 Dale Spender (ed), Feminist Theorists: Three Centuries of Women’s Intellectual Traditions (London: The Women’s Press Limited, 1983/1992), 1.

4 Karen Offen, European Feminisms, 1700–1950: A Political History (Stanford: Stanford University Press), 1.

5 Offen, European Feminisms, 19.

6 Mina Roces and Louise Edwards (eds), Women’s Movements in Asia: Feminisms and Transnational Activism (London and New York: Routledge, 2010), back cover.

7 See Lucy Dulap, Feminisms: A Global History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020).

8 Offen, European Feminisms, 25.

9 Elaine Showalter, Inventing Herself: Claiming a Feminist Intellectual Heritage (Basingstoke and Oxford: Picador, 2002), 39, 21.

10 Miriam Brody, ‘Mary Wollstonecraft: Sexuality and Women’s Rights (1759–1797)’ in Spender, Feminist Theorists, 40–59, 40.

11 Brody, ‘Mary Wollstonecraft,’ 40.

12 Brody, ‘Mary Wollstonecraft,’ 40–1.

13 Brody, ‘Mary Wollstonecraft,’ 42.

14 Showalter, Inventing Herself, 13.

15 Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (Koln: Konemann, 1798/1998).

16 Brody, ‘Mary Wollstonecraft,’ 58.

17 Showalter, Inventing Herself, 38–9.

18 Ruth B Moynihan, ‘Susan B Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Abigail Scott Duniway’ in Sara Hunt (ed), Heroines: Remarkable and Inspiring Women (Glasgow: Saraband, 1995), 74–9, 74.

19 Moynihan, ‘Susan B Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Abigail Scott Duniway,’ 74.

20 Moynihan, ‘Susan B Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Abigail Scott Duniway,’ 77.

21 Moynihan, ‘Susan B Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Abigail Scott Duniway,’ 77.

22 Moynihan, ‘Susan B Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Abigail Scott Duniway,’ 78–9.

23 https://www.aec.gov.au/Elections/Australian_Electoral_History/milestone.htm (Date last accessed August 2018).

24 http://www.helsinki.fi/sukupuolentutkimus/aanioikeus/en/articles/first.htminland(Date last accessed August 2018).

25 Tessa K Malcolm. ‘Sheppard, Katherine Wilson,’ Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, first published in 1993, updated May 2013. Te Ara – the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, http://teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/2s20/sheppard (Date last accessed 1 September 2020)

26 Martha S Jones, Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote and Insisted on Equality for All (New York: Basic Books, 2020).

27 Sojourner Truth, The Narrative of Sojourner Truth: A Northern Slave Emancipated from Bodily Servitude in the State of New York, in 1928 (Boston: Yerrinton and Son, 1850), v.

28 https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sojourner-Truth (Date last accessed 20 October 2021).

29 Clare Wright, You Daughters of Freedom: The Australians Who Won the Vote and Inspired the World (Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2018), xi.

30 June Purvis, ‘Deeds, not words: The daily lives of militant suffragettes in Edwardian Britain,’ Women’s Studies International Forum, Vol. 18, No. 2 (1995), 91–101, 91.

31 Ray Strachey, Millicent Garrett Fawcett (London: John Murray, 1931), 209.

32 Strachey, Millicent Garrett Fawcett, 208–9.

33 Strachey, Millicent Garrett Fawcett, vii.

34 Strachey, Millicent Garrett Fawcett, 4–5.

35 Strachey, Millicent Garrett Fawcett, 180.

36 Millicent Garrett Fawcett, Some Eminent Women of our Time (London: Macmillan, 1889) and Millicent Garrett Fawcett, Five Famous Frenchwomen (London: Cassells, 1908).

37 Strachey Millicent Garrett Fawcett, 180.

38 See Katie Pickles, ‘The Old and New on Parade’ in Katie Pickles and Myra Rutherdale (eds), Contact Zones: Aboriginal and Settler Women in Canada’s Colonial Past (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2005), 272–91.

39 Strachey, Millicent Garrett Fawcett, 19.

40 Strachey, Millicent Garrett Fawcett, 25.

41 Strachey, Millicent Garrett Fawcett, 101.

42 Ann Oakley, ‘Millicent Garrett Fawcett: Duty and Determination (1847–1929)’ in Spender, Feminist Theorists, 184–202, 201.

43 Ann Oakley, ‘Millicent Garrett Fawcett,’ 184.

44 Strachey Millicent Garrett Fawcett, 322–3.

45 Barbara Castle, Sylvia and Christabel Pankhurst (Middlesex: Penguin, 1987), 103.

46 June Purvis, Emmeline Pankhurst: A Biography (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 127.

47 https://theconversation.com/what-is-suffragette-white-the-colour-has-a-110-year-history-as-a-protest-tool-158957 (Date last accessed 31 August 2021).

48 June Purvis, ‘Deeds, Not Words,’ 91. Emmeline wrote this in her 1914 autobiography.

49 June Purvis, Emmeline Pankhurst, 354.

50 Verna Coleman, Adela Pankhurst: The Wayward Suffragette 1885–1961 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1996), 6, 8, 11, 47.

51 Strachey, Millicent Garrett Fawcett, 210.

52 Castle, Sylvia and Christabel Pankhurst, 105–6.

53 Castle, Sylvia and Christabel Pankhurst, 104.

54 Castle, Sylvia and Christabel Pankhurst, 114–15.

55 Castle, Sylvia and Christabel Pankhurst, 101–4.

56 Castle, Sylvia and Christabel Pankhurst, 120–1.

57 Castle, Sylvia and Christabel Pankhurst, 119–20.

58 Castle, Sylvia and Christabel Pankhurst, 102.

59 Purvis, Emmeline Pankhurst, 301.

60 Purvis, Emmeline Pankhurst, 217–18.

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68 Castle, Sylvia and Christabel Pankhurst, 125.

69 Richard Pankhurst, ‘Suffragette sisters in old age: unpublished correspondence between Christabel and Sylvia Pankhurst, 1953–57,’ Women’s History Review, Vol. 10, No. 3 (2001), 483–537.

70 Castle, Sylvia and Christabel Pankhurst, 117.

71 Castle Sylvia and Christabel Pankhurst, 121–2.

72 Richard Pankhurst, ‘Suffrage sisters in old age,’ 484.

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74 Richard Pankhurst ‘Suffragette sisters in old age,’ 509.

75 Richard Pankhurst, ‘Suffragette sisters in old age,’ 509.

76 Coleman, Adela Pankhurst, 57.

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82 Purvis, ‘Remembering Emily Wilding Davison,’ 359.

83 Liz Stanley, Ann Morley, The life and death of Emily Wilding Davison (London: The Women’s Press, 1988).

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85 Purvis, ‘Remembering Emily Wilding Davison,’ 360–1.

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87 Purvis, ‘Remembering Emily Wilding Davison,’ 357.

88 Purvis, ‘Remembering Emily Wilding Davison,’ 357.

89 Emmeline Pankhurst, My Own Story (London: Eveleigh Nash. Hearst’s International Library Co., Inc, 1914), 187–8.

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96 Marie Mulvey-Roberts, Militancy, ‘Masochism or Martyrdom?,’ 161.

97 Ray Strachey, Millicent Garrett Fawcett, 220, Mulvey-Roberts, ‘Militancy, Masochism or Martyrdom?,’ 167.

98 Emmeline Pankhurst, My Own Story, 186.

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102 Haverty, Constance Markievicz, 204.

103 Haverty, Constance Markievicz, 208. https://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/transformingsociety/electionsvoting/womenvote/overview/womenincommons/ The first woman to take her seat was Nancy Astor, after a by-election in December 1919. (Date last accessed 29 September 2018).

104 Susan Mitchell, Icons, Saints and Divas: Intimate Conversations With Women Who Changed the World (Sydney: HaperCollins, 1997), 9.

105 Mitchell, Icons, Saints and Divas, 262.

106 Mitchell, Icons, Saints and Divas, 262–3.

107 Mitchell, Icons, Saints and Divas, 263.

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110 Mitchell, Icons, Saint and Divas, 9.

111 Showalter, Inventing Herself, 212, 222.

112 Moi, Simone de Beauvoir, 176.

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116 Elaine Showalter, Inventing Herself, 222.

117 Moi, Simone de Beauvoir mentions Millett and Friedan, 198–200.

118 Carolyn G Heilbrun, The Education of a Woman: The Life of Gloria Steinem (New York: The Dial Press, 1995), xx.

119 http://now.org/about/history/presidents/ (Date last accessed 27 October 2020).

120 Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: Dell Publishing, 1963).

121 Mitchell, Icons, Saints and Divas, 270.

122 Mitchell, Icons, Saints and Divas, 269.

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141 Heilbrun, The Education of a Woman, 408.

142 Conkling, Ms. Gloria Steinem, 272.

143 Conkling, Ms. Gloria Steinem, 119.

144 Conkling, Ms. Gloria Steinem, 258–9.

145 Conkling, Ms. Gloria Steinem, 269.

146 Mitchell, Icons, Saint and Divas, 11.

147 Conkling, Ms. Gloria Steinem, 189.

148 Steinem, I know this to be true, 21.

149 bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (London: Pluto, 1981).

150 Marlene Le Gates, Making Waves: A History of Feminism in Western Society (Toronto: Copp Clark Limited, 1996), 311.

151 Mitchell Icons, Saints and Divas, 12.