36 Women’s rights

At the first women’s rights convention in the USA, held at Seneca Falls, New York, in July 1848, Elizabeth Cady Stanton made a long overdue amendment to the American Declaration of Independence. “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” she thundered, “that all men and women are created equal.”

Three-quarters of a century was to pass before women in America and Britain gained the vote, and the battle to establish the principle of equal rights in law and custom around the world is a long way from being won.

Through history there have been occasional voices calling for greater empowerment of women, but the modern women’s movement originated in the later 18th century. In 1789, in the wake of the French Revolution, the National Assembly issued the “Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen,” but declined to extend civil and political rights to women. In response, in 1791 the playwright “Olympe de Gouges” published a “Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen.” In the following year in England, Mary Wollstonecraft published A Vindication of the Rights of Women, a book that argued for better education for girls, to enable them to realize their full potential as human beings.

The battle for women’s suffrage At the time Mary Wollstonecraft and Olympe de Gouges were writing, middle- and upper-class girls were trained to do little more than read, write, sew, draw and sing, and women were regarded as mere adornments, suppliers of heirs, chattels of their fathers and husbands, to whom they had to submit in everything. Unmarried women could own property and run their own businesses, but in Britain, for example, as soon as they married, their property became their husband’s. Similar restrictions operated in other countries. In France, for example, the Napoleonic Code of 1804, which influenced the civil codes of many other European countries, stressed the rights of husbands and fathers at the expense of those of women.

As a consequence of entrenched male dominance in almost every sphere of society, women were barred from the professions, from higher education, and from voting or holding political office. For feminists, there was one important first step to take. Susan B. Anthony, Stanton’s long-term colleague in the US movement for women’s rights, summed this up when she wrote, “There never will be complete equality until women themselves help to make laws and elect lawmakers.” Women had to have the vote, before anything else would change, and in 1869 Anthony and Stanton founded the National Woman Suffrage Association. They were particularly incensed that the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution had just asserted that “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied … on account of race, color or previous condition of servitude.” There was no mention of gender. In those less enlightened times, one of Anthony and Stanton’s supporters complained that the Amendment gave the vote to “Patrick, Sambo, Hans and Ung Tung,” but denied it to educated middle-class women.

“If women be educated to dependence … and submit, right or wrong, to power, where are we to stop?”

Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Women, 1792

At much the same time, the campaign for women’s suffrage was getting underway in Britain. In 1866 the philosopher and Liberal MP John Stuart Mill presented a petition to Parliament demanding that women be given the vote, and the following year saw the formation of the National Society for Women’s Suffrage, later superseded by the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, led by Millicent Fawcett. These “suffragists” campaigned peacefully, in contrast to the “suffragettes” of Emmeline Pankhurst’sWomen’s Social and Political Union, formed in 1903. For Pankhurst, “The argument of the broken window pane is the most valuable argument in modern politics.” The suffragettes—by throwing stones through windows, chaining themselves to railings and going on hunger strike once arrested—alienated many, but they brought enormous publicity to the cause.

The first country to give the vote to women was actually New Zealand, in 1893. Country after country followed—Australia in 1902, Germany and Britain in 1918, the USA in 1920. France and Italy waited until 1945, Switzerland until 1971, Oman until 2003. In the first ever local elections held in Saudi Arabia in 2005, women were not allowed to vote.

Women and war work

Women from the laboring classes had always worked in the fields and in domestic service, and from the later 18th century large numbers were also employed in factories. Single middle-class women could work as teachers, but it was not until the later 19th century that a few women began to gain access to higher education and professions such as medicine. During the First World War, and again during the Second, millions of women in Britain and America were recruited to work in sectors traditionally reserved for men, such as heavy engineering and, indeed, the armed forces. In the Second World War, the Nazis refused to adopt such a policy, maintaining that a woman’s role should be confined to Kinder, Küche und Kirche (“children, kitchen and church”); this policy impeded industrial productivity, significantly undermining the German war effort. Even in Britain and America, after the war women were encouraged to surrender their jobs to the returning menfolk. There was an immense “baby boom,” and millions of women found themselves tied down once more by their domestic and parenting roles. It seemed that the status quo had returned—but for many women, the war had given them a glimpse of freedom and power.

Toward full equality In 1949 the French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir published The Second Sex, in which she asserted that “One is not born a woman; one becomes one”—in other words, much of what people think of as “femininity” is in fact a cultural construct rather than a biological fact. De Beauvoir’s book had little impact until the second great wave of feminism began to emerge in the 1960s, kicking off with Betty Friedan’s book The Feminine Mystique (1963). In tune with the radical youth politics of the time, the new feminists campaigned under the banner of the “women’s liberation movement.” The new feminists agitated not just for equality of pay and opportunity in the workplace, but also for access to family planning and childcare, and against male violence and exploitation and all forms of discrimination on grounds of gender. Some went further, arguing for a thoroughgoing realignment of the relations between men and women. A few advocated a complete separation from the male world, adopting a lesbian lifestyle as a political gesture.

“The false division of human nature into ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ is the beginning of hierarchy.”

Gloria Steinem, in the Observer, May 15, 1994

Although women have won victories such as the UK Equal Pay Act of 1970, women’s average earnings in the Western world still lag far behind those of men. And although the representation of women in politics, government, board rooms, the professions and the armed forces is greater than it used to be, they still form a tiny minority in positions of power and influence. And outside the West, billions of women still remain second-class citizens, and struggle for even the most basic of human rights.

the condensed idea

Many victories won, many still to win