FIRST WAVE FEMINISM by VALERIE SANDERS

1. Modern feminism begins with Mary Wollstonecrafts Vindication of the Rights of Woman
(1792). she actually said about the difficulties women faced in late eighteenth century
society.
2. Nineteenth-century feminism evolved very much as a response to the specific difficulties
individual women encountered in their lives.
3. By the end of the century, major reforms had been accomplished, but the terms feminist
and feminism had only just begun to be used.
THEORISTS
1. Wollstonecrafts Vindication emerged from the social and political disorder caused by the
French Revolution. Wollstonecrafts was the first to issue an open meeting call to middle-
class women, especially mothers, as major influences on society. Her emphasis was on the
need to make women rational. she accepted that most middle-class women would marry
and remain at home, she wanted girls education to prepare them for the possibility of
economic independence, to give them freedom and dignity, rather than the ability to
fascinate potential husbands.\
2. Diverging from a feminist trend, the Vindication was followed largely by a period of
reaction, dominated by writers of advice manuals and conduct books, such as Hannah
Mores writings on female education, and Mrs Sarah Elliss immensely successful Women of
England (1839), which was followed by The Mothers of England (1842) and The Daughters
of England (1843). Aimed at the middle classes, these books were designed to inspirit women
with a sense of mission which combined patriotism with dedication to their families. Similar
manuals were written by Mrs John Sandford, and Sarah Lewis, whose Womans Mission
(1848) caught the mood of the times and became a bestseller.
3. The best-known feminist text of this time was William Thompsons Appeal of One-Half of
the Human Race, Women, against the Pretensions of the Other Half, Men (1825).
4. The next significant stage of the debate about womens rights occurred in the 1860s, in the
opposition of John Ruskin (18191900) and John Stuart Mill (180673). Where Ruskins
writing is emotional, Mills is wholly rational. He concentrates on the way society has
traditionally oppressed women and treated them as slaves: an analogy he makes at
intervals throughout the book. For this he blames the legal subordination of one sex to the
other, which he sees as being wrong in itself and one of the chief hindrances to human
improvement.

ACTIVISTS
1. The specific injustices faced by mothers in unhappy marriages were highlighted in 1839 by
the Caroline Norton case, which was the first major controversy to begin the long process of
undermining the total legal unity of husband and wife. In the early nineteenth century the
status of a married woman was still that of hidden. When Caroline Nortons husband,
George, abducted their three sons in 1836, and tried to sue her for divorce by bringing a
charge of criminal conversation against Lord Melbourne, she researched the legal position
for herself, and with the help of a young Whig barrister, Thomas Talfourd, a sergeant-at-law,
wrote a pamphlet attacking the existing law on the custody of children.
2. The result of their combined efforts was the Infant Custody Act (1839) which permitted
separated wives of good character, against whom adultery had not been proven, to have
custody of any children under seven. Still the law implied that the father was the natural or
usual guardian of the children. It was not until 1873 that mothers were given custody of
children up to the age of sixteen, and not till 1973 that mothers were given exactly the
same legal authority over their children as fathers.
3. All the time she had been separated from her husband she had been supporting herself by
writing, but according to the married womens property laws of the time, her earnings
legally belonged to her husband. After 25,000 women had signed a petition in favour of
married womens property ownership (1856), limited legal rights were introduced by the
Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857. There were to be eighteen more acts concerned with
married womens property by 1882, of which the most significant was the 1870 Act. This
allowed married women to keep their earnings, and to inherit personal property, with
everything else going to their husband.
THE 1850s: DECADE OF ACTIVISM
1. The 1850s generally saw a major recovery of feminist activity, and was perhaps the most
important decade of the nineteenth century for Victorian women. The two Norton cases
helped air long-standing concerns about the legal position of married women.
2. Instrumental in effecting the change of attitude behind these reforms was the so-called
Langham Place circle: a group of middle-class, activist women who discussed and published
their views about women, and met (from 1857) at 19 Langham Place in London. The most
famous members of this group were Barbara Leigh Smith (later Bodichon), author of
Women and Work (1856) and Bessie Rayner Parkes, author of Remarks on the Education of
Girls (1854). Together they established their own publication, The English Womans Journal
(185864), later renamed The Englishwomans Review, and a Society for the Promoting of
the Employment of Women (1859).
AMERICAN FEMINISM
1. In America, feminist activism started slightly earlier with the Seneca Falls Convention of
1848, a meeting attended by 300 people (including 40 men) to demand an end to all
discrimination based on sex.
2. the American feminists campaigning for modification of the divorce laws, married womens
property rights, and the vote; while key theorists were Sarah Grimk (Letters on the
Equality of the Sexes, 1838) and Margaret Fuller (Woman in the Nineteenth Century, 1845)
3. The most significant difference between Britain and America, in terms of first wave feminist
development, however, was that in America, different state legislatures passed reform
measures independently of the central government. Hence the women of Wyoming and
Utah had the vote in 1869 and 1870 respectively, whereas women in the northern states
remained unenfranchised until 1920. Once activated, American feminist campaigns
proceeded at different rates around the country towards reforms similar to those in Britain.
EDUCATION AND EMPLOYMENT
1. womens employment opportunities developed in areas that were seen as an extension of
their natural sphere as mothers and carers: teaching, philanthropy, nursing, workhouse
visiting, and work on school boards. Teaching became more professionalised as more girls
were educated at school rather than by governesses at home.
2. In 1869, the first College for Women was established experimentally at Hitchin, on the way
to Cambridge: as Girton College (1873), it was swiftly followed by Newnham (1875) in
Cambridge, and Lady Margaret Hall (1878) and Somerville College (1879) in Oxford, but it
was still many years before women were accepted into the two ancient universities on
exactly the same terms as men. It was not till 1948 that women at Cambridge were
awarded degrees fully equal to mens.
3. Other important gains for women were the new opportunities in public and clerical work.
Clerical work was a major area of expansion in the 1860s, especially in government
departments such as the post office.
THE DOUBLE STANDARD AND WOMENS CIVIL LIBERTIES
1. The Contagious Diseases Acts of 1864, 1866, and 1869, in authorising the intimate
examination of any woman suspected of being a prostitute in a garrison town, were an
attempt to fight the spread of syphilis in the army, but were seen as an infringement of
womens civil rights. Any woman caught with the disease could be sent to a Lock hospital
to be forcibly cured; those who refused examination could be imprisoned and put to hard
labour.
2. Josephine Butler (18281906), became effective campaigners against state-regulated
prostitution, succeeding in having the Acts repealed in 1886.
THE VOTE
1. Within a matter of thirty years, Victorian women had shown how effectively they could
mobilise to campaign for specific reforms in the areas of matrimonial law, property
ownership, child custody rights, work and educational opportunities, and government
regulation of sexual morality. votes for womenwas one of the last major campaigns to be
launched, and remained unachieved at the end of the nineteenth century.
2. The vote was finally won in 1918, it was offered to women over thirty; it was not until 1928
that women were enfranchised on the same terms as men.
CONCLUSION

Victorian feminism is a difficult concept to analyse. Some of the greatest reforms of womens
social and legal position before those of the late twentieth century occurred in a few
decades of the nineteenth century. First wave feminism gathered pace through the work
of specific individuals working for specific ends, until the momentum of events made
concern for womens full participation in social and political life a matter of public
interest across the whole political spectrum. This in itself was no mean achievement.