I Had the Privilege of Meeting Eric Hobsbawm, the Late Eminent Left
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I had the privilege of meeting Eric Hobsbawm, the late eminent left-wing historian, a few years ago, and I took the opportunity to ask him what he felt was the most significant revolution of the twentieth century. Without hesitation he answered “Undoubtedly, the women's revolution.” Ireland played its part in that revolution, and it is something to be proud of. It's instructive to reflect that the two greatest human rights achievements in the west in the last two centuries, the achievement of suffrage for women and the achievement of civil rights for people of colour, were both achieved largely without violence on the part of their supporters. It is important to remember that, at least until 1922, the struggles and campaigns for women’s rights in Ireland were inextricably bound up with the same struggles and campaigns in the UK. Ireland was part of the United Kingdom, and as such, subject to laws passed in the British parliament at Westminster, with some variations for specifically Irish circumstances. So let’s look at these parallel campaigns from the beginning of the 19th century and see how different strands – reformist, moderate, religious, militant, philosophical – all played their part in achieving votes and other important rights for women. The mother of all women’s rights theorists was Mary Wollstonecraft, whose Vindication of the Rights of Women, published in 1792, is widely seen as the first feminist text, although that term did not, of course, exist in the late 18th century. Wollstonecraft was the wife of the philosopher, William Godwin, and the mother of Mary Shelley, who went on to give us Frankenstein. Wollstonecraft was an eye-witness to the French Revolution, which inspired her first book, a riposte to Edmund Burke’s critique, Reflections on the Revolution in France. This book made her famous and gave her a mode of livelihood other than that of governess, all that was available to her otherwise. She went on to produce several more popular books, among them the Vindication. She laid women’s inequality at the door of inadequate education, arguing that if women were given a rational education as mem were, they would not only be more virtuous, but also better wives and daughters, and most importantly, citizens, that category of being given new autonomy and strength by the French Revolution. “I then would fain convince reasonable men of the importance of some of my remarks; and prevail on them to weigh dispassionately the whole tenor of my observations. – I appeal to their understandings; and, as a fellow-creature, claim, in the name of my sex, some interest in their hearts. I entreat them to assist to emancipate their companion, to make her a help meet for them! Would men but generously snap our chains, and be content with rational fellowship instead of slavish obedience, they would find us more observant daughters, more affectionate sisters, more faithful wives, more reasonable mothers – in a word, better citizens.” Her emphasis on women’s education laid the seeds for one of the great feminist battles of the 19th century, Wollstonecraft died in childbirth at only 38 years of age, and her husband’s posthumous memoir of her, which detailed a number of affairs, an illegitimate child and suicide attempts, made her persona non grata for almost a century. Men! Godwin meant well, but did not think of the consequences of his affectionate exposure of his wife’s unorthodox life. She was rediscovered in the late 19th century and now has a huge body of scholarship devoted to her. Until the 1860s, there was a lot of activity relating to “the woman question”, much of it centered on evangelical religious, socialist and other philosophical systems which focused on human rights. The campaign for the abolition of slavery necessarily shed light on women’s lack of freedom, and issues like custody of children (solely the father’s until 1839) access to fair divorce laws (partly granted in 1857) and married women’s right to their own property were prominent. One of the most passionate advocates for these reforms was writer Caroline Norton, grand-daughter of the Irish playwright and politician, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, who married a drunken boor and lost all of her income as well as her children when she left him in 1836. She retaliated by running up bills and referring the creditors to her husband, who in turn retaliated by accusing her of an affair with Lord Melbourne, the Whig Prime Minister, which resulted in a scandalous court case which the husband lost. Norton was indefatigable in using her own situation to petition for custody of her children and the right to divorce her husband, and succeeded in both, as well as laying the foundations for the Married Woman’s Property Acts of 1870 – 82, which granted married women for the first time a separate legal existence to their husbands. The next great champion of women’s rights was John Stuart Mill, utilitarian philosopher, MP and author of The Subjection of Women, published in 1869, hugely influenced by the ideas and writings of his late wife, Harriet Taylor. ”The legal subordination of one sex to another – is wrong in itself, and now one of the chief hindrances to human improvement; and it ought to be replaced by a system of perfect equality, admitting no power and privilege on the one side, nor disability on the other." This volume came after a petition which he presented to Parliament in 1866, signed by 1500 people, seeking extension of the elective franchise “to all Householders without the distinction of sex.” A year later, the petition led to the first debate on votes for women. On 20 May 1867 Mill tried to amend the Second Reform Bill to replace the word ‘man’ with ‘person’. He later described this as ‘perhaps the only really important public service I performed in the capacity as a Member of Parliament.’ The division was lost by 73 votes to 196, but Mill was delighted by the level of support, which came from both sides of the House. Meanwhile, an Irishwomen, Anna Doyle Wheeler, born in Tipperary in 1780, married at 15 to a 19-year-old drunken husband, whom she left after 12 years with her daughters, was reading French enlightenment and socialist literature, including Saint-Simon and Fourier, and eventually translating them into English to make a living. She became friendly with philosophers like Jeremy Bentham and Robert Owen, and met the Irish philosopher William Thompson, who became her close friend and possibly her partner. In 1825, they wrote the wonderfully titled “An appeal of one half of the human race, women, against the pretensions of the other half, men, to retain them in political and hence in civil and domestic slavery”. They concluded: “All women and particularly women living with men in marriage…having been reduced by the want of political rights to a state of helplessness and slavery…are more in need of political rights than any other portion of human beings. Without (equal rights) they can never be regarded by men as really their equals”. While suffrage remained the ultimate prize, a number of other issues were also part of the agenda for first -wave feminists. In the 1870s in Ireland, women laboured under a variety of legal, economic and cultural constraints. In the 1870s, Women could not vote in local or parliamentary elections; Women could not be members of public boards or local authorities; Women were not expected or encouraged to earn their own living; Education for women was considered unnecessary and undesirable; On marriage a woman’s property became that of her husband; Women had legal custody of their children only to 7 years of age. Educational and employment demands for single middle-class women led to further demands relating to property and child custody rights for married women. The Intermediate Education Act of 1878, the Royal University Act of 1879, and the Married Women’s Property Act of 1882 all contributed greatly to the improvement of women’s lives and economic prospects. In many ways, the expansion of education for women, particularly secondary education, was essential to the suffrage project. Education meant the possibility of economic independence, with its concomitant inevitable demand for civil rights. Of course, expanded education meant very little to working class women, most of whom had to work in any case to support their families, but who were to organise themselves early in the 20th century in the trade union movement, and in that capacity many of them supported the suffrage campaign. As the 19th century went on, demands grew for the opening of public boards and local authorities to women, the right to vote in local elections and ultimately for the parliamentary vote. Isabella Tod, a Presbyterian living in Belfast, who was tirelessly active in the campaign for women’s education, in 1871 organised the first suffrage society in the country, the North of Ireland Women's Suffrage Committee, and her speeches were widely reported in daily newspapers in both Ireland and England. She shared platforms with, and was a friend of, many of the leading English suffragists. In February 1872 Tod embarked on the first Irish campaign to secure the vote for women, addressing meetings at Belfast, Carrickfergus, Coleraine and Londonderry. On 21 February she addressed a meeting in Dublin which resulted in the establishment of a suffrage committee which evolved into the Dublin Women's Suffrage Society. She successfully campaigned for the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts of 1864, 1866 and 1869. Under the terms of this legislation, any woman suspected of being a prostitute could be arrested and forced to undergo medical examination by the police for venereal disease.