"Her Body Is Her Own": Victorian Feminists, Sexual Violence, and Political Subjectivity Kelly Lynn Trumble
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Florida State University Libraries Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School 2004 "Her Body Is Her Own": Victorian Feminists, Sexual Violence, and Political Subjectivity Kelly Lynn Trumble Follow this and additional works at the FSU Digital Library. For more information, please contact [email protected] THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES "HER BODY IS HER OWN": VICTORIAN FEMINISTS, SEXUAL VIOLENCE, AND POLITICAL SUBJECTIVITY By KELLY LYNN TRUMBLE A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Degree Awarded: Spring Semester, 2004 The members of the Committee approve the dissertation of Kelly Lynn Trumble defended on November 19, 2003. ______________________________________ Fred Standley Professor Directing Dissertation _______________________________________ Aimee Boutin Outside Committee Member _______________________________________ Helen Burke Committee Member _______________________________________ Barry Faulk Committee Member Approved: ______________________________________________ Hunt Hawkins, Chair, Department of English The Office of Graduate Studies has verified and approved the above named committee members. ii For Matt, whose encouragement and generous gift of time made this project possible. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract v INTRODUCTION 1 1. RAPE AFTER LOCKE: WOMEN, BODILY INTEGRITY, AND THE POWER OF POLITICAL LIBERALISM 8 2. MERGING THE POLITICAL AND THE TEXTUAL: JOSEPHINE BUTLER'S APPROPRIATION OF DISCURSIVE AUTHORTY 38 3. FROM KNOWLEDGE TO POWER: WOMEN DOCTORS AND CONTROL OF THE FEMALE BODY 70 4. "WHAT THE GIRL SAYS": MARITAL RAPE AND THE COLLECTIVE VOICE OF FEMALE EXPERIENCE 95 CONCLUSION 123 NOTES 125 BIBLIOGRAPHY 131 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 149 iv ABSTRACT During the latter half of the nineteenth century, women publicly confronted the issue of sexual violence for the first time. Feminists campaigned against the state-sanctioned "instrumental rape" perpetrated on women under the Contagious Diseases Acts, demanded access to medical knowledge in order to free themselves from the hands of male doctors, and attacked the marital exemption in rape law, an effort which paved the way for a married woman's legal right to her own body. This dissertation traces the journey of selected Victorian feminists toward political subjectivity by exploring how their discussions of and resistance against sexual violence served as a key portal through which they began to construct themselves as "subjects" with a natural right to bodily integrity. Making use of feminist narratological theories, I analyze the rhetorical strategies emerging from women's non-fictional texts to argue that their resistance against the myriad forms of sexual violence became indistinguishable from the struggle for political subjectivity, the liberties that women believed they held as politically equal individuals. Feminists struck at the heart of liberal political theory, exposing the falsity of the public/private distinction which effectively disqualified women from consideration as civil individuals capable of making choices concerning their own lives and bodies. They appropriated liberalism's theory of liberty and equality, including themselves in that liberal definition to argue that all people, not just men, were created as free and equal individuals with the concomitant right to bodily inviolability. By ignoring the gender discrimination upon which the English constitutional system rested and positioning themselves as political subjects whose freedom of self-ownership was being infringed upon, feminists were, I would suggest, shifting the prevailing assumption of women's rights through ideological change. If women were perceived as civil subjects with all the measures of political freedom granted to them, they could end sexual abuse by affecting the laws that made that abuse possible. However, once women discovered that an ideological shift alone would not prompt male legislators to act on their behalf, they transferred their energies into lobbying for female suffrage, the only means by which they might protect themselves and their own interests. v INTRODUCTION In 1864, the first of three Contagious Diseases Acts passed silently through Parliament, purportedly in order to arrest the spread of venereal diseases within the British armed forces. The Act gave plainclothes policemen in port and garrison towns the authority to detain for compulsory gynecological examination (and possible incarceration) any prostitute suspected of being diseased. The two subsequent Acts further extended the earlier one: the Act of 1866 required any woman suspected of being a prostitute—whether diseased or not—to register herself as a prostitute and submit to fortnightly surgical "introspections;" and the 1869 Act increased the confinement period of diseased prostitutes and extended the districts in which the Contagious Diseases Acts were to be enforced. When the details of the Acts finally reached women—particularly the forced physical examination for prostitutes—they organized a resistance campaign unparalleled in history before that time. It is widely known that feminists agitated against a number of issues during the century, including the gender-biased divorce and property laws and the barriers to equal education and employment. However, the nineteenth-century also witnessed women campaigning for the first time against sexual violence—a fact that has gone largely unnoticed by scholars. The conspiracy of silence surrounding discussions of sexual matters no doubt restricted women's ability to articulate their feelings about and experiences of male violence. Furthermore, merely defining the legal characteristics of sexual assault proved challenging, for the judicial definition of rape was decidedly ambiguous during the century, undergoing continual re- interpretation according to the parties or circumstances at hand. The definition of "indecent assault" was even more vague than that of rape. Justice William Brett explained to one jury, "I cannot lay down the law as to what is or is not indecent beyond saying that it is what all right- minded men, men of sound and wholesome feelings would say was indecent" (523). As a result of this ambiguity, however, many Victorian feminists themselves conceptualized acts of sexual violence against women rather liberally, allowing them, as women, to have a say in what should 1 be considered "indecent" behavior. For instance, feminists referred to the gynecological examinations endured by prostitutes under the Acts as "instrumental rape," thus extending the "traditional" definition of rape to include the legally-sanctioned forcible entry into the female body. Even though not all feminists explicitly connected attacks against the body with rape in this way, they "talked around" the subject of sexual assault by employing the language of rape. During the latter half of the Victorian period, feminists made strides toward gaining the legal recognition of a woman's right to bodily integrity and succeeded in bringing the heretofore taboo subject of rape into the open for the first time.1 They helped to repeal the Contagious Diseases Acts in order to release women from the hands of the State, and they stormed the citadel of medicine so that women would have access to female physicians. Although they did not rid the books of the marital exemption in rape law, their efforts to do so further opened up the discussions of sexual matters and paved the way for a married woman's legal right to self- ownership.2 Their discussions of and resistance against sexual assault served as a key portal through which these women entered into arguments for the more crucial need to represent and protect themselves. Women wanted to be in control of their bodies, to decide for themselves who would be allowed to touch them. Thus, the issue of control came to hold a central place in the feminists' agenda. They were determined to take control not only of their bodies but also of their individual choices since men continued to pass legislation that took the power of decision-making out of the hands of women, treating them as if they were children. And, indeed, in the eyes of the law they were. The Victorian political and legal system was founded in large part on the theories of John Locke, the seventeenth-century social contract theorist. Locke had argued that every individual owned the "property in his own person" and by consent was included as a member of political society. However, Locke grounded his theories in gender inequality; along with minors and the mentally insane, women were deemed lacking in rational ability and, therefore, were excluded from partaking in the "common Rights and Priviledges" of men, including the right of bodily ownership. Women were not legal individuals and therefore were not granted the power of consent that marked the truly free individual under the law. Thus, men—whether doctor, husband, or even stranger—could potentially invade women's bodies. Although well aware that the law followed Locke's words literally, feminists attacked the gender-biased legal system head-on. As Frances Power Cobbe so poignantly asked in 1869, "Criminals, Idiots, Women, and Minors: Is the Classification Sound?" Feminists spent the rest 2 of the nineteenth century arguing that that classification was not, indeed, sound. Feminists believed they, too, had inalienable rights over their own bodies and that the English constitution granted