FEMINISM AND FREEDOM
SOMMERS, CHRISTINA HOFF
On february 10, 2001, 18,000 women Freedom used to stand at the heart of feminism, but modern feminists have succeeded in erasing history christina Hoff sommers (l–r) Gloria Steinem,...
...But whereas Wollstonecraft befriended Paine and debated Burke, More was a friend and admirer of Burke, a close friend of Samuel Johnson and of Horace Walpole, and an indispensable ally and confidante to William Wilberforce, a father of British abolitionism...
...Some historians credit her political writings with saving England from the kind of brutal revolutionary upheaval that traumatized France...
...Concerning the French revolution which Wollstonecraft initially championed, More wrote, “From liberty, equality, and the rights of man, good Lord deliver us...
...One disparaging historian called this unprecedented cohort of writing women (borrowing a phrase from the 16th-century religious reformer John Knox) “a monstrous regiment...
...Historically, proponents of the two schools were forthright and sometimes fierce competitors, but their competition sharpened the arguments on both sides, and they often cooperated on practical causes to great effect...
...It is hard to overstate the positive impact of widespread volunteerism on the fate of women...
...Perhaps American feminism has become hysterical because it has ceased to be useful...
...by 1890 she had 150,000 adult dues-paying members...
...Charity,” said one of More’s fictional characters, 5 6 t H e a M e R I c a n s P e c t a t o R J u l y / a u g u s t 2 0 0 8 c H R I s t I n a H o F F s o M M e R s Her didactic 1880 novel, Coelebs in Search of a Wife, which valorized a new kind of wise, effective, active, and responsible femininity, went into 11 editions in nine months, and to 30 by the time of More’s death...
...It was started in 1750 by intelligent but educationstarved upper- and middle-class women who yearned for serious conversation rather than the customary chatter and gossip typical of elite gatherings...
...Indeed, Willard referred to the “vote” as “the home protection ballot...
...Women everywhere need the liberty to be what they are—not, as contemporary feminism insists, liberation from what they are...
...Stanton’s words were effective with a relatively small coterie of educated women, mostly on the East Coast...
...The mood grew solemn when Oprah Winfrey came forward to read a new monologue called “Under the Burqa,” which described the plight of Afghan women living 5 2 t H e a M e R I c a n s P e c t a t o R J u l y / a u g u s t 2 0 0 8 under the Taliban...
...The sooner the better...
...As one Iraqi women’s advocate, Haifa Abdul Rahman, told her, “We see feminism in America as dividing women from men, separating women from the family...
...S e he w l a t nte W d o noth o ing less tha s l n s - - Wollstonecraft, a rebel and a free thinker, believed taken notions that enslave my sex...
...More flatly rejected these assumptions...
...They were traditional, religious, and family-centered—and they had a following among women from all social classes...
...Both were startled by her ability to attract unprecedented numbers of dedicated women to the suffrage cause...
...Its three most important members were Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane Austen, and Hannah More...
...She envisioned a society where women’s characteristic virtues and graces could be developed, refined, and freely expressed...
...She wrote it in the spirit of the European Enlightenment—whose primary principle was the essential dignity and moral equality of all rational beings...
...She awakened a nation and changed the way it saw itself...
...The world does...
...Her A Vindication of the Rights of Woman became an instant sensation...
...This is bad for everyone...
...magazine tried to distance itself from RAWA in 2002, a RAWA spokeswoman denounced Ms...
...Fernea settled on the term “family feminism” to describe this new movement...
...that women were as intelligent as men and as worthy For Wollstonecraft, education was the key to of respect...
...She was not urging legislators in France and England to “remember the ladies” or appealing to their generous or protective impulses...
...Or was Hannah More closer to the truth when she suggested that women will always prevail in the private sphere and express themselves as the natural caregivers of the species...
...More is hard to classify politically...
...The second school, conservative feminism, was traditionalist and family-centered...
...More succeeded brilliantly with all classes of women...
...Glenn Close led the crowd in spelling out the obscene word for women’s intimate anatomy, “Give me a C...
...You have only to give women the same opportunities as men, and you will soon find out what is or is not in their nature...
...The “Blues” were a group of intellectual women (and men) who would meet to discuss politics, literature, science, and philosophy...
...Fortunately, her ideals and her style of feminism are well represented in the novels of Jane Austen...
...Feminists distanced themselves...
...Luce’s exemplary remarks on Mother Nature and sex differences are especially relevant today...
...J u l y / a u g u s t 2 0 0 8 t H e a M e R I c a n s P e c t a t o R 5 5 Hannah More F e M I n I s M a n D F R e e D o M More (who never married) was active in the Bluestocking society...
...But in the late 19th century, most feminists, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, supported it...
...The mood J u l y / a u g u s t 2 0 0 8 t H e a M e R I c a n s P e c t a t o R 5 7 F e M I n I s M a n D F R e e D o M darkens and a pioneer in the field of women’s studies— Professor Sally Roesch Wagner—appears on the screen...
...She had persuaded large numbers of men and women that it was a mother’s sacred duty to vote...
...The conventional constraints, confinements, and rigid expectations are largely things of the past...
...The embarrassing spectacle at Madison Square Garden, the erratic state of women’s studies, the outbreak of feminist vigilantism at Duke University may tempt some to conclude that the women’s movement in the United States is in a state of hopeless, hapless, and perma nent disarray...
...still give priority to the domestic sphere...
...Today’s feminist establishment in the United States is dominated by the radical wing of the egalitarian tradition...
...Degler and other historians believe that, because the vote was associated with individualism and personal assertiveness, many women saw it as both selfish and an attack on their unique and valued place in the family...
...for them, classical feminism offers a tried and true roadmap to equality and freedom...
...Pick up a women’s studies textbook, visit a college women’s center, or look at the websites of leading feminist organizations and you will be likely to find the same fixation on intimate anatomy, combined with left-wing politics, and a poisonous antipathy to men...
...The “Islamic feminists” Fernea was meeting were different...
...One would never imagine from Burns’s film that Frances Willard (1839–1898) was one of the most beloved and respected women of the 19th century...
...In 1776, Abigail Adams famously wrote a letter to her husband, John, urging him and his colleagues in the Continental Congress to “remember the ladies…and to be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors...
...Perhaps there is a sensible women’s studies text out there somewhere, but, for the most part, the sphere of life that has the greatest appeal to most women, and is inseparable from traditional ideas of feminine fulfillment, is rejected in the name of liberation...
...According to the Prospect, when Ms...
...I was educated at random,” More would say, and women’s education became one of her most passionate causes...
...But her fondness for saying things like “Womanliness first—afterwards what you will” was her ticket to historical obliquy...
...bers of the upper classes for their amorality, hedonism, indifference to the poor, and tolerance of the crime of slavery...
...It was a regiment that was destined to win decisive battles in women’s struggle for Virginia Woolf once said that if she were in charge of naming historical epochs, she would give a special name to that worldtransforming period at the end of the 18th century in England when, in her words, “The middleclass woman began to write...
...Today, however, her reputation is secure...
...6 2 t H e a M e R I c a n s P e c t a t o R J u l y / a u g u s t 2 0 0 8...
...were they aware of a conservative alternative, in Ttoday readily label themselves as feminis l u o w o h w n e m o w n a c r e m A a r o m t n o c ruth e be p told r , y there a i re also great numbers o t d s f which liberty rather than “liberation” is the dominant idea...
...they have achieved parity with men in most of the ways that count...
...Approved feminist founders like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony promoted women’s suffrage through Wollstonecraft-like appeals to universal rights...
...She told women that it was their patriotic duty to apply their natural gifts— nurturing, organizing, and educating—not merely to their own households, but to society at large...
...On february 10, 2001, 18,000 women Freedom used to stand at the heart of feminism, but modern feminists have succeeded in erasing history christina Hoff sommers (l–r) Gloria Steinem, Glenn Close, Eve Ensler filled Madison Square Garden for one of the more notable feminist gatherings of our time...
...they have achieved parity with men in most of the ways that count...
...Alexis de Tocqueville commented on the essential equality of the male and female spheres in Democracy in America (1840) “Americans,” he said, did not think that men and women should perform the same tasks, “but they show an equal regard for both their perspective Temperance advocates believed that a ban on the sale of alcohol would greatly diminish wife abuse, desertion, destitution, and crime...
...In other words, temperance was a movement in defense of the home—the female sphere...
...Restore its lost history...
...Virginia Woolf once said that if she were in charge of assigning names to critical historical epochs, along with the Crusades, or the War of the Roses, she would give a special name to that world-transforming period at the end of the 18th century in England when, in her words, “The middleclass woman began to write...
...Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one...
...J u l y / a u g u s t 2 0 0 8 t H e a M e R I c a n s P e c t a t o R 5 3 F e M I n I s M a n D F R e e D o M The classical feminism of the 18th and 19th centuries embodied two distinct schools of thought and social activism...
...Ken Burn m o f d e h i n va e v e t d a s e m o w annah n ’ m ore v o is c a not to th ha e on ly on s ce-fam r ou s s , the celebrated documentarian, followed his awardwinning Civil War with a 1999 film about Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902) and Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906) and their struggle to win the vote for American women...
...For many decades the average American woman simply ignored the cause of suffrage...
...Egalitarian feminists like Wollstonecraft (and later, John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor) are staple figures in the intellectual history of feminism, but they have never attracted a very large following among the rank and file of women of their time...
...Prochaska, who calls More “probably the most influential woman of her day,” concludes, “It should not come as a surprise that in 1866 women trained in charitable society were prominent among those who petitioned the House of Commons praying for the enfranchisement of their sex...
...The female tendency to be empathic and caring shows up very early in life...
...Stanton, a skeptic in religious matters, was leery...
...her writings of both More and Wollstonecraft...
...It is the conventional wisdom that men denied women the ballot...
...It is in such conditions of respect and fairness that woman can reveal their true preferences...
...At its climax, an actual Afghan woman named Zoya, who represented RAWA—the Revo lutionary Associ a tion of the Women of Afghanistan—appeared on stage covered from head to toe in a burqa...
...Contemporary feminism routinely depicts American society as a dangerous patriarchy where women are under siege—that is the message of the “RAPE FREE ZONE” banner in the Garden...
...More shared Adam Smith’s enthusiasm for the free market as a force for good...
...According to Prochaska, as women began to become active in the outside world and form philanthropic organizations, they became interested in “government, administration and the law...
...They seek to obliterate not only feminist hisways a free society has to offer, many, perhaps most, tory but the femininity that made it a success...
...When a suffrage amendment failed dismally in the state of Colorado in 1877, one newspaper editorial called the suffragists “carpet baggers” promoting an elitist “eastern issue...
...The initiative lost, with 187,000 voting against the franchise and only 110,000 in favor—and of those who voted yes, only 23,000 were women...
...The sooner the better...
...The story of what she initiated and how she did it is integral to the story of women’s quest for freedom...
...It is time to leave the question of the role of women in society up to Mother Nature—a difficult lady to fool...
...She is careful to say that women’s nature can be made known only in conditions of freedom and opportunity...
...Adams was appealing to a tradition of chivalry and gallantry that enjoined male protectiveness toward women...
...They formed the National American Woman Suffrage Association and elected Elizabeth Cady Stanton president...
...But you will also find, and so will they, that what is not in their nature, even if they are given every opportunity, they will not do, and you won’t be able to make them do it...
...Unlike its more radical sister, conservative feminism has always had great appeal to large majorities of women...
...The series is supported by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation...
...Hence as long as women saw the vote as a threat to their sphere, suffrage was a lost cause...
...But even a cursory look at the historical record suggests that men were not the only problem...
...Tment and did liberate themselves in ways o - e v o m m r o d t e W e t n i n e m o n i a r h e at c t is o an . W understan h dable s bu id t f unwa a rranted f vital importance to the evolution of liberal society...
...More flatly rejected these assumptions...
...Her heroines are paragons of rational, merciful, and responsible womanhood...
...Today we J u l y / a u g u s t 2 0 0 8 t H e a M e R I c a n s P e c t a t o R 5 9 F e M I n I s M a n D F R e e D o M associate temperance with Puritanism...
...We do...
...Through selective citation she can be made to seem like an insufferable prude—Lord Byron dismissed her as “Morality’s prim personification”—but it is doubtful that a “prim personification” would have attracted the devotion and respect of men like Johnson, Walpole, and Wilberforce...
...Today, women enjoy the equality of opportunity that Luce alluded to...
...Society should be totally different...
...Camille Paglia once told me she found these words powerful, persuasive, and even awe- inspiring...
...And even in the West there are unresolved equity issues and the work of feminism is not over...
...Furthermore, as Degler shows, in nineteenth-century America, both the public and private spheres were prized and valued...
...In Simone de Beauvoir, we see how starkly the ideology of liberation has come to oppose actual, practical liberty—even “choice...
...In 1890, two leading egalitarian suffragist groups merged because they were worried that the cause was dying...
...How Women Have Betrayed Women (1995) and The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Young Men (2001...
...Wollstonecraft led one of the most daring, dramatic, and consequential lives of the 18th century...
...Thomas Carlyle has ascribed the insights of genius to “cooperation with the tendency of the world...
...The former invite me and the latter come to jeer and wrangle—but as a rule we all part as friends...
...This we can see if we look back at the history of women’s liberation—not as it is taught in women’s studies departments, but as it truly was...
...She was persuaded that these virtues could be realized only when women were given more freedom and a serious education: [T]ill women shall be more reasonably educated, and until the native growth of their mind shall cease to be stilted and cramped, we shall have no juster ground for pronouncing that their understanding has already reached its highest attainable perfection, than the Chinese would have for affirming that their women have attained to the greatest possible perfection in walking, while their first care is, during their infancy, to cripple their feet...
...The crowd roared in delight...
...This essay is the sixth in a ten-part series being published in successive issues of The American Spectator under the general title, “The Future of Individual Liberty: Elevating the Human Condition and Overcoming the Challenges to Free Societies...
...Under her lead m o r f n i n U e c n e m e T n s r h C s a m o W rances n ’ willa i rd ti a served p as r a presiden o t of the - ership it grew to be the largest and most influential women’s organization in the nation...
...Of the two schools, conservative feminism was much the more influential...
...Friedan told Beauvoir that she believed women should have the choice to stay home to raise their children if that is what they wished to do...
...But they forget that this “cult” freed many rural women from manual labor, improved the material conditions of women’s lives and coincided with an increase in female life expectancy...
...It aims not to free women to pursue their own interests and inclinations, but rather to re-educate them to attitudes often profoundly c ontrary to their natures...
...Wagner informs viewers that Anthony was so determined to win the vote, she established alliances with pro- suffrage women who were “enemies of freedom in every other way—Frances Willard is a case in point...
...this difference persists into adulthood...
...Revisionist history is never a pretty sight...
...With the vote, they could protect the homes they so dearly loved...
...Soon after she published her Vindication of the Rights of Woman she ran off to Paris to write about the revolution...
...She loathed the mindless pastimes that absorbed upper-class women of her day, and encouraged middle- and upper-class women to leave their homes and salons so as to take up serious philanthropic pursuits...
...they enter the helping and caring professions in great numbers...
...Conservative feminists argued that a practical, responsible femininity could be a force for good in the world beyond the family, through charitable works and more enlightened politics and government...
...Godwin all but destroyed her reputation for the next hundred years...
...Women were moved by this, and men were disarmed...
...years, I have lectured on more than 100 college campuses where I meet both conservative and radical women activists...
...Stanton, a skeptic in religious matters, was leery...
...That may be an overstatement, but it finds a lot of support in modern social science—and evidence of everyday life...
...The headline read: “Good-bye to the Female Tramps of Boston...
...The two movements were (and will remain) rivals in principle but complementary in practice...
...novels and pamphlets, she sharply reproached mem- And women listened...
...Make the movement attractive once again to the silent majority of American women, who really don’t want to be liberated from their womanhood...
...With the vote, said Willard, women could greatly increase their civilizing and humane influence on society...
...In the opening lines of Vindication, she expresses her “profound conviction that the neglect5 4 t H e a M e R I c a n s P e c t a t o R J u l y / a u g u s t 2 0 0 8 Mary Wollstonecraft c H R I s t I n a H o F F s o M M e R s ed education of [women] is the grand source of the misery I deplore...
...Reason - able, moderate feminists hang back and keep silent in the face of fascism...
...The evening was a near-perfect distillation of contemporary feminism...
...Traveling through Uzbekistan, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Turkey, and Iraq, Fernea met great numbers of women’s advocates working hard to improve the status of women...
...Woolf summarizes Wollstonecraft’s egalitarian teachings in one sentence: “The staple of her doctrine was that nothing matters save independence...
...But few contemporary feminist historians have wanted that story to be told...
...She did so without rejecting the idea of a special women’s sphere...
...I have yet to meet a single one who shares the play’s misandry...
...Take back feminism...
...After all, women in this country have their freedom...
...Clearly Luce does not expect that women will turn out to be interchangeable with men...
...As women became engaged in charitable works, other parts of the public sphere became accessible...
...Feminism, in its classical phase, was a critical chapter in the history of freedom...
...protective of women’s role...
...But for the market to thrive, she believed England’s poor and rich would need to develop good moral habits and virtuous characters...
...It is now possible to observe “the role of women in society” by taking note of the roles women themselves freely choose...
...Why do you like the Vagina Monologues so much...
...But on that magical February night at the Garden, few knew or cared about Zoya’s political views or affiliations...
...Knightley—esteem female strength, rationality, and intelligence...
...M d l e p a e h . ls o o c s d n a , s e g na ha p o , ls t i p s o admirer of Edmund Burke, but she was no constitutional monarchy, and a friend and i h nform a ed, r and well-trained h wom S en w p ork a in e g t in o , t n g i l e t i f o e i m r a e n i s v n e r . n o s s f o r ore was a british patriot, a champion of “ p is t e he i call ” ing Mo of a e lad i y; o the d care of s the p n oor l is e her defender of the status quo...
...Their inspirations were John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, and Wollstonecraft herself...
...By comparison, Willard had built an organization with more than ten times that number...
...Eve Ensler and her most devoted disciple, Jane Fonda, may not be amenable to change...
...Good riddance...
...When Frances Willard died in 1898, her younger feminist colleague Carrie Chapman Catt remarked, “There has never been a woman leader in this country greater than Frances Willard...
...Both were startled by her ability to attract unprecedented numbers of dedicated women to the suffrage cause...
...When she died, one newspaper wrote, “No woman’s name is better known in the English-speaking world than that of Miss Willard, save that of England’s great queen...
...She was a proponent of co-education and insisted that women be educated on a par with men—with all fields and disciplines being open to them...
...Who needs feminism...
...Prochaska, in his seminal Women and Philanthropy in Nineteenth-Century England (1980), wrote, “The charitable experience of women was a lever which they used to open the doors closed to them in other spheres...
...Former friends denounced her...
...but More is rarely given the credit she deserves...
...Frances Willard showed new ways of thinking that were more respectful and suffrage movement needed new arguments and women’s movement was going to move forward, the and individual rights fell on deaf ears...
...But they are small in number and tend to be found among the most educated elites...
...If Wollstonecraft was the founder of egalitarian feminism, More was the founder of conservative feminism...
...Another way of putting it is to say that what Wollstonecraft wanted for women was the full liberty of citizenship...
...She embraced that sphere, giving it greater dignity and power...
...E m e h t n o i a g i d n i h t i e i I “ : y n t s e d t o n s i y o 7 9 7 1 9 5 7 1 ( f r e n o l o W y r a M r h o n p ing e s in the writing lst s of c th a e t British – phil os ) - . p g erhaps the fir i st wom v an w in w history to n in t sist that bio i a w t f a r c e n t s l l . y i a u q l a r o m d n a l a c i t i o l a t t galitarian feminism had its historical begint o he sa p m l e righ ts as men...
...The companionate marriages described by Jane Austen were the American domestic ideal...
...Above all, it was a feminism that women themselves could comfortably embrace: a feminism that granted women the liberty to be themselves without ceasing to be women...
...The great 19th- century psychologist William James said that for men “the world is a theater for heroism...
...No woman should be authorized to stay at home to raise her children...
...Why not let the feminist movement fade from the scene...
...Many historians agree that Willard’s new conservative approach explains the success...
...It therefore presents itself as a movement of “liberation,” defying the patriarchal oppressor and offering women everywhere the opportunity to make contact with their “real selves...
...He even praised her—completely inaccurately—for having rejected Christianity...
...Campus feminists were among the most vocal and zealous accusers of the young men on the Duke University lacrosse team who were falsely indicted for rape in 2006...
...But why, she asked, limit these angels to Anthony admired Willard...
...Wollstonecraft’s demand was a dramatic break with the past...
...Impassioned feminist rhetoric about freedom, dignity, autonomy, the way...
...christina Hoff sommers is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of Who Stole Feminism...
...Later, an exposé in the progressive American Prospect would reveal that RAWA is a Maoist organization whose fanatical members are so feared by Afghan women that one human rights activist has dubbed them the “Talibabes...
...At the time wollstonecraft was writing, Hannah More (1745–1833)—novelist, poet, pamphleteer, political activist, evangelical reformer, and abolitionist—was waging a very different campaign to improve the status of women...
...There have always been Western-style egalitarian feminists in these countries...
...Women don’t merely say they want to help others...
...and though their lot is different, they consider both of them as being of equal value...
...Her friends included Thomas Paine, William Wordsworth, and William Blake...
...But the feminist scholar Elizabeth Kowaleski Wallace speaks for many when she describes More as a case study of “patriarchal complicity” and an “univited guest” who “makes the process of celebrating our HERITAGE as women more difficult...
...Contemporary feminism needs to make peace with Hannah More and Frances Willard and their modern-day heirs or face a complete loss of appeal and effectiveness...
...others show her as a progressive reformer...
...The total membership of these combined groups, according to University of Michigan historian Ruth Bordin, was 13,000...
...Sev eral rejected what they see as divisiveness in today’s American women’s movement...
...Indeed, if More’s name and fame had not been brushed out of women’s history, many women today might well be identifying with a modernized version of her femalefriendly feminism...
...Even today, in an era when equal rights feminism is dominant in education, the media, and the women’s movement, women continue to be vastly over-represented in fields like nursing, social work, pediatrics, veterinary medicine, and early childhood education...
...Feminists do not honor the memory of these women...
...Still, it is interesting to note, today the Hannah More/Frances Willard style of conservative feminism is on the verge of a powerful resurgence...
...Darcy, Captain Wentworth, and Mr...
...Temperance advocates believed that a ban on the sale of alcohol would greatly diminish wife abuse, desertion, destitution, and crime...
...But Willard, a suffragist and leader of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, is another once esteemed figure in women’s history who is today unmentioned and unmentionable...
...Historian Christine Rosen, in a recent survey of women’s studies texts, found that every one disparaged traditional marriage, stay-at-home mothers, and the culture of romance...
...The membership figures for the various women’s organizations are striking...
...In a 1902 history of women’s suffrage, Anthony and her co-author wrote, “the indifference and inertia, the apathy of women lies the greatest obstacle to their enfranchisement...
...But modern “ women’s liberation” has little to do with liberty...
...More initiated a humane revolution in the relations of the sexes that was decorous, civilized, and in no way socially divisive...
...Reason, she said, demanded that women be granted female liberation: “Strengthen the female mind by enlarging it, and there will be an end to blind obedience...
...women, that history has just begun...
...It embraced rather than rejected women’s established roles as homemakers, caregivers, and providers of domestic tranquility—and it promoted women’s rights by redefining, strengthening, and expanding those roles...
...We don’t know for sure whether Austen read More, but scholars claim to see the unmistakable influence in It was taken for granted in More’s time that women were less intelligent and less serious than men, and thus less worthy as human beings...
...To prove once and for all that the majority of women wanted the vote, suffragists organized a referendum in Massachusetts in 1895...
...The event—“Take Back the Garden”— centered on a performance of Eve Ensler’s raunchy play, The Vagina Mono logues...
...UCLA literary scholar Anne Mellor comments on the extent of More’s influence: She urged her women readers to participate actively in the organization of voluntary benevolent societies and in the foundation of hospitals, orphanages, Sunday Schools….And her call was heard: literally thousands of voluntary societies sprang up in the opening decades of the nineteenth century to serve the needs of every imaginable group of sufferers...
...Was Wollstonecraft right to insist that under conditions of freedom the sexes would make similar choices...
...The opinions expressed in this series are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the John Templeton Foundation...
...Over the ideas of feminine fulfillment, is rejected in the name of liberation...
...Hthe official “herstorical” record...
...Like Hannah More before her, Willard cooperated with the world and discerned novel and effective ways to improve it...
...Austen’s heroes—men like Mr...
...She could also be called the first conservative feminist...
...freedom and opportunity...
...If the American F1879 until her death in 1898...
...parts...
...Historians have referred to her as “bourgeois progressivist,” a “Christian capitalist,” “Burke for beginners,” the “first Victorian...
...Today, more than 70 percent of American women reject the label “feminist,” largely because the label has been appropriated by those who reject the very idea of a feminine sphere...
...It is not, however, my purpose to denigrate egalitarian feminism—quite the contrary...
...Not only do its members not coopThese young women can be reasoned with and many are fully capable of allying themselves with moderate and conservative women to work for common interests...
...That was her signature Burkean style of feminism...
...Her intolerance and condescension toward family-centered women is shared by many in today’s feminist establishment, and has affected the education of American students...
...British historian F.K...
...The public reaction to his disclosures was fascination, horror, and repulsion...
...After her death, her husband William Godwin wrote what he thought was an adulatory biography...
...It held that men and women are, in their essential nature, the same, and it sought to liberate women through abstract appeals to social justice and universal rights...
...He talked honestly about her unorthodox lifestyle that included love affairs, an out-of wedlock child, and two suicide attempts over her faithless Ameri can lover...
...But today’s feminists remain implacably hostile to Willard’s notions of “womanly virtue” and have no sympathy with her family-centered feminism...
...Moreover, Willard and her followers began to bring the suffrage movement something new and unfamiliar: victories...
...are granted their full Lockean/Jeffersonian free- But feminist revisionists are destructive in special doms to pursue happiness in all the multitudinous ways...
...the home...
...According to Anthony, “The average man would not vote against granting women the suffrage if all those of his own family brought a 5 8 t H e a M e R I c a n s P e c t a t o R J u l y / a u g u s t 2 0 0 8 Frances Willard c H R I s t I n a H o F F s o M M e R s strong pressure to bear upon him in its favor...
...The late UCLA literary historian Mitzi Myers calls her a “female crusader infinitely more successful than Wollstonecraft or any other competitor...
...Approved feminist founders like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony promoted women’s suffrage through appeals to universal rights...
...For most of the world’s Women in America have their freedom...
...So do I. Luce takes the best of both egalitarian and conservative feminism...
...And then take on the cause of the women who have yet to find the liberty that western women have won for themselves and that all women everywhere deserve...
...In a 1975 exchange in the Saturday Review, the feminist pioneer Betty Friedan and the French philosopher and women’s rights advocate Simone de Beauvoir discussed the “problem” of stay-at-home mothers...
...Throughout the 1880s and 1890s many women actively organized against it...
...Beauvoir candidly disagreed: No, we don’t believe that any woman should have this choice...
...She was a lower-middle-class, semi-educated “nobody” (as one British historian has described her) who was to become the first woman to enter the Western canon of political philosophy...
...By contrast, egalitarian feminists often appeared strange and frightening with their salons and little journals...
...There is one brief sequence in which the narrator explains that in the last quarter of the 19th century, Anthony forged coalitions with conservative mainstream groups...
...In the many Sunday schools she established she encouraged the poor to be sober, thrifty, hard-working, and religious...
...Both men and women were allowed to take part...
...Female infants, for example, show greater distress and concern than male infants over the plight of others...
...men prevail in the saving and rescuing vocations such as policemen, firefighters, and soldiers...
...Sixteen years later, in her Vindication, Wollstonecraft was doing something markedly different...
...What is in women’s nature to do they will do, and you won’t be able to stop them...
...And she was surely the most prominent woman of her age...
...Willard was proud of women’s role as the “Angel in the house...
...However, Wollstonecraft’s insistence that women too are rational and deserving of the same rights as men was then a contentious thesis...
...Unlike Wollstonecraft, More believed the sexes were significantly different in their propensities, aptitudes, and life preferences...
...In 1893 the state of Colorado held a second election on women’s suffrage...
...What she achieved was unprecedented...
...The first, egalitarian feminism, was progressive (in the view of many contemporaries of both sexes, radical), and it centered on women as independent agents rather than wives and mothers...
...self-described “Vagina Warriors”—including Gloria Steinem, Jane Fonda, and Donna Hanover (Rudolph Giuliani’s ex-wife)—recited pet names for vaginas: Mimi, Gladys...
...These are unforgivable defects in their eyes, but they are precisely the traits that make Willard’s style of feminism highly relevant 6 0 t H e a M e R I c a n s P e c t a t o R J u l y / a u g u s t 2 0 0 8 c H R I s t I n a H o F F s o M M e R s to the many millions of women all over the world who are struggling for their rights and freedoms in strongly traditional societies, and who do not want to be liberated from their love for family, children, and husband...
...According to More, women were more tender-minded than men and were the natural caretakers of the nation...
...Anthony admired Willard...
...Austen also honors a style of enlightened and chivalrous manhood...
...Why not let the feminist movement fade from the scene...
...She carried on a famous debate with Edmund Burke about the merits of the French Revolution...
...Most tell me that, by acting in the play or supporting it, they are both having fun (girls, too, like to push the limits) and serving a good cause (funds raised by the performances support local domestic violence shelters...
...When Luce wrote her cautionary words, sex role stereotypes still powerfully limited women’s choices and opportunities...
...But, as conservative feminists have always insisted, free women seldom aspire to be just like men, but rather employ their freedom in distinctive ways and for distinctive purposes...
...Stanton wrote affectingly on “the individuality of each human soul,” and on a woman’s need to be the “arbiter of her own destiny...
...I ask them...
...Good riddance...
...Feminist historians denigrate what they call the “cult of domesticity” that proved so beguiling to nineteenth century women...
...Suffragettes Elizabeth Cady Stanton (left) and Susan Brownell Anthony (right) J u l y / a u g u s t 2 0 0 8 t H e a M e R I c a n s P e c t a t o R 6 1 F e M I n I s M a n D F R e e D o M H liberated from the domestic sphere and no but eliminated them from the history of Americ a e v y e h d e e d n ; m e h y f l i d n e a r i n e n e f o e r a n e m o n e h w s i n a t a e e g re l i w a e r i come fe m to i n th m e : central w paradox of er t ate d with g th t eir a con v se i rva t tive si i sters, b t ut th ha ey als a l n o l longer forced into the role of nurturers, when they feminism...
...In her once firm and feminine for the greater good of all...
...Women are numerically dominant in the helping professions...
...A huge banner declared the Garden to be a “RAPE FREE ZONE...
...Clare Boothe Luce, a conservative feminist who in her heyday in the 1940s was a popular playwright and a member of the United States Congress, wrote and spoke about women at a time when feminism’s Second Wave was still more than 20 years away...
...Political enemies called her a “whore...
...In her 1990 book, In Search of Islamic Feminism, the University of Texas Middle Eastern studies professor Elizabeth Warnock Fernea described a new style of feminism coming to life throughout the Muslim world...
...Unlike 1877, when the suffragists lost and the so-called “tramps of Boston” were sent packing, this time the suffragists won the vote by a 55 percent majority...
...Her various pamphlets sold in the millions and her tract against the French revolution enjoyed a greater circulation than Burke’s Reflections or Paine’s Rights of Man...
...Willard brought mainstream women into the suffrage movement, and some historians credit her with doing far more to win the vote for women than any other suffragist...
...Like Wollstonecraft, More was a religiously inspired, self-made woman who became an intellectual peer of several of the most accomplished men of her age...
...More is well-known to scholars who specialize in eighteenth century culture...
...As one biographer notes, “In her time she was better known than Mary Wollstonecraft and her books outsold Jane Austen’s many times over...
...Indeed, with the exception of a small group of professional historians and literary critics, almost no one knows who they are...
...Stanford historian Carl Degler, in his classic 1980 social history, At Odds: Women and the Family in America from the Revolution to the Present, notes that in 1890, more than 20,000 women had joined an anti-suffrage group in New York State alone...
...Experts on the history of Western feminism will here recognize its affinities with Frances Willard’s long-lost teachings...
...They were proud of women’s role as mother, wife, and caregiver...
...Today, almost 20 years after Fernea’s book, conservative feminism is surging in the Muslim world...
...My advice to them: Don’t bother “taking back the Garden...
...She called for revolution- women to exert themselves “with a patriotism at ary change—not in politics, but in morals...
...In Professing Femin ism: Edu cation and Indoctrination in Women’s Studies (2003), two once-committed women’s studies professors, Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge, describe how the feminist classroom transforms idealistic female students into “relentless grievance collectors...
...Because of her prodigious good works and kindly nature, Willard was often called the “Saint Frances of American Womanhood...
...Thanks to egalitarian feminism, women now have the same rights and opportunities as men...
...The camera then shows a photo of a menacing- looking Willard...
...The sphere of life that has the greatest appeal to most women, and is inseparable from traditional But there is hope for the younger generation...
...We know from common observation that women are markedly more nurturing and empathetic than men...
...It was taken for granted in More’s time that women were less intelligent and less serious than men, and thus less worthy as human beings...
...In 1991, the culture critic and dissident feminist Camille Paglia put the matter even more bluntly: she described women’s studies as “a jumble of vulgarians, bunglers, whiners, French faddicts, apparat chiks, dough-faced party-liners, pie-in-the-sky utopians and bullying sanc timonious sermonizers...
...as the “mouthpiece of hegemonic, U.S.-centric corporate feminism...
...In an essay published in 1932, Virginia Woolf wrote, “One form of immortality is hers undoubtedly: she is alive and active, she argues and experiments, we hear her voice and trace her influence even now among the living...
...It is possible to find passages in her novels, pamphlets, and letters that make her look like an arch conservative...
...Their volunteer work in charity schools focused their minds on education reform—for women of their own social class and for the poor women they sought to help...
...She and her sister suffragists brought a feminist Enlightenment to women, but to their abiding disappointment, American women greeted the offer with a mixture of indifference and hostility...
...The “Vulva Choir” sang...
...Oprah approached her and, with a dramatic sweep of her arm, lifted and removed it...
Vol. 41 • July 2008 • No. 6
