Women in the Early 20th Century: England
By the early 20th century, women in England and the United States were tired of being treated like second-class citizens.
During the 1800s in England, women began agitating for more rights, but it was slow work. Women did not have the right to vote. When a woman married, she and any property she might own became the property of her husband. Any money a wife earned went automatically to her husband; women were not allowed to keep the money they had earned until 1870. A husband was allowed to beat his wife. In 1853, a law was passed limiting the amount of violence a husband could inflict upon his wife, but laws punishing all physical abuse were not passed until well into the 20th century. Divorce was difficult for a woman to obtain, and any children were considered property of the husband; the law did not allow women who divorced their husbands even to visit their children until 1873. Thus, many women stayed married, regardless of how violent their situation was, because they didn't want to lose their children.
The Married Women's Property Act of 1884 finally established that a wife was an independent and separate person, rather than property belonging to her husband. But the law did not guarantee women any other rights. Until 1891, if a woman ran away from an abusive marriage, the police could capture and return her, and her husband could imprison her. He could even, if he chose, commit her to a lunatic asylum, regardless of her mental condition. He was also legally entitled to any property or possessions she might have obtained while she had lived apart from him; legally, he was allowed to take everything, including the clothes on her back.
Girls typically received far less education than boys; women were barred from universities; and with a few rare exceptions, women were allowed to take only low-paid jobs: factory workers, agricultural laborers, seamstresses, domestic servants. Women in the middle and upper classes were brought up and groomed solely for marriage, and in fact were not allowed to learn any other way to support themselves. But women outnumbered men by the hundreds of thousands; thus, many women were left destitute or dependent on the kindness of relatives. Prostitution was rampant in Victorian England; many prostitutes were middle-class women who had no other way to make a living, and worked only when they were desperate. Others came from the working classes, where girls began working between the ages of 8 and 12 and, even if they married, continued working all their lives, taking breaks only to have children. Contraception was illegal (although crude, often ineffective, and sometimes dangerous methods were used by many women).
Women in England began demanding the right to vote in the 1890s. Their demonstrations were often violent and women were frequently with extraordinary brutality. Once in prison, they retaliated by going on hunger strikes, so as to cause the government as much bad publicity as possible. In 1918, the first law granting women the right to vote was passed by Parliament, but it still only allowed women over the age of 30 to vote, and only if they were property owners. Women were finally granted full voting rights in 1928.
Women in the Early 20th Century: The United States
The history of women's rights in the United States followed a different arc than in England. During colonial times, women of necessity did many of the same jobs as men; women were not barred from the professions. In fact, until the 1800s, obstetrics was considered a "woman's" field. This is not to say that women had equal legal rights; as in England, they were legally considered the property of their fathers, brothers, and husbands. And women were barred from voting, holding political office, or sitting on juries. But the hard work of colonizing the land, and later settling it and developing it, opened more windows of opportunity for women.
This began to change in the 1800s. In the medical field, for example, prior to 1800 there were almost no medical schools, and no credentials were required of an individual to be called a "doctor." But as the field began to be regulated, as formal education requirements began to be written into law, and as medical schools began to be established, women began to be excluded. Women were barred from men's medical schools, and they were also barred from joining the American Medical Association. Women were prohibited from attending many universities, as well, so this precluded them from getting the necessary degrees to qualify for admission to medical school. However, women founded their own colleges and medical schools, and this allowed at least a few to become doctors. By 1890, about 5% of the doctors in the country were women.
The changes in the medical field were typical of changes in other professions; it became almost impossible for women to succeed in any profession except teaching and writing. In addition, as the middle class expanded, social attitudes toward women's roles began to change. While working class and poor women were expected to toil at unskilled and poorly paid jobs, as they always had, middle and upper class women were now expected to stay at home to raise the children and provide a comfortable home for their husbands. They were expected to run the household professionally, but be as children to their husbands, ceding to them all their property and legal rights and letting them make all important decisions. Women in some states were allowed more rights, but in general, marital and property laws followed the example of England.
However, the United States was different from England in several important ways, and one of those was that it was a country which was still being explored and settled. Women who followed their husbands to Western states to claim and cultivate land often worked as hard as their husbands, and at the same jobs, to survive the harsh conditions. On paper they may have had few legal rights, but in practice, there was less separation between the sexes than in the Eastern cities. Women were as likely to be out in the fields pulling the plow as men, and in storms, women didn't stay inside doing their nails while the men were out piling sandbags and shoring up levees.
This is probably why the earliest states to give women the right to vote were the western states: Wyoming in 1869, Colorado in 1893, Utah and Idaho in 1896, Washington State in 1910, California in 1911, Oregon, Kansas, and Arizona in 1912, Alaska and Illinois in 1913, Montana and Nevada in 1914, New York in 1917, and Michigan, South Dakota, and Oklahoma in 1918.
Women in the United States had begun agitating for the right to vote--and for the equalization of other rights--in 1848. The fight was often, as in England, vicious and dangerous. Women were fighting not just against entrenched politicians who saw their power being threatened, but against entrenched prejudices about women's emotional and intellectual capacities. Women were thought to be childlike, unable to withstand the emotional tension of political elections. Some doctors said, with straight faces, that women's brains were too weak to comprehend complicated political issues, and that if they tried, their brains would go soft and suffer irreparable damage. These arguments were eventually overcome, and full voting rights were finally granted in 1920, with the passage of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution.
Virginia Woolf and Mrs. Dalloway
Virgina Woolf was born Virgina Stephen in London in 1882. Her father was Leslie Stephen, a prominent critic, and their house was filled with many prominent artists, writers, and scholars. Her mother died in 1895; this was a traumatic shock to her, and she later explored it in her novel To the Lighthouse. Her father died in 1904, and Virginia moved in with two of her brothers, Thoby and Adrian, and her sister, Vanessa, in the London section of Bloomsbury. Virginia had always written, and by 1905 she was writing articles and essays for various publications, including book reviews for the Times Literary Supplement, and teaching writing and history classes at Morley College. She and her brothers and sisters became associated with a group of writers, poets, intellectuals, and artists who became known as "The Bloomsbury Group," and included Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes, E. M. Forster, Clive Bell, Roger Fry, and Leonard Woolf.
In 1912, Virginia married Leonard Woolf, who was a scholar and historian; in 1917, they founded the Hogarth Press, which was responsible for publishing some of the most important writers of the early 20th century, including Katherine Mansfield, T.S. Eliot, Robert Graves, E.M. Forster, Christopher Isherwood, John Maynard Keynes, Vita Sackville-West, Gertrude Stein, Robinson Jeffers, H.G. Wells, and, of course, Virginia Woolf herself.
Woolf's first novel, The Voyage Out, was published in 1915. In it, she minimizes the importance of plot to focus on the inner emotional life of her main character. This was a concern of hers throughout her career: she believed that external events and description must take second place to the "inner self" of a character. The writer, she said, should portray the "ordinary mind on an ordinary day." She rejected the realism of the Victorians, saying that life is a "luminous halo," not the number of buttons on a coat. She was less interested in describing the external world in great detail, and more interested in the flux of emotions, the impressions made on the mind and heart by tiny, often insignificant, details of the external world.
In Mrs. Dalloway, the most dramatic events take place in metaphors, not in events. The novel shows how the mind builds symbols and images in an associative, rather than linear way, to create what Proust called "moments of being," that is, moments which flood you with joy because of being able to make some connection between past and present, to transcend clock time to stand in both past and present. These moments of epiphany, when one has a sudden realization, are central to Woolf's writing, as is the process which leads to these moments.
Woolf's writing was periodically interrupted by mental breakdowns. The first of these occurred after her mother's death; the second after her father's. She struggled throughout her life with depression, and contemporary critics speculate that she may have been bipolar. In 1941, she committed suicide.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Charlotte Perkins Gilman was born Charlotte Anna Perkins on 3 July, 1860 in Hartford, Connecticut. Her mother was Mary Fitch Westcott and her father was a librarian and writer, Frederick Beecher Perkins. Henry Ward Beecher, a social reformer, was her great-uncle, and her great-aunt was Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin.
Charlotte's father left the family when she was a child and Charlotte grew up in poverty. Her mother found work when she could, but they moved often, and sometimes lived with relatives when there was no money for rent. Nevertheless, Charlotte managed to attend the Rhode Island School of Design for four years; she paid for her education by giving drawing lessons, painting advertisements, and selling greeting cards.
In 1884, despite her fears that the obligations of marriage would end her career as an artist, she married Charles Walter Stetson, another artist. Her daughter, Katharine Beecher Stetson, was born in 1885. Care of her daughter took up all her time and she found it impossible to work. In addition, her husband was putting presssure on her to abandon her work and take up a traditional role as wife and mother. She fell into a depression, possibly aggravated by postpartum depression, and suffered a nervous breakdown. In 1887, Gilman went to a sanitorium run by Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell, the doctor who is named in "The Yellow Wallpaper." He advised her to be as isolated as possible; to refrain from thinking; and most of all, to give up art and writing. Gilman tried this treatment and almost lost her mind for good. Ultimately, she came to believe that creative work and lots of social interaction were the key to her recovery.
She also came to believe that a great part of her depression was caused by trying to give up her work and fit into her traditional roles as wife and mother. She left her husband and went to live in California, living first in Oakland and later in Pasadena. She made a precarious living as a writer, lecturer, and artist. She had taken her daughter Katharine with her, but ultimately found herself unable to care and provide for her adequately, and eventually sent her to live with her father. Katharine never forgave her for what she considered an abandonment, and Charlotte herself later regretted the decision.
In 1900, Gilman remarried. She had been corresponding for several years with her cousin George Houghton Gilman; they began by writing back and forth about literature, art, and politics, and became more and more attached. Finally, they decided to meet, fell in love, and married. They were very happy, and he was supportive of her career and her ideals. She wrote several books, lectured, and became politically active.
In 1932 Gilman was diagnosed with inoperable breast cancer. George died suddenly in 1934. And in 1935, Charlotte committed suicide by holding a chloroform-soaked rag over her face. She left a suicide note that said, in part, "When all usefulness is over, when one is assured of unavoidable and imminent death, it is the simplest of human rights to choose a quick and easy death in place of a slow and horrible one. I have preferred chloroform to cancer."
If you'd like more information on any of the topics covered in this lecture, go to the Links page. Enjoy!
Some of the information in this lecture derives from:
1. A Woman of Letters: A Life of Virginia Woolf, Phyllis Rose
2. Virginia Woolf: A Biography, Quentin Bell
3. The Mrs. Dalloway Reader, ed. Francine Prose
4. The Suffragettes
5. Women's Status in Mid-Nineteenth Century England, Helena Wojtczak
6. Women's International Center: Women's History in America
7. Charlotte Perkins Gilman
8. Charlotte Perkins Gilman
9. Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Her Life and Work as a Social Scientist and Feminist, Mary Beekman