A short history of feminism

Ideas meander for a long time before they reveal their destination

By George Jonas

The women’s movement didn’t start in the 1960s, when protesters set their bras on fire in New York’s Central Park. It’s taking nothing away from them to say that by the time they struck a match, Simone de Beauvoir’s “second sex” was already burning with a bright flame.

Nor did the women’s movement begin 60 years earlier, when the suffragettes started marching for the vote in Western capitals. (Where else? In Eastern capitals, men didn’t have the vote either.) Saying that the women’s movement started when Eve approached Adam with a suggestion about the nutritional value of apples sounds more accurate, but let’s leave it aside. It may never have happened.

Whether or not the woman’s movement began in the Garden of Eden, it came in time to play a big role in history, including matters of military significance. In addition to launching a thousand battleships as Helen of Troy is said to have done, examples included eliminating “the scourge of God,” which wasn’t the result of a macho military campaign but a nifty piece of domestic violence by Ildiko or possibly Gudrun — in any event, Mrs. Attila the Hunness.

Women were by no means the “invisible half” of humanity that contemporary myth makes them out to be. On the contrary, they’ve been reviewed in all places and periods, often with admiration, sometimes with venom, in leading as well as in supporting roles.

Some roles were stereotypical. A perky Paris beauty, Madame Hamelin, was noted for her sharp tongue. The Emperor Napoleon once threatened her with jail, but when Pope Pius VII refused to bless her, Napoleon gallantly rose to the mouthy lady’s defense by telling the Pope that one should forgive a person who loved so many so well.

In Madame Hamelin’s case, we can see what the fuss was about. Probably more paintings survive of Jeanne Lornier-Lagrave (as she was until lucky Hamelin came along) than of anyone in that period. She may have made her mark by being what one wit called a horizontal socialite, but vertical socialites were even more influential. Take Anne Louise Germaine Necker, the brainy daughter of Jacques Necker, Louis XVI’s Swiss wizard of a finance minister, who married the Swedish ambassador, Baron Staël-Holstein. As Madame de Staël, Germaine became famous enough to require no further introduction. For the benefit of readers who missed her books, I’ll mention that she was influential enough to have the appointment of Charles Maurice de Talleyrand attributed to her. Talleyrand was one of the great diplomats of history who eventually secured the Concordat between the empire and the papacy. Now that’s what I call pull.

Some will object that the women who made their mark on history before feminism’s bra-burning dawn were all upper-class women. But this is a silly objection, for virtually all men who made their mark were upper-class men, too. The world used to belong to the upper classes before the French revolution, the only true revolution in history.

Besides, a woman didn’t have to come from the upper classes to be noted; it’s just that peasant lasses had to work harder. Joan of Arc needed to liberate France to get into the same history books as a horizontal socialite. Perhaps neither Joan of Arc nor Bernadette Soubirous of Lourdes could have secured a diplomatic appointment for Prince Talleyrand, but they could and did get themselves sainted, which some regard as no mean achievement.

The point is, the “glass ceiling” used to be class, not sex. At one time background loomed larger than foreground, which to us is almost incomprehensible. Social rank trumped gender by a huge margin as a qualifier for power and influence. History until modern times has been essentially the history of the highly born. Whether they were men or women mattered far less than whether or not they were born into the upper classes.

Ideas meander for a long time before they reveal their destination. I’d argue that emancipation for both men and women is a feminine notion, carried to term in the salons of the 18th century, maintained by well-to-do husbands for their ambitious wives. Some women of the period, like playwright and pamphleteer Olympe de Gouges, sounded positively 21st century: “If women have the right to climb the steps to the scaffold, they have the right to climb the steps to the pulpit as well,” she wrote. Other literary salon-keepers demurred. “As women, we must cultivate feelings of moral usefulness,” wrote Madame Roland, socially prominent wife of Interior Minister Jean Marie Roland, “instead of trying to compete in politics.” Their differences mattered little: Both women mounted the scaffold in 1793 during the Reign of Terror. Twentieth century suffragettes or bra-burners wouldn’t have existed without them.

Was Charlotte Corday, who stabbed revolutionary leader Jean-Paul Marat to death in his bath, an ancestral feminist as well? That’s harder to say. The great-granddaughter of Pierre Corneille, the 17th century French tragedian, Corday combined both royalist and revolutionary sentiments with a penchant for theatrical gestures. She settled on justification by numbers: “I killed one to save a hundred thousand.” It was a robust, masculine excuse.