NEGOTIATING THE FEMALE MIND AND BODY, c. 187 0 - c. 1890
The theories formulated by scientists and physicians laid out in the previous chapter had a profound influence on feminist writings. They set boundaries, yet they were explored in alternative ways, debated and reinterpreted by feminists. In their analyses of the relationship
between female nature and social organization, feminists refuted the idea that the social order reflected the prescripts of Nature. In many instances they highlighted the contradiction in the claim that it was Nature who dictated the social roles of the sexes, but that it was so open to violation that it had to be protected by social custom and the law. Could not the "order of nature" rather be left to take care of i t s e l f T h e physician Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, for example,
maintained that Nature would ultimately protect herself. Hence "when we are in doubt, we may be guided by the general principles of equality and common sense, while
^Millicent Garrett Fawcett, "The Emancipation of Women", Fortnightly Review, 50 (1891), p. 685; Clarissa Dixon, "Woman and Nature", Westminster Review. 169
(1908), p. 284; Maria Grey, "Men and Women", Fortnightlv Review. 26 (1879), p. 680.
waiting for the light of a larger experience."^ It was pointed out that the pronouncements of medical men and scientists and the rights of the
individual did not always agree. Hence Eliza Orme in 1886 declared that to the former "men are as chess pawns, to be moved here or left there as science dictates", not taking into account the frictions this produced with the exercise of free will. Orme believed that scientists thus ultimately hardly affected legislation.^ Scientists were
rebuked for wanting "to map out the whole of human life with tape measure and ruler, and to carry the idea of division of labour into fields where it has no true application", as Millicent Garrett Fawcett put it.^
Responding to the allegations that the women's
movement aimed at an assimilation of the sexes, feminists made their standpoint clear: there was no intention to
"annihilate the difference of se x. Although some women
^Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, "Sex in Mind and Education: A Reply", Fortnightly Review. 15 (1874), p. 594 .
^Eliza Orme, "Woman's Work in Creation", Longman's Magazine. 9 (1886), p. 155. Orme was the holder of a LL.D. She published Lady Fry of Darlington in 1898 and wrote the introduction to The Trial of Shama Charan Pal : An Illustration of Village Life in Bengal, published in 1894. No other biographical date available.
^Fawcett, "Emancipation", p. 683. Fawcett made this statement in response to an article by the positivist Frederic Harrison (see Frederic Harrison, "The
Emancipation of Women", Fortnightly Review. 50 (1891), pp. 437-452). For Fawcett's biographical details see
chapter one, footnote 102.
^Fawcett, "Emancipation", p. 677/ see also Garrett Anderson, "Sex in Mind", p. 583.
put forward theories which proposed a degendering of the mind, most campaigners argued that higher education for women was not aimed at an assimilation of the female mind to the male mind, nor was a degendering of the mind an envisaged outcome. Those who promoted female higher education only wanted to make the best "of the material at their disposal".^ Gender would continue to exist, but the gendering of intellectual capacity would take on a different form. It was not so much the notion that men and women were different that was contested, but the conception that the relationship between gender
difference and social organization was one in which female nature gave women only role within the home as child-bearers and rearers.
Feminists and the Development of the Female Mind
Feminists claimed that women's mental, or
intellectual rank could only be established once women were given the opportunity to employ their mental powers freely. Thus a reviewer of Herbert Spencer's Study of Sociology. Sara S. Hennell, pointed out that women, as opposed to Spencer, claimed that "no settled opinion" with regards to the limitations of the female intellect were yet possible.^
^Garrett Anderson, "Sex in Mind", p. 583.
^Sara S. Hennell, "Mr Spencer and the Women", The Examiner (7 February 1874), p. 135. No biographical details available.
There was little doubt that contemporary women on the average had enough mental power to successfully undergo college education. After all, since 1869 women had shown that they could:
It is known, or should be known, to all, from frequent repetition, that in all matters of simple acquirement, competing [college] women have won for themselves such a place as is
likely materially to stimulate the exertions of men, and that without the advantage of a single generation of hereditary preparation.®
Feminists' concepts of female mental powers, however, often acknowledged that the intellectual capacities of contemporary women were not as highly developed as men's. But they argued that female mental powers could and would be greater in future generations when "artificial
restrictions" upon women's education and intellectual occupations were impeding no longer mental development. The poet and writer Emily Pfeiffer (1827-1890)in 1888 thus declared:
The remarks that I have hazarded on the
circumstances conditioning the development of the two sexes, are the expression of no vain desire to claim for women a present equality with men in force of intellect, or, in some respects, of character; their object is to vindicate, as at least an open question, the inherent capacity of the retarded sex for illimitable progress upon its own lines.®
®Emily Pfeiffer, Women and Work: An Essay Treating on the Relation to Health and Physical Development of the Higher Education of Girls, and the Intellectual or More Systematized Effort of Women (London: Trübner & Co., 1888), pp. 38-39.
®Pfeiffer, Women and Work, p. 171. Pfeiffer received little formal education herself. Many of her poems
reflected concerns about issues of the women's movement and upon her death she left a large sum of money towards
That female nature was open to progress was without doubt. Otherwise, "civilization would have had no
influence on them, and they would have remained savages, or else, if we accept theories contained in 'The Descent of Man', jelly fish."^°
In feminist constructions the contemporary female intellect was the product of the conditions of life and education, as well as inherited aptitudes.“ It was
subjected to an environment of restricted mental
application which had shaped women's mental powers over the generations. Already in 1869 Frances Power Cobbe had argued that it was Charles Darwin, who had offered
central information on the origins of the female character. Two years before the publication of The Descent of Man (1871), Cobbe believed that Darwin's observations on animals provided information about humans. Darwin, she pointed out, had described how rabbits, when tamed over the generations, grew
increasingly stupid since they were in no need to "exert even the small intelligence of rabbinical existence in the construction of holes and the escape from weasels."
women's higher education (see Virginia Blain, Patricia Clements, Isobel Grundy, The Feminist Companion to
Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present (London: B.T. Batsford, 1990).
^Millicent Garrett Fawcett, "The Education of Women" (1871), in Henry Fawcett and Millicent Garrett Fawcett, Essays and Lectures on Social and Political Subjects
(London: Macmillan and Co., 1872), p. 225.
^^See, for example. Grey, "Men and Women", p. 678; Frances Power Cobbe, Life of Frances Power Cobbe. by Herself. 2 (London: Richard Bentley & Son, 1884), p. 211.
She continued:
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