History, Feminism and the Feeling Woman

Femininity, it is often supposed, is what characterizes those people who happen to be women. But do women exist? That they do not – or that while a human animal who is bio-genetically female may exist, the figure dubbed Woman is a fiction, a historical invention – was once a very popular idea, one might say almost a consensus idea, in the feminist academy. Here I revisit this idea, to raise some questions about its validity and its value for the writing of feminist history. The American feminist historian Joan Scott wrote of feminist history that it provides ‘an important and a sobering corrective to the essentialist tendencies of feminist politics’.¹ I want to suggest an alternative view, that perspectives on femininity once widely dismissed as ‘essentialist’ may have more value for feminism and feminist history than is often assumed.

The notion that women do not exist has a long history within feminism. In 1792 Mary Wollstonecraft expressed a ‘wild wish’ to ‘see the distinction of sex confounded in society’. It is the ‘desire of being always women… which degrades the sex’ she wrote, and similar attitudes have been discernible in many varieties of western feminism.² After all, as the American feminist Ann Snitow pointed out in 1989, ‘Why would anyone who likes being a woman need to be a feminist?’ ‘Woman is my slave name,’ Snitow wrote: why would anyone want to retain the label?³

In the 1980s and 90s this repudiation of womanhood acquired unprecedented intellectual currency, as part of a general onslaught on what Foucault and other radical culture theorists described as the ‘timeless, cultureless’ self of Enlightenment humanism.⁴ The universal human subject disappeared in favour of culturally-determined subject positions. Woman revealed herself as heterogeneous bundle of subject positions whose common labelling as female was condemned as spurious and oppressive. Or as Joan Scott put it in 1996, in a statement that at the time won assent from many feminist scholars:

except for the similarity of their sexual organs, it is hard to find a common identity … between aristocratic salonnières in the seventeenth century and nineteenth-century middle-class housewives, or between those religious women of the Middle Ages who sought transcendence of their bodies in the service of Christ and twentieth-century sex workers whose bodies serve as a source of income.⁵

Scrutinized up close, Woman vanishes into her instantiations; and thus, as Scott concludes, history provides a ‘corrective’ to the ‘essentialist tendencies’ of feminism.⁶

To my mind the case is not closed. It does not seem to me absurd to think that a ‘similarity of sexual organs’, and all that follows from this, may be more consequential than Scott argued. Here I look again at Woman to see whether she is really as ephemeral as many feminists have believed and hoped; or whether some of women’s best hopes may in fact reside with her.

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Recent theorizations of gender in queer, intersex and trans studies have grappled with these issues afresh. A 2023 article by Mo Moulton in History Workshop Journal 95 argues for a ‘non-binary historical methodology’ in which ‘gender, and the gender/sex/sexuality schema in particular’ are ‘categorically contingent, just one particular and rather recent way of parsing the entangled experiences of bodies, desires…’ While acknowledging the liberating power of Scott’s challenge to biological essentialism, Moulton is strongly resistant to any view of gender as embodied, as a trans-historical reality as well as an analytical category.⁷

Here I want to return to the issues from a different direction. Gender is a mythology. It is mythic because the elements that compose it are not, for the most part, openly articulated propositions but unspoken assumptions, expectations, fantasies. Gender myths are what Freud called ‘public dreams’, that is shared stories that, like sleeping dreams, are fractured and contradictory, full of displaced associations and distorted images. These myths vary over time, and have both a theoretical and a power dimension. It is the powerful who tend to determine which gender myths prevail at any moment, while people’s theories about gender reinforce or challenge these prevailing myths. How the mythic and theoretical elements of mental life interconnect is, however, quite a puzzle. And an even bigger puzzle is how myths, public dreams, connect to the private dreams of individuals. If the strength of myths derives as much from their psychic resonances as from their social consequences, how do we study these inner effects? How do we write a history of gender mythology in a subjective register?

One of the leading gender myths over the last two and half centuries – that is, since the birth of western feminism – is that women are the kinder sex. Women are, it is said, warmer, more sympathetic, more compassionate than men. Some time ago I started collecting newspaper and magazine commentary to this effect, but soon the pile became so big that I ran out of space for it. Many of these articles were authored by women.

Are women the kinder sex? The history of feminism is deeply entangled with this question. Feminism has often been associated with the rise of individualism (bourgeois individualism in some formulations). But in fact for all of the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century, feminists framed their case in altruistic terms. Victorian feminists demanded equality in order to facilitate women’s natural benevolence. For Josephine Butler, the goal of feminist activism was to extend as widely as possible that ‘sympathy and insight which are peculiarly female’.⁸ Women’s political emancipation was not a good in its own right, according to Frances Power Cobbe, but ‘a means, a very great means of doing good, fulfilling our Social Duty of contributing to the happiness … of mankind.’⁹ At a time of intense female involvement in charitable organizations and humanitarian campaigning, women’s philanthropic activism was held up by feminists as demonstrating both the value and the limits of female kindness in a patriarchal society. Without civil and civic equality, women’s instinctive public-spiritedness, their willingness to sacrifice personal interest to social benefit, could not achieve its full potential. ‘I know of no better means … of counteracting the tendency to prefer narrow private ends to the public good,’ Barbara Bodichon wrote in 1866, ‘than … of giving to all women … a direct participation in political affairs.’¹⁰ The demand for the vote was constantly posed in these terms, as a way of bringing women’s ‘intelligent sympathy’ into public life, to counteract male selfishness and create a kinder, fairer Britain.

This altruistic feminist agenda survived into the Women’s Liberation Movement, particularly into its socialist wing. But it did so implicitly, with little trumpeting of women’s kindly credentials. Indeed, as a creed, feminine kindness encountered some hostility from second-wave feminists, suspicious as we were – in Cora Kaplan and David Glover’s careful formulation – of ‘feelings and practices that have long been associated with innate gender difference and … women’s subordination’.¹¹ The self-effacing woman, sacrificing her own needs and freedoms to care for others, was too close to the feminine ideal of our mothers’ generation to serve as a model for us. Feminist historians, including myself, traced the genealogy of this ideal in separate-spheres ideology and regretted its presence in first-wave feminist rhetoric. There was, and remains, an important strand of American feminist psychology which emphasizes female care and relationality, but this did not find much favour among British feminists, who often criticized it as sentimental and essentialist.

And yet: when the ‘Greenham women’ gathered in the 1980s to protest against the nuclear weapons programme they evoked female caring values, especially maternal values, on behalf of their cause. Other feminists were uneasy with this rhetoric, yet it proved an immensely powerful weapon for the camp women, as it had in women’s peace campaigning since the First World War. The call to women to abandon homes and families to join in the struggle for human survival also shows very clearly how female kindness turned militant could transgress conventional femininity, as it did in innumerable other feminist campaigns of the nineteenth and twentieth century.

So is the kind woman – that is, the woman who is kind because she is a woman – really just another manifestation of ‘lazy gender stereotyping’, as another Guardian columnist described it?¹² Or rather, are the fantasies and anxieties surrounding human kindness among the driving forces behind gender myths? I will begin by looking at how the history of kindness intersects with the rise of first-wave feminism.

Premodern western attitudes to female kindness were highly equivocal. The Judaeo-Christian celebration of the virtuous woman in whose ‘tongue is the law of kindness’ was offset by contemptuous representations of feminine kindness as mindlessly emotive and ‘partial’, that is directed solely at ‘domestic objects’.¹³ Male kindness, by contrast, was depicted as a judicious magnanimity capable of encompassing humanity at large as well as personal intimates. Moderate affection and compassion were deemed excellent in both sexes, but to be overwhelmed by sympathetic feelings was a feminine failing. ‘For one’s mind to yield to pity is an effect of affability, gentleness and softness’, the French essayist Michel de Montaigne wrote in 1580, ‘(that is why weaker natures such as women ... are more subject to them).’¹⁴

This negative attitude to women’s kindness was part of a wider hostility to the emotions – the passions as they were known – that characterized post Augustinian Christianity. Dogmas about mankind’s fallen, depraved state made all spontaneous feelings appear inherently vicious – female feelings above all. To be kind was to transcend human nature, not to express it. Caritas (care for others) was not a natural virtue but a divine bestowal: people were kind only by God’s grace. But from the seventeenth century onward the passions experienced a steady revaluation. Human nature was newly vindicated. Feelings and appetites long condemned as carnal and reprobate were rehabilitated, and natural man, and woman, gradually rose from the ethical pit to which rigorist Christianity had consigned them. This movement led in divergent directions, with one leading to the material world, to the needs and passions (newly dubbed ‘interests’) that motivated economic life. Commercial man was born: energetic, self-improving, openly acquisitive, but also made anxious by his economic egoism, fearful of moral isolation and personal anomie. (Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe was the great fictional expression of this anxiety). The other direction led to a naturalized version of Christian kindness.

In Britain, enlightened Anglicans, repudiating rigorist dogmas of human corruption, described man as naturally disposed to gain pleasure from the happiness of others. ‘As all the actions of nature are sweet and pleasant,’ one English cleric wrote in 1720, ‘so there is none which gives a good man a greater pleasure than acts of kindness or charity.’¹⁵ Physiologists studying the human nervous system showed it responding sensitively to the feelings of others, while historians traced the progress of kindness in the transition from barbarism to civilization. Adam Smith famously sought to reconcile market values with a secularized caritas, while moral-sense philosophers posited an altruistic instinct or sense on a par with the other natural senses. ‘Sensibility’ became the cardinal virtue of the age, giving rise to a vogue for empathic emotionality (‘sentimentality’) which by the mid-eighteenth century had permeated British intellectual culture. Novels and poems were crammed with tender-hearted individuals. Conduct books sang the praises of complaisance (the desire to please others), while arguments for political rights were couched in terms of the natural sympathies that bound individuals together in political communities.

This cult of kindness encompassed both sexes. But over time women moved to the forefront, until by the end of the eighteenth century kindness had become a largely female prerogative. Historians investigating the reasons for this have tended to blame ‘domestic ideology’ which in consigning women to the home foisted on them all those kinder emotions associated with family life. But the story is more complicated than this. For what was at stake in the figure of the kindly woman was not just a familial feminine ideal (which anyway long predated the eighteenth century) but the place of kindness in a market society. In the ‘myth of feminine sensibility,’ as John Mullan puts it, we see ‘a culture’s anxieties about its capacity for sociability’.¹⁶ The myth of feminine kindness was an attempt to alleviate fears about the survival of sociality in capitalist modernity. In a rapidly commercializing age, feminine sympathy was seen as the great socializing force, repairing communal ties frayed by masculine greed and individualism. Women’s virtues, as one influential Enlightenment philosopher wrote, ‘are to ordinary life what ready money is to commerce … Generally speaking, one may say that women correct that which an excess of passions has made a bit hard in commerce among men. Their delicate hand softens, so to speak, and polishes society’s springs.’¹⁷ In an increasingly egoistic world, women had become the guardians of altruism.

Popularized by a host of moral didacts – conduct book writers, pulp theologians, novelists, journalists - the idea rapidly became cultural orthodoxy. Grossly idealized images of women, especially of mothers, proliferated, until by the nineteenth century the kindly Woman had become the leading emblem of human sociality – as she has remained more or less ever since.

Women themselves contributed to this development, with bluestocking intellectuals, novelists and poets writing enthusiastically about female benevolence, especially maternal tenderness. Feminists however – by which I mean Mary Wollstonecraft, although other late eighteenth-century feminists had things to say on the subject – were more equivocal. ‘Women, weak women,’ Wollstonecraft wrote in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ‘are allowed to possess more goodness of heart, piety and benevolence. I doubt the fact…unless ignorance…be the mother of devotion.’¹⁸ Sentimental eulogies to women as paragons of ‘exquisite sensibility’ were no substitute for equal respect, she insisted.¹⁹ The argument, as usual in the Rights of Woman, carries a strong whiff of woman-hating. Adam Smith in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, a book that much influenced Wollstonecraft, contrasted the large-minded sympathies of men to the ‘feeble spark of benevolence’ possessed by women, their ‘womanish lamentations’.²⁰ Wollstonecraft takes up this distinction, deriding women’s much-touted sensibility as ‘false sentiments and overstretched feelings’ and contrasting it to the virile magnanimity of men, whose active engagements with the world endow them with ‘practical virtue’ and ‘manly generosity’.²¹ Her leading example of male kindness, however – the French Declaration of the Rights of Man – would probably have raised a Smithian eyebrow. Like most of her radical associates, Wollstonecraft regarded the French Revolution in its early phase as love-inspired, its leaders suffused with ‘mutual philanthropy’, a ‘generous, undivided sympathy’, light years away from the lachrymose soft-heartedness of women.²² ‘[I]n my eye all feelings are false and spurious, that do not rest on justice as their foundation, and are not concentred by universal love’.²³

To be kind, a woman must become manly, that is, rational, self-commanding, and public-spirited, capable of transcending petty concerns (including, Wollstonecraft hints occasionally, the petty concerns of family life) for devotion to the common weal. This ‘rugged attitude’, as her husband William Godwin later described it, is offset in the Rights of Woman by some warm praise for ‘domestic affections’, which Wollstonecraft regarded as the seedbed of ‘social affections’, but she is firm that these feelings are not, or should not be, gender-specific. For both sexes, humanity begins in the home.²⁴ There is nothing different or special about female affection, she insists, including maternal affection, about which she writes very coolly in the Rights of Woman, dismissing ‘natural [maternal] affection’ as a ‘very faint tie’, and criticizing a mother’s partiality for her own children as antisocial and ‘brutish’.²⁵ Women who love their children simply ‘because they are their children’ are contemptible: ‘It is this want of reason in their affections which makes women run into extremes’, she writes sternly – she who later complained so bitterly of her mother’s coldness toward her.²⁶ The misogynist tone is striking. The ‘blighting winds of unkindness’ that scoured Wollstonecraft’s childhood (the description is from William Godwin’s memoir of her) can certainly be felt in the Rights of Woman, in its endless exhortations to women to shape up, shake off their ‘sexual characters’, and stand alongside men as reasonable parents and dedicated citizens.²⁷

But there is of course, famously, another Wollstonecraft – another sort of woman. In the years following the publication of the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft experienced an emotional education that soon taught her the limits of reason. A passionate love affair, sexual betrayal and heartbreak, the birth of her first daughter, Fanny, followed by her abandonment by Fanny’s father, two suicide attempts: the woman who emerged from these travails was wiser and gentler than the severe young virgin who had authored the Rights of Woman. Motherhood was a particular shock to her. Writing to Fanny’s father, Gilbert Imlay, when the baby was three months old, she told him how her feelings for her daughter had at first been ‘very reasonable – more…a sense of duty, than a feeling’; but now Fanny was so omnipresent to her ‘heart and imagination’ that she could think of little else.²⁸ Such feelings have ‘become too strong for my peace’, she told Imlay, and it seems clear that her love for Fanny did trouble her, as did her passionate love for Imlay himself, which left her feeling tormented and exposed long before he abandoned her.²⁹

Wollstonecraft was no good at vulnerability. Few of us are, but a loveless childhood made any emotional exposure exceptionally difficult for her. The realities of human interdependence were often an agony for her; neediness could make her harsh and domineering; no one could have mistaken her for a sentimental heroine. Yet as she led her difficult life, female kindness took on new meanings for her, and in her final years she produced a fascinating account of a woman’s initiation into the ‘female affections’. This woman was the fictional Jemima, from her unfinished, posthumously-published novel, Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman.

Jemima is a unique figure in pre-twentieth-century women’s fiction: born a bastard, she is poor, disreputable; a washerwoman, a thief, a prostitute. Now, as Wollstonecraft’s novel opens, she is employed as a warden in a lunatic asylum. Hardened by suffering, she is living a life of ‘selfish independence’. An ‘insulated being’, Wollstonecraft describes her, who ‘loved not her fellow creatures because she had never been beloved’.³⁰ But then the eponymous Maria enters the tale. Maria, a wealthy heiress, is a classic romantic heroine: imprisoned in the lunatic asylum by her wicked husband, she is lovely, passionate, desperate. Jemima is alternately touched by her and deeply suspicious. They tell each other their stories. Jemima hears about Maria's wretched childhood as the illegitimate daughter of a servant girl who died soon after she was born: ‘I was an egg dropped on the sand; a pauper by nature, hunted from family to family, who belonged to nobody – and nobody cared for me’.³¹ Maria in her turn tells Jemima about her baby daughter, who was taken from by her estranged husband while she was still breast-feeding. Jemima responds profoundly to this revelation: ‘the woman awoke in a bosom long estranged from feminine emotions’, and she resolves to do everything she can to reunite mother and baby.³² The women become allies, eventually escaping together. But Jemima’s story reaches its emotional climax earlier, at the conclusion of her personal narrative, when she confides to Maria about the horrors she has witnessed in the asylum. Why should she care for the wretched people around her? ‘What should induce me to be the champion for suffering humanity? – Who ever risked any thing for me? Who ever acknowledged me to be a fellow creature?’ Maria reaches out for her hand, and Jemima ‘more overcome by kindness than she had ever been by cruelty’, rushes from the room.³³ Wollstonecraft didn’t live to finish the story, but one of her drafted conclusions describes Maria, overwhelmed with misery about her lost baby, swallowing an overdose of laudanum (as Wollstonecraft herself had done a few years before). Maria is found by Jemima, who is bringing her rescued daughter. ‘Behold your child…’ Jemima says to her, ‘would you leave her alone, to endure what I have endured?’ Maria recovers, and their suffering is over.³⁴

The female sympathies that Wollstonecraft depicted in her final novel clearly owed much to the kindly feminine ideal of the period, while at the same time taking it in directions far from the cultural mainstream. Maria and Jemima’s kindness has nothing to do with civilizing men or socializing capitalism, and everything to do with identifications and fellow feelings of the sort that were soon to become central to feminism. The maternalistic, nurturant elements in their kindness are motifs that repeat throughout feminist history. How do we think about these? Do we treat them as ideological impositions, public myths about Woman without any private dimension or psychic resonance? Or do we allow ourselves to contemplate the possibility that female kindness may be, in certain respects, sex-specific?

The idea that women are always, everywhere, naturally kinder than men is, I believe, mythic in the pejorative sense. Gay men tend to be associated with kindliness, and of course heterosexual men are often kind. Masculinity is not fixed; nor are family relations. Parenting by gay couples raises important issues that are beyond the scope of this brief discussion but clearly demand consideration.

Yet if we think about kindness in a way that is interesting rather than merely sentimental – that is, not just as people being nice to each other, but as the sympathetic relations that shape human subjectivity – then the possibility that women experience these relations differently from men is certainly worth pondering. Human beings are interdependent; the self is no isolate but sociable to the core, originating and surviving through its attachments. No woman is an island. But this interdependence, this enmeshing of self with other, is a fraught affair, involving high levels of vulnerability and anxiety. Feeling with and for others can be acutely uncomfortable; the open heart is very exposed. Myths of gender, I am proposing, are, among other things, ways of imagining – and resisting – this interdependence. They are attempts to manage our needs and feelings for each other: by idealizing them, denying them, parcelling them up in gender packages. These myths work as myths, that is as public dreams, because they are not just cultural impositions but private myths, that is, unconscious feelings and fantasies with powerful personal and inter-personal effects. What are the private dreams of which the myth of female kindness has been the public expression?

The image of the kindly Woman purveyed by eighteenth-century moralists – tender-hearted to a fault, infinitely gentle and compassionate – was, I have suggested, a defensive fantasy bred by cultural anxiety. The commercialization and depersonalization of relationships in a market society generated fears about isolation and anomie, an unravelling of communal bonds. This was the dark side of the personal autonomy promised by capitalist modernity. Like Moll Flanders before her, Mary Wollstonecraft’s Jemima – with her ‘selfish independence’ acquired through marketing her labour and, sometimes, her sexual body – represents the ultimate expression of this chilly commercial ethos.³⁵ Against this, Wollstonecraft sets a model of mutual dependence and care based on what she describes as ‘true sensibility’, for which Maria’s motherly devotion is the idealized prototype. ‘True sensibility’, Maria explains at one point, is to be ‘so occupied with the feelings of others, as scarcely to regard [one’s] own sensations.’³⁶ This notion of a person completely absorbed in another, who empathizes totally with the needs and sufferings of the other person without ever resenting or hating them, is a fantasy. But it is a powerful fantasy, which still finds expression in contemporary notions of feminine kindness: that is, in the projection, into women, of caring capacities and feelings that, in a more realistic version, belong to both sexes – but differently. Baby girls develop into women via sympathetic identifications and attachments that differ in important respects from male identifications and attachments. Fellow-feeling is crucial to the private worlds of both sexes, but in different ways. Sexual difference is, in part at least, a kindness issue.

Every one of us, at the beginning of our lives, is wholly dependent on parental, usually maternal, kindness: a fantasy of perfect nurturance is part of everyone’s psychic inheritance. Every child, as she or he gets older, replaces this absolute dependence with relative dependence: a transition which is also a movement away from being exclusively an object of kindness to being a person capable of kindly feelings for others. Sympathetic identifications with care-givers are the pathway to this transition: but each sex follows this route differently. A little girl’s identification with her mother’s maternal capacities provides a floor (as the psychologist Wendy Holloway describes it) for feminine subjectivity in which care-giving plays a major role.³⁷ The same is true for little boys who are mothered, but boys face a daunting challenge which girls do not, of eventually giving up their maternal identification while retaining its caring aspects. Many boys don’t manage this, and the legacies of this failure are everywhere apparent. For both sexes, becoming kind entails confronting their own and other people’s hatred, greed and aggression, which is a difficult task – so difficult that both sexes, throughout life, are prone to retreating into sentimental fantasies of kindness for which Woman is the prototype, leaving many men stranded inside a defensive egoism while women struggle to reconcile their aggression and hate with mythic femininity. Nonetheless, the type of kindness involved in successful mothering – that complex blend of devotion and resentment, love and hate, aroused by infantile dependence – lends an unsentimental toughness to female kindness which is not merely mythical. If the capacity for kindness, as the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott once put it, depends on the ability to imagine oneself in someone else’s shoes while still keeping one’s own feet on the ground, then women, I would suggest, are the demonstrably better-grounded sex – as feminists from Mary Wollstonecraft onward have, in one way or another, proposed.³⁸

I offer this argument not as a settled conviction but as a hypothesis. My aim is not to persuade you of its truth, but to show the continuing importance of such hypotheses for feminist history. Feminism past and present needs an account of womanhood which is not merely constructionist. For if we remove female subjectivity from the frame, if we treat women’s inner life as a reflex of social norms, if we dismiss all suggestions of female-specific elements in women’s psychology as ‘essentialist’ ideology, then we lose not just Woman – the cultural construct, the public myth – but the private dreams and fantasies that power the feminist project. The kindly Woman may be mythical, but the history of feminism is so entwined with the question of feminine kindness that it is impossible to think about one without pondering the other. And however dismissive we may be of mythic Woman, a kind-hearted feminism with its feet on the ground seems to me, as to many previous generations of women, a politics worth celebrating.

Barbara Taylor is a historian of subjectivities and Professor Emerita at Queen Mary University of London. She has written extensively on the history of feminism, gender relations, theories of subjectivity, and histories and concepts of solitude from antiquity to the present. She is currently continuing her work on solitude and she is writing a memoir of her career as a political activist.

Acknowledgments

My thanks to Sally Alexander, Matt Cook, Laura Gowing, Norma Clarke and Kate Hodgkin for their helpful comments and suggestions. Thanks also to Cathleen Mair for assistance with the references.

Footnotes