Article I. Initial Presentation of the Question

512. Notions of feminism. In a broader usage, any defense of women can be referred to “feminism,” whatever is undertaken to promote their religion, virtue, knowledge, liberty, social esteem, or economic condition.

Properly, this word designates the recent efforts of all those who judge that men and women ought to be made more equal. For women, as they think, enjoy a right that is too inferior, whether you regard the domestic order, where the wife is seen to be in the power of her husband, who rules her person, manages the goods at his own discretion, and violates the marriage covenant with greater impunity; or the social and economic order, where a woman is prohibited from several arts, especially the liberal arts; or the political order, in which she has no access to the commonwealth even through suffrage.

Some, as is customary, defend what they call the emancipation of women more completely than others, whether they advocate only economic emancipation, or political emancipation also, or finally domestic emancipation, so that the defenders of a certain absolute feminism contemplate removing the very institution of marriage from their midst as the first root or cause of the inequality they hate. Among these the socialists are prominent, for example Bebel in his work Die Frau.

Thus feminism is distinguished as absolute and moderate; feminism as political and domestic; feminism as Christian, and feminism as impious, which equally contemns morals and religion.

513. Historical outline. Aristophanes¹ derided a commonwealth governed by women, while Aristotle reproved it, reckoning it equally evil for women to be placed over the commonwealth, or for those placed over the commonwealth to govern it at the pleasure of women.² Lactantius³ declares Plato truly the author of a certain feminism and at the same time reproves him in these words: “Indeed, he also reserved the senate-house for women and permitted them military service, magistracies, and commands. How great will be the unhappiness of that city in which women occupy the offices of men!”

¹ Ἐκκλησιάζουσαι (Women in Assembly).

² Politics, bk. 2, chap. 7 (On the Lacedaemonian commonwealth).

³ Epitome of the Divine Institutes, chap. 33 (elsewhere 38), no. 5.

The European nations did not wholly reject in the Christian age this political kind of feminism, which was unknown to the pagan commonwealth of the Romans.⁴ For women, by a certain right of the corporate body to which they belonged, or, if noble by birth, by hereditary succession—at least where male descendants were lacking—obtained some part in the commonwealth either through their vote or through feudal administration.

⁴ Cato inveighs vehemently against the juridical emancipation of women in Livy, XXXIV.2.

Modern feminism, however, seems to have arisen in the United States of North America, since women began to contend for the right of suffrage at the Philadelphia congress in 1787, and in the State of Massachusetts, in 1850, the first assembly was gathered to promote the political emancipation of women.

In England, J. Stuart Mill undertook to defend the cause of feminism, both by forming a society to vindicate suffrage for women and especially by the celebrated little work The Subjection of Woman, which he wrote in 1869.

From there feminism began to pervade various nations, though with unequal fortune and character, so that in France it is especially mingled with impiety; in several regions it has impelled women to pursue higher studies;⁵ it has made them legally fit to cultivate several arts,⁶ and almost everywhere it has obtained milder civil rights for women. In a few nations, for example, in South Australia, they are also adorned with political suffrage;⁷ in several they can participate in local administrations. Such is the case in England.

⁵ In America and Russia, separate universities are now assigned to the education of women. Thus, since 1885, at Bryn Mawr, near Philadelphia, there has been a university which in 1900 numbered 50 professors and about 400 female students.

⁶ Thus the medical art and the forensic art, especially in America.

⁷ Concerning political suffrage, cf. the study of D. Duthoit in Réforme sociale, October 16, 1901, p. 560 ff.

In Belgium, by the laws of 1900, greater disposition over their own wages was granted to wives; and their money deposited in a savings bank is more protected from a husband's dissipation.⁸ Already before this, by the law of April 10, 1890, women had been permitted to acquire academic degrees and to practice medicine, but not to plead cases at the bar.

⁸ Cf. Vermeersch, Manuel social, pp. 241 and 298.

To promote the affairs of feminism, however, not a few books are written, periodicals are published, and especially congresses are held periodically. Thus the most recent congress in Germany (June 1904) was held in the name of 7,000,000 women.

514. The causes why the right and place of women are now disputed with such great contention, besides the multitude of persons whose lot is at issue, are:

1. Changed economic conditions and customs, so that many more women attempt, and are obliged, to provide for themselves by their own occupation.

Thus in Belgium, in 1896, the women who were engaged in laborious occupations, agriculture excepted, numbered 264,999; in agriculture, in 1895, there were 515,914, of whom 58,829 had hired out their labor; those assigned to other occupations in 1890 exceeded 600,000 in number.⁹

⁹ Recensement général (agriculture) de 1895; Recensement général des industries et des métiers, October 31, 1896 (vol. 18), and the study of D. Julin, Réforme sociale, September 16, 1901, p. 381 ff., and Annuaire statistique de la Belgique, 1903.

About 600,000 women were engaged in various occupations of middle-class citizens (emplois de la classe moyenne); of these more than 325,000 had exceeded the age of 25 years and were not joined in marriage.

In Belgium, however, 3,422,403 women were counted in 1901.¹⁰

¹⁰ Annuaire statistique de la Belgique, 1903.

At the international congress of women which was held at Berlin in June of this year, 1904, 25 percent of the women of Germany—that is, 3,578,851—were found to provide themselves with sustenance by working.