First Wave Feminists - posh Anglos with too much time and money
A further deep dive into the real history of a madness which has poisoned the West
Feminism is rightly understood by most traditionalists and genuine nationalists to be a major contributor to the “Decline of the West”. As such, it was inevitable that the vastly disproportionate role of radical Jewish women among the proponents of the cultural Marxist revolution of ‘68 would lead to the now quite widespread claim that “feminism was Jewish”.
In fact, as I set out in my first article in this series, Shaking All Over (linked just below in case you missed it first time around), if feminism springs from any religious or ethnic background the people to blame are (nominally) Christian Quakers, and English Quakers at that.
What, however, of later developments?
I have also already published Terrorism for Women (October 2nd). In dealing with the extreme violence of the UK’s Suffragette movemeent, this makes it clear that this very important part of feminist history was impeccably English, and largely upper class English at that.
This essay moves back in time to consider how Quaker “First Generation Feminism” developed and, ultimately, achieved its goals.
If, dear reader, you are someone who is broadly happy with the feminists’ early demands being met, then what follows should be read simply as a piece of history.
On the other hand, you may believe that the entire feminist movement was a dangerous wrong turn for our civilisation. In that case, you should understand that - regardless of the identity of many of the theoriests and harridans of the ‘68 generation - it was a subversive sickness which sprang not from the extremely anti-female tendencies which exist within Judaism, but from a weird sect of heretical Christians, and a gaggle of upper-class Anglo women with too much time and money on their hands.
The Victorian era saw a major backlash against the fevered theorising of upper class feminists. The Victorian ideal created a dichotomy of “separate spheres” for men and women that were very clearly defined in theory, though not always in reality. In this ideology, men were to occupy the public sphere (the space of wage labour and politics) and women the private sphere (the space of home and children.)
This “feminine ideal”, also called “The Cult of Domesticity”, was typified in Victorian conduct books such as Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management and other best-sellers promoting the Victorian feminine ideal. Queen Victoria herself disparaged the concept of feminism, which she described in private letters as the “mad, wicked folly of ‘Woman’s Rights’”.
Yet while the feminist movement seemed to have run out of steam in Britain, it continued to advance in America.
John Neal, brought up a Quaker, slavery abolitionist and teetotaller, is remembered as America’s first women’s rights lecturer. Having failed to make a living selling luxury goods smuggled in from England, Neal – an evil-tempered thug whose short-fuse gave him a life-long tendency to violence – turned to writing and agitation.
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Neal’s polemics roused the feminist wave which led to the 1848 Seneca Falls Conference, where hundreds of women met in New York for the first Women’s Rights Convention. The two-day meeting is considered the official beginning of the modern American feminist movement. Most of the women attending the convention were active in Quaker or evangelical Methodist movements.
The ideas of Neal and of the Seneca Falls organisers also filtered back over the Atlantic. They encouraged a group of upper class women who met regularly during the 1850s in London’s Langham Place to discuss the united women’s voice necessary for achieving their aims. These “Ladies of Langham Place” focused on education, employment, and marital law.
Women associated with the group founded the ironically and aptly named Society for Promoting the Employment of Women (SPEW). Leading advocate for changing of property law, Harriet Taylor married John Stuart Mill in 1853 and provided the liberal theorist with much of the subject material for The Subjection of Women...
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