The Patriarchal Bargain: Part 1

And let's talk about it through the historical reality of the suffrage and anti-suffrage movements.

My students this past July at the Suffrage memorial in London

I teach an entire class on the suffrage movement.

Yes, I am a medieval—not modern—historian (PhD UNC-Chapel Hill, 2004) with a second field in religious studies (I took most of my course work for this emphasis at Duke Divinity). But the overarching theme of my research (which you can see most of here on my google scholar profile) and graduate coursework has always been women’s history—from courses in modern feminism and medieval women with Judith Bennett to readings in British women’s history and gender history with Barbara Harris and Cynthia Herrup to a course on female monasticism and mysticism with Susan Keefe and a course on the “Christianization” of Europe (late ancient/early medieval with an emphasis on women & monasticism) with Catherine Peyroux. I even worked for two or three semesters as the graduate assistant for the Women’s Studies department at UNC-Chapel Hill and served as a teaching assistant for Stan Chojnacki in his class Women and Marriage in Medieval Europe.

So learning to teach the modern history of suffrage has been a fun, and not difficult, addition to my usual fare. It also has helped with my current research in the Southern Baptist archives.

My students this past summer at the memorial for Emmeline Pankhurst (right next to Parliament).

For those of you unaware, by the “suffrage movement” I am referencing the time between 1832 and 1928 when women in the U.K. and U.S. fought (and finally received) the legal right to vote—although my class begins with the revolutionary era (U.S., France, and Haiti in the late eighteenth century). Suffrage is not a western phenomenon, as students in my course learn. But given my particular expertise in Western Europe as well as the centralized framework of the course (U.S. in Global Perspective) for the Baylor History department, I center it on a comparison of suffrage in the U.S. & U.K. and expand globally outwards. (The textbook I use is Susan Ware’s Why They Marched, alongside the source book U.S. in Global Perspective and Hallie Rubenhold’s The Five.)

For example, we are currently discussing the conditions of women’s lives in the 19th century. We have learned that, on both sides of the pond, some women who met certain conditions had the ability to vote before Sojourner Truth was denied a ballot in Battle Creek, Michigan for the 1872 presidential election. It was the Great Reform Act of 1832 (aka The Representation of the People Act) that unilaterally revoked suffrage for women in the U.K. (defining voters as “male persons”) just as it was the 1887 Edmunds-Tucker Act that disenfranchised all Utah women.

My students find it interesting to learn that some women (mostly white) in the U.S. had the right to vote long before the 19th Amendment. I mean, did you know that white women in Wyoming gained the right to vote in 1870 and—unlike their sisters in Utah—never lost it? Black women could technically vote in Wyoming, but no one knows if they actually did.

My students this past summer at the traditional location for the Reformer’s Tree in Hyde Park where suffragettes held regular meetings in 1906.

Two weeks ago, my lectures focused on how the laws of coverture (which denied married women a legal identity) affected women throughout the 19th century in both the U.S. and U.K.—wives could not own property, control money (including wages they earned), or sign legal documents. While some advances were made for married women through a series of property acts, they remained disadvantaged. (Did you remember from my last post that it wasn’t until the Equal Credit Opportunity Act in 1974 that a woman in the U.S. could own a credit card in her own name? Just think about that).

Some women were more disadvantaged than others. Take the 1855 case of Celia, an enslaved woman raped frequently by her white master. When she fought back and killed him, she was declared guilty of murder because a court ruled that the 1845 Missouri statutes which criminalized rape for “any woman” taken “unlawfully against her will” did not apply to Celia as a Black woman. In a similar vein, Native American women were denied the vote in Wyoming because Native Americans were not considered citizens (just think about that, too…..).

My students this past summer at Sophia Duleep Singh’s house outside London right across from Hampton Court Palace. Singh was an active suffragette who worked alongside Emmeline Pankhurst.

Last week we took the conversation global, turning to the revolutionary hero Qiu Jin. Like most other nineteenth-century women in her village of Shanyin, Jin bound her feet and became the wife of an older man in an arranged marriage. As she had come from a wealthy family, she was well-educated and trained in martial arts. Eventually she escaped the husband she had grown to hate (leaving during one of his visits to the brothels), sold her jewelry to buy a one-way boat ticket to Japan, and started a new life. She unbound her feet, became a poet who advocated for women’s rights, started a feminist magazine, and joined the Chinese revolutionary army. Listen to how she wrote about her escape to Japan in her poem Reflections:

“The sun and moon without light; sky and earth in darkness. Who can lift up the sinking world of women? I pawned my jewels to sail across the open seas, divided from my children as I left the border at Jade Pass. Unbinding my feet to cleanse out a millennium’s poisons, I arouse the spirits of women, hundreds of flowers abloom. Oh, this poor handkerchief made of merfolk-woven silk, half stained with blood and half soaked in tears!” (translated by Yilin Wang)

In 1905 she returned to China and began publicly advocating for women’s rights. My students read her provocative essay, “An Address to Two Hundred Million Women Fellow Countrywomen,” in which she called them to rise up and claim their independence. “When Heaven created humans, there was no difference between men and women. I ask you, where would these people be without women?” Perhaps the most famous line Qiu Jin ever wrote is the unforgettable opening to her poem A Reply Verse in Matching Rhyme, “Don’t tell me women are not the stuff of heroes.” After her public beheading in 1907, she became a martyr whose story helped inspire the people of China to rise up and overthrow the Qing Dynasty.

Lizzo’s dress on display in Kensington Palace, London. You can see why I like it.

My students thus are learning that in the nineteenth-century (1) women, from the U.S. to Asia, faced broadly similar inequalities because of their sex and (2) women, from Sojourner Truth to Qiu Jin, recognized the subordination of women within their particular historical context and spoke out against it.

What my students haven’t learned yet is a third continuity: that some women during the suffrage era recognized the legal, economic, and cultural subordination of their sex and—instead of fighting against it—supported it. Qiu Jin’s words, “Don’t tell me women aren’t the stuff of heroes,” stand out to us because they are extraordinary. Most ordinary women during the timeframe of my class, 1832-1928, did not actively participate in the suffrage movement. Many of them worked against it, arguing that women should not have the right to vote.

I’m going to stop here, for today, and let you think about the implications of this. Despite some recent conversations on social media, it isn’t a surprise to scholars why so many women declined to support the suffrage movement and actively worked against it. We know that the most effective opponents to suffrage were not men; they were women. Indeed, the reason the suffrage victory was so tremendous was because the odds were stacked against it.

I’m concluding this post with a short bibliography. I am aware that many of you will be uncomfortable with my discussion of the patriarchal bargain. At the same, I think you should understand it. As I have said before, my goal isn’t to change your mind; it is to tell you what I know.

So what is the patriarchal bargain for women? It is the strategies and coping mechanisms employed by women to navigate gendered constraints without challenging them.

Until my next post…..

Harry Potter’s letters filling up Privet Drive on his 11th birthday. My daughter and I visited the Warner Brother Studios this past summer and did the whole Harry Potter tour. I included this picture because it reminds me of what happened last time I wrote about the patriarchal bargain……

Bibliography:

Deniz Kandiyoti, “Bargaining with Patriarchy,” Gender and Society 2:3 (September 1988), pp. 274-290.

Charlotte Allen, “The Patriarchal Bargain,” A Review of Soft Patriarchs, New Men: How Christianity Shapes Fathers and Husbands By W. Bradford Wilcox (University of Chicago, 2004). First Things 151 (March 2005), pp. 41-43.

Judith Bennett, History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006.

Curtis Coats, “God, Man, Then… Wait, How Does That Go? Emerging Gender Identities in 20-something Evangelicals,” Journal of Men, Masculinities and Spirituality 3:1 (2009), 64-79.

Kelly Chong, “Negotiating Patriarchy: South Korean Evangelical Women and the Politics of Gender,” Gender & Society 20:6 (2006), https://doi.org/10.1177/0891243206291111.

Sally Gallagher, Evangelical Identity & Gendered Family Life. Rutgers: 2003.

Elissa Lucero, “‘Are we in a bargaining position?’: Patriarchal Bargains, Elisabeth Elliot, and Purity Culture,” paper presented at the 2019 Scottish Association for the Study of American Annual Conference, University of Edinburgh.

Elena Moore, “‘My Husband Has to Stop Beating Me and I Shouldn’t Go to the Police’: Family Meetings, Patriarchal Bargains, and Marital Violence in the Eastern Cape Province, South Africa,” Violence Against Women 26:6-7 (April 2019), https://doi.org/10.1177/1077801219840440.