Consciousness of Self and Consciousness of Sex in Antebellum Feminism

Consciousness of Self and Consciousness of Sex in Antebellum Feminism Jean V. Matthews The essential tension between women in feminist movements and women outside them has stemmed not so much from specific feminist demands as from the perception that ferninism requires a re-visioning and refashioning of the female self. Within the feminist movement, there has been an equally long-standing, though not always overt, tension between equality and "difference," between those who seek to expand the area of genderless space available for individual growth and those who affirm a distinct female identity. This philosophical difference rests, I suspect, upon the different ways that individuals conceive of and experience the self. Our sense of identity may not be consciously chosen, but it is probably not entirely given either. Specific contexts offer room for different identities to be asserted; which we choose has consequences for who our allies are and what kinds of actions we find it appropriate to take. The sense of self orients one when making moral choices. "Identities," as June Howard has recently remarked, "inevitably constitute the locations from which we act."1 If we look at the remarkable upsurge in women's activism in antebellum America—an activism which included, but was much broader than, the first formal movement dedicated to claiming equal rights for women— we can see that major philosophical fault line between equality and difference already beginning to form. We can also glimpse the ways that different women experienced and defined the self and the effect this had upon their orientation to the "woman question." To what extent in becoming conscious does the self perceive itself as gendered? How central is gender to identity? The nineteenth century was the century of individualism—not merely in an economic sense, but in a spreading individual self-awareness and a cherishing of individual distinctness and potential. But various social pressures molded the direction that individual self development could take. Gender was one of these pressures—and men were as much subject to it as women. Nineteenth-century Western culture increasingly encouraged individuals to think of the self in essentially gendered terms. Gender permeated every aspect of being, making men and women almost mirror images of one another. Ideal types of "manhood" and "womanhood" were not entirely monolithic; there was always a variety of ways in which to be unequivocally "ferninine'' or "masculine." However, the maintenance of clear boundaries between the two was of great importance, since gender was seen as © 1993 Journal of Women's History, Vol. 5 No. 1 (Spring)___________________ 62 Journal of Women's History Spring vulnerable and in constant need of reinforcement. Nineteenth-century culture was geared to provide that reinforcement. There has never been a time when the adjectives "manly" and "womanly" were so profusely applied, or so much media energy devoted to reinforcing and explicating distinctions of sex. Separate spheres for men and women were necessary not merely for social order, but because they provided the essential context within which gender identity was developed and maintained. When women sought to invade men's sphere, it was not merely a threat to social discipline; rather, both sexes deeply feared that once women stepped outside of the magic circle they would lose their gender identity. They would cease to be women and then, most terrifying of all, men would become women. For even more than female identity, male identity seemed to depend upon the strict maintenance and policing of gender boundaries. Hence the immediate attacks on women's rights advocates as mannish or unsexed, who wanted to relegate men to the distaff and the washtub, and the characterization of male allies of feminists as effeminate "Miss Nancy men. ' Both Nancy Cott and Carroll Smith-Rosenberg have suggested that feminism in this period arose from a "female world" in which women learned "to define themselves first as women." Certainly in the early nineteenth-century the positive attributes of femininity were given much greater play than previously. Considering the number of public encomiums to women's nature and influence, it is hardly surprising that the century witnessed a rising tide of female self-esteem along with gender consciousness. "I am a woman" wrote a correspondent...