Women and Protest: Introduction

EUROPEAN ROMANTIC REVIEW 2021, VOL. 32, NO. 3, 239–244 https://doi.org/10.1080/10509585.2021.1917816 INTRODUCTION Women and Protest: Introduction Elizabeth Kraft Department of English, University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA The Women’s March on Washington in 2017, organized in protest of the 2016 election of the American president Donald Trump, spawned a worldwide movement. Two years later, women in more than thirty countries participated in marches designed to draw attention to violence against women and economic austerities that disproportionately affect women’s lives. In ever-increasing numbers, worldwide, women began to utilize all the resources at their command—political, technological, and cultural—to highlight inequities of gender, race, and class as well as global concerns such as the environment, climate change, immigration, etc. Women artists, from novelists and poets to filmmakers and songwriters/performers, devoted (and continue to devote) their talents to expressions of activism, protest, and calls for change. In many countries, prominent exposés of and legal actions against once-important male cultural icons resulted in prison sentences, dismissal from duty, public shaming, and calls for change in the various professions that allowed such behavior to occur without check—indeed, often with enablers and systemic support. The #MeToo movement bears witness to a growing determination to speak out about and demand reparation for wrongs too often endured, tolerated, or even celebrated in the past. All of this activity coincided with commemorations of an important milestone in the fight for women’s equality in America, the 100th anniversary of the passage of the nineteenth amendment, which guarantees women the right to vote; therefore, it is no surprise that renewed commitment to the rights of women has been evident in the popular culture of the past four years. Two 2018 films based on the career of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg—a documentary entitled RBG and a feature-length dramatic recreation of her argument before the Supreme Court as a young lawyer entitled On the Basis of Sex —were particularly notable. And, significantly, both works solidly situated Ginsburg in the line of succession beginning with women of the Romantic era who were the first to demand social and legal reform. As we saw in both these films, Ginsburg ended her plea before the bench in the 1973 landmark sex discrimination case Frontiero v. Richardson with the words of nineteenth-century feminist Sarah Moore Grimké: “I ask no favor for my sex; all I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks” (Grimké 10). Recently, we have entered a new phase of worldwide protest, one centered more on racial injustice than on the specific concerns of women. In the Spring of 2020, due to the worldwide coronavirus pandemic, the people of America and much of the world CONTACT Elizabeth Kraft [email protected] © 2021 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group 240 E. KRAFT were working from home and attending school remotely, with most leisure time spent in front of the television or the computer screen rather than in theaters, movie houses, concert halls, sports arenas, airports, or bars. Therefore, millions witnessed in real time the killing of George Floyd by a police officer who used his knee to cut off the victim’s air supply. Despite the pandemic, millions of protestors took to the streets, chanting not only the slogan of the Black Lives Matter movement, “I Can’t Breathe,” but a version of Grimké’s call for justice, taking their cue from the Reverend Al Sharpton, who delivered the eulogy at Floyd’s 4 June 2020, Minneapolis memorial service: George Floyd’s story has been the story of black folks, because ever since 401 years ago, the reason we could never be who we wanted and dreamed of being is you kept your knee on our neck. We were smarter than the underfunded schools you put us in, but you had your knee on our neck. We could run corporations and not hustle in the street, but you had your knee on our neck. We had creative skills. We could do what anybody else could do. But we couldn’t get your knee off our neck. What happened to George happens every day in this country, in education, in health services, and in every area of American life. It’s time for us to stand up and say in the name of George get your knee off our necks. (Sharpton) The phrase lent itself to the Commitment March of 28 August 2020, marketed as the “Get Your Knee Off Our Necks March”, in commemoration of the 57th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom where Martin Luther King Jr. gave his powerful “I Have a Dream” speech from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Marches in support of Black Lives Matter and in protest of police violence in America in the summer of 2020 again inspired worldwide demonstrations—this time in opposition to systemic racism in all its manifestations. In solidarity with the American movement, many protestors in Europe also highlighted their countries’ involvement in colonial oppression and participation in the trafficking of slaves. These efforts, in America and Europe, have led to determination to create more just and justifiable historical narratives—efforts that include the eradication of public monuments dedicated to European champions of the slave trade, American Confederate generals, and white supremacists who stood in the way of civil rights for all. The line of rhetorical and ethical dissent stretches from Romantic-era activism to the abolition of the British slave trade in 1807, to the Seneca Falls Convention and the passage of the Married Woman’s property act in America in 1848, to the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 to the Married Women’s Property Act in England in 1870 and 1882, to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, to the work of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Al Sharpton, and others who were and remain sick and tired of oppression, inequality, and abuse at the hands of the powerful in whatever sector of life or whatever country it occurs. It is with a sense of the historical importance and continuing relevance of the protests offered, in various ways to various ends, by Romantic women writers that we present this special issue. Sarah Grimké, whose words have been so often and so powerfully invoked in the fight for justice, was a Quaker and an abolitionist in addition to being a feminist. And she owed a great, though unacknowledged, debt to the work of Mary Wollstonecraft. Eileen Hunt Botting and Christine Carey have posited that she and other nineteenthcentury American suffragists would have been hesitant to overtly claim Wollstonecraft’s influence because of “a fear of public outcry against … allegiance with the scandalous image of the fallen woman memorialized” in William Godwin’s Memoirs of the Author EUROPEAN ROMANTIC REVIEW 241 of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1797) which, of course, revealed the “shocking details” of Wollstonecraft’s romantic life (714, 708). Clare Migley notes that by the early nineteenth century in England, as well, “advocacy of women’s rights had become discredited in middle-class circles by its association with support of the French Revolution and with the notorious private life of Mary Wollstonecraft” (127). For an earnest Quaker abolitionist who argues the equality of women “depend[ing] solely on the Bible” for her evidence of “the sphere of woman” (Grimké 4), allusion to Wollstonecraft specifically would not advance the cause. Yet it is clear that Grimké and Wollstonecraft are more similar than different in their sense of women’s rights and potentialities, their notion of the nature of female suppression and their commitment to the advancement of women through avenues of education, protest, and political action. Indeed, Botting and Carey argue that Grimké’s Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Women (1838) and Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) “are linked not only as the two most important early treatises on women’s rights, but also in their shared set of philosophical concerns” (714). Moreover, though “Grimké omits direct references to Wollstonecraft, … [she] employs terms and arguments parallel to the Rights of Woman” (714). Botting and Carey cite a number of shared concepts and language, but most important, to me, is the forcefulness of the writing in each case—producing in Wollstonecraft such memorable statements as “Strengthen the female mind by enlarging it, and there will be an end to blind obedience”; and “It is vain to expect virtue from women till they are, in some degree, independent of men” (44, 321). In Grimké, the robust language already cited is accompanied by other direct and clear indictments of male prerogative, such as the following Wollstonecraftian observation: “Man has inflicted an unspeakable injury upon woman, by holding up to her view her animal nature, and placing in the back ground (sic) her moral and intellectual being” (24). Wollstonecraft was not the only woman writer of her time to voice protest, nor was she the only woman writer who laid the groundwork for the collective action of later generations—action that led to legal change and more equitable distribution of rights. In Mothers of the Nation, Anne Mellor establishes that Romantic-era women other than Wollstonecraft were fully participant in forwarding social reform. She cites Hannah More’s spearheading of the Sunday School movement, Amelia Opie’s involvement in the Anti-Slavery Society of Norwich, and “the powerful role of women in the burgeoning philanthropic voluntary associations” during this period (6). All of these activities involved tacit protest at the very least; some—particularly abolitionist commitments— would be recognizable by today’s definitions as adamant social and political activism. So too do we recognize in the behavior of literary characters and actual women of the Romantic era behavior that we would call today “political protest”—declarations of objection to the status quo on behalf of all women, not as individual grievance but as voicing of joint concerns. This period, from the late eighteenth to the early nineteenth century, witnessed what Jane Rendall has called the birth of “modern feminism,” when women began “to associate together, perhaps at first for different reasons, and then to recognize and to assert their common interests as women” (1). Protest and protest movements can be uneven—and sometimes counterproductive. Every individual at any given moment is negotiating a variety of claims, identities, and commitments, some of which, as in the case of the authors we will examine in this 242 E. KRAFT issue, give rise to expressions of protests of various sorts. In the Romantic era, these protests did not result in collective action, but they paved the way for such to come in the decades to follow. After all, “protest” can mean a number of things—and did in the period in question. Samuel Johnson records the following definitions of the verb: “to give a solemn declaration of resolution or opinion,” “to prove, to show, to give evidence of,” “to call as a witness” (s.v. protest). He records, as well, the noun form that is close to the meaning we generally ascribe today: “a solemn declaration of opinion against something” (s.v. protest). Probably the most well-known quotation linking women and protest —though not one cited by Johnson—is from Shakespeare’s Hamlet: “The Lady doth protest too much” (3.2.254). Interestingly, the comment is uttered by Gertrude who is watching the play (the “Mousetrap”) that Hamlet has written to expose Claudius’s guilt. The Queen in the play rehearses solemn declarations of love for her soon-to-bemurdered husband, and Gertrude finds her over-the-top effusions to be evidence of the shallowness of her devotion. Gertrude reasons that the play’s Queen would not avow love for her husband so often and so fulsomely if she really did love him. So protest, to Gertrude, is not an objection but, again, a solemn declaration. The Oxford English Dictionary reveals several legal senses in which the term “protest” has been used since the Middle Ages, but most are marked “obsolete” (OED). The notion of adamant declaration so prominent in Johnson remains, but more definitions are slanted toward the idea of collective dissent. The illustrative examples, however, reveal that this now-dominant definition begins to emerge in the mid-nineteenth century. The very act of writing is a kind of protest. Whether it be poetry, fiction, criticism, political theory, philosophy, drama or any other genre, putting words on paper and distributing them is an act of assertion, of courage, of belief in the worth of what one has to say. It is a “solemn declaration of resolution,” whatever the content (Johnson, s.v. protest). For women writers in the period of our concern, it was also a plea to the powerful men who seemed to control everything. To quote again, and in full, Grimké, inspired by Wollstonecraft and inspiring Ginsburg and Sharpton, what the woman writer of this period was saying by the very act of writing was: “I ask no favors for my sex. I surrender not our claim to equality. All I ask of our brethren is, that they will take their feet from off our necks, and permit us to stand upright on that ground which God designed us to occupy” (10). Put more secularly, but in complete accord with Grimké’s statement, what these women writers want is to develop and express the talents that are theirs. In this issue, we examine other of the first women protestors of the Romantic period and the issues to which they addressed their works as well as the strategies, effects, and influence of their endeavors. The essays in this issue demonstrate a wide range of concerns tackled by women writers of the Romantic period and offer insight into the long history of women’s activism and the role of literature and the other arts in framing protest, in prompting change, and in solemnly declaring the right to do so. Our issue begins with three essays that examine the assertion of protest through the restructuring of generic norms. Kelli Holt sees in Mary Robinson’s “The Shepherd’s Dog” a multidimensional cry of protest against the ideological uses to which the pastoral mode has traditionally been put. Reading Robinson’s poem as a response to Wordsworth’s “Michael,” Holt investigates the intervention Robinson makes in representation of the natural world, in sympathy for the working animal and the laboring class, and in concern for the rural world being sapped of life and energy by encroaching demands of EUROPEAN ROMANTIC REVIEW 243 urbanization and industrialization. Renee Buesking similarly examines the way the woman writer negotiates with generic conventions in order to find her own voice. Buesking turns to Charlotte Smith, who dons the mask of nonthreatening female personae in order to enact radical formal experiments. In her novel Celestina, Buesking demonstrates, Smith blends poetry and narrative to create a receptive audience that is responsive to hybrid forms and innovative combinations not bound by rigid literary precedents. Elizabeth Way’s essay examines experimentations with dramatic form in two plays by Scottish author Joanna Baillie, her musical drama The Phantom and her prose tragedy Witchcraft. Both plays serve as vehicles through which Baillie protests patriarchal authority in details of plot as well as in radical generic innovation. Like Holt and Buesking, Way provides insight into how protest is mapped at the level of form by women’s insistence on reshaping the contours and expectations of artistic expression in order to better fit their voices, their sentiments, and their concerns. The next two essays focus on women writers as they situate themselves more explicitly in communities of protest. Roxanne Eberle considers the 1794 contributions of Amelia Alderson (later Opie) to the progressive periodical The Cabinet. As Eberle points out, Alderson “mediates between various modes of masculine Romantic sociability and political discourse, even as she generates an alternative (and explicitly feminine) voice of protest.” She used that voice to speak publicly in a way startling to even her female contemporaries. With an emphasis on performance and empathy, Alderson constructs a kind of protest that was radical and effective, as did Anna Letitia Barbauld, whose anti-establishment, antiwar writings form the core of Scott Krawczyk’s examination. Centered on Barbauld’s little-examined 1807 essay or prose-poem, “The Contrast, or Peace or War,” Krawczyk’s discussion illuminates Barbauld’s effort to create a “generic outlet suitable for fearless antiwar sentiments”—an effort that would also inform her most famous jeremiad, Eighteen Hundred and Eleven. As Krawczyk demonstrates, Barbauld’s success can be measured by the twentieth-century invocations of “The Contrast” in antiwar efforts of new generations. In that sense, Krawczyk’s essay bridges the first section of this issue with its focus on generic experimentation and the final section which turns to the lasting influence of Romantic women’s protest. Li-ching Chen departs from the idea of protest as a communal activity and treats, instead, the role of solitude and the espousing of solitariness as a means of female empowerment. Mary Hays, Chen argues, embraced solitariness in order to cultivate independence of thought and action and, in doing so, modeled that a kind of strength typically associated with male thinkers was also available to the women who wished to pursue it. Chen links this trait to Hays’s feminism and argues its vital importance to the thought and life of Hays’s niece Matilda Mary Hays and to the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century social movements in pursuit of women’s enfranchisement. Matt Lorenz brings us into the twenty-first century through his reading of the HBO series Westworld as an extension of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, foregrounding issues of creation and ethics. Like Shelley, the creators of Westworld are committed to the examination of, as Lorenz puts it, the “outsized role” men have played in the creation of the social structures that define the lives of women. His essay testifies to the continued relevance of Shelley’s insight that lack of empathy on the part of those in positions of power (who, essentially, are the creators of the realities in which those without power live) results in trauma and destruction for all. Together, these seven essays offer insight into the origins of women’s 244 E. KRAFT protest and, we hope, will inspire further investigation into the relationship between Romantic women’s writing and the pursuit of justice from their time through our own and beyond. Acknowledgments I would like to thank Catherine Burroughs, Danielle Gilman, Courtney Hoffman, Aysha Jerald, William McCarthy, John Mee, Jeanne Moskal, Luke Vines, and Miriam Wallace for consultation on various aspects of this issue. I am also appreciative of the support of Lucy Morrison and Benjamin Colbert, the editors of European Romantic Review who solicited and nurtured this project. To the contributors I would like to express my gratitude and admiration. The essays that make up this special issue were written in the midst of one of the most difficult years in recent memory. Its successful completion stands as a tribute to the importance of the topic and the dedication of the scholars who worked so diligently to creatively address the various aspects of Women and Protest. 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