Capitalism-and-Its-Critics-A-History-From-the

The patriarchy wasn’t a new topic for Thompson. In the Inquiry, he had lamented the “domestic slavery of one half of the human race” and demanded: “Give men and women equal civil and political rights  … Let property on the death of the parents be equally divided between all the children male and female.”21 In writing the Appeal, he expanded his arguments in many directions. Since no correspondence between Wheeler and Thompson appears to have survived, it’s hard to single out specific areas in which she shaped his views, but Thompson himself suggested that Wheeler’s influence was pervasive, writing in his introductory letter to her: “To separate your thoughts from mine were now to me impossible, so amalgamated are they with my own.”22

Thompson’s blistering criticisms of marriage likely reflected Wheeler’s views and experience. One area where her voice came through particularly clearly was in Thompson’s argument that legal and institutional reforms, although urgent, must be accompanied by drastic changes in how men thought about women and behaved toward them. “But I hear you indignantly reject the boon of equality with such creatures as men now are,” with their “ignorance and vanity” and “animal appetite,” Thompson wrote, referring to Wheeler. “With you I would equally elevate both sexes.”23 Writing in his own voice, Thompson also addressed his fellow men, saying:

Three or four thousand years have worn threadbare your vile cloak of hypocrisy. Cast aside this tattered cloak before it leaves you naked and exposed. Clothe yourself with the new garments of sincerity. Be rational human beings, not mere male sexual creatures. Cast aside the ferocious brute of your nature; give up the pleasures of the brute, those of mere lust and command, for the pleasures of the rational being.24

Having originated as a response to James Mill’s article on government, the Appeal largely focused on legal and political questions. But Thompson and Wheeler were also acutely aware of economic changes that were drastically changing women’s role in society. In preindustrial times, many women had been wage earners, to be sure. Domestic service—working for rich people as servants and housekeepers—was a major employer of female labor. So was preindustrial manufacturing. Under the “putting out” system, women had worked in their homes as spinners, weavers, knitters, and sewers. Usually a merchant supplied them with raw materials and paid them on a piecework basis: the more they produced, the more they earned.

With the rise of the factory system, out-work became in-work, and women entered the textile mills in large numbers. According to estimates provided to the British Parliament in 1834, 58 percent of the workforce in the cotton industry was female. In the silk industry, the figure was even higher: 78 percent. In the wool industry, it was 41 percent.25 The majority of these female factory workers were young. The same 1834 report indicated that 16 percent of them were under the age of thirteen, and 51 percent were between thirteen and twenty. Indeed, the story of the early industrial revolution is largely a story of young female workers, although that is not how some histories have presented it. In the mills of Manchester and other cotton-producing areas, women worked day and night shifts, and if they were over sixteen, there was no legal limit to the length of their workday. (It wasn’t until 1844 that Parliament finally imposed a limit of twelve hours for adult women.)

There were similar developments in the United States. In the Massachusetts textile town of Lowell in the 1820s, mill owners recruited teenage girls and young women from farms and villages throughout New England. Many “mill girls,” as they came to be known, lived in large dormitory-style boardinghouses owned by the mill owners.26 They worked twelve to fourteen hours a day, five days a week, and half a day on Saturday. The work was arduous, the discipline strict, and the work conditions crowded and unregulated. But for many young New England women, working in the new factories was more remunerative than staying on their families’ farms.

On both sides of the Atlantic, factory owners valued female and child workers for their dexterity, sobriety, and acceptance of lower wages.

Historians still debate the extent to which they were exploited financially. After analyzing figures presented to the 1834 parliamentary commission, Joyce Burnette, an economic historian at Wabash College, reported that women working in Lancashire cotton factories were paid 8.60 shillings a week, compared to men’s wages of 19.12 shillings a week—a huge gap.27 But Burnette also pointed out that women tended to carry out less productive tasks, and she argued that they usually received market rate wages for the jobs they did. Other historians have challenged this conclusion, noting that women were often assigned jobs and paid according to customs that reflected sexist norms. In some cases, they were actively excluded from high-paying skilled trades.

From the early days of the industrial revolution, many men who worked in textile mills regarded female labor as a threat to their jobs and wages. This attitude was particularly prevalent among male mule spinners, who minded machines that were used to spin cotton. In Glasgow, some women who entered the trade were subjected to violent attacks. As late as 1829, a national meeting of mule spinners passed a resolution to restrict the job to “the son, brother, or orphan nephew of spinners, and the poor relations of the proprietors of the mills.”28

Low wages and employment restrictions weren’t the only challenges that female factory operatives faced. Even as they went out to work, they remained largely responsible for raising children and unpaid household labor. In scholarly papers and a 2010 book, Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution, the historian Jane Humphries has provided a compelling portrait of family life in a time of roiling change.29 Childcare was expensive if it was available at all. Working mothers often had to rely on one of their older children to look after the youngest. To boost the family budget, other siblings were often sent out to work. Many fathers, whether they were at work or at the local tavern, were largely absent from the home.30

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As upper-class intellectuals who mixed in metropolitan circles, Wheeler and Thompson didn’t have much firsthand experience of women in the new industrial economy. The Appeal didn’t directly discuss their situation, but it did insist that women should enjoy equal opportunities in the workplace. To make this possible, the first necessary step was to “abolish all prohibitory and exclusive laws,” particularly the marriage code. “Women then might exert in a free career with men their faculties of mind and body, to whatever degree developed, in pursuit of happiness by means of exertion, as men do.”31

These statements came from a passage at the end of Thompson’s introductory letter to Wheeler, in which he summed up their message of gender equality and tied it to the overall utilitarian project of creating a fairer, more rational society, “a more comprehensive system, founded on equal benevolence, on the true development of the principle of Utility.” Simply leveling the legal playing field for women and men wouldn’t be sufficient to achieve this goal, Thompson explained, because it would leave in place other inegalitarian aspects of “competition”—i.e., capitalism. Orthodox economists, he went on, were guilty of ignoring this reality and “leaving the great bulk of human beings to eternal ignorance and toil.” The passage ended with an invocation: “To a new science, the social science, or the science of promoting human happiness, that of political economy, or the mere science of producing wealth by individual competition, must give way.”32

Wheeler was fully committed to both parts of the grand project, liberating women and reorganizing society on a more equitable basis. During the 1820s, she came into contact with Robert Owen and Charles Fourier. Some correspondence from these relationships has survived, and it suggests that Wheeler was just as forthright in expressing her views with them as she was with Thompson. In one letter to Owen, she lamented that humans had “hitherto been taught nothing but the most pernicious errors,” then went on to criticize organized religion, patriotism, and the pursuit of “bit by bit reforms.”33 Wheeler lived for some time in Paris with her two adult daughters and sought to replicate the political and intellectual networks she had developed in Caen. She came across Fourier, whose proposals for independent cooperative communities were beginning to gain a following, and she began to act as his translator from French to English and vice versa.

Wheeler also tried to get the “co-operators” on both sides of the English Channel to cooperate with each other, but these efforts weren’t very successful. In 1826 she introduced Fourier to some members of the London Co-operative Society, only to have him complain to her: “They are not very sharp and they were bloated with dogmatism. The Owenite school is extremely weak.”34

One point of commonality between Fourier and the British cooperators was a struggle to find investors willing to finance their ambitious plans. (Only after Fourier’s death, in 1837, would some of his disciples, in the United States and elsewhere, establish versions of his phalanxes.) Like many visionaries, Fourier believed his insight wasn’t being fully recognized. At times, Wheeler tried to buck him up. “You feel some disappointment when you see how little society appreciates your generous efforts,” she wrote in an 1830 letter, “but I think this must necessarily be the fate of the small number of wise philanthropists who commit themselves to such a hopeless struggle.”35

By this time, Wheeler had returned to London following the early death of her elder daughter, Henrietta—the one who had described Thompson doing his harlequin dance at Bentham’s house. Wheeler’s other daughter, Rosina, married Edward Bulwer-Lytton, an English novelist and aristocrat. Anna was now in her early forties, but the approach of middle age hadn’t dulled her spirit or moderated her views. At a family dinner with Rosina and Bulwer-Lytton, she met Benjamin Disraeli, a future British prime minister who was then an ambitious young novelist. In a letter to his sister, Disraeli described Wheeler as a combination of Jeremy Bentham and Meg Merrilies, a figure from an eponymous Keats poem who was “a gypsy, and lived upon the moors.” Disraeli went on to say that Wheeler was “very clever but awfully revolutionary. She poured forth all her systems upon my novitiate ear, and while she advocated the rights of women, Bulwer abused system-mongers and the fairer sex, and Rosina played with her dog.”36

If Wheeler had once harbored reservations about expressing her views publicly in her own voice, she had overcome them. In 1829 she spoke at a public meeting in a chapel near Finsbury Square, in central London, on the “Social Condition of Women.” She began her speech by noting that poor health and “deep domestic sorrow”—the death of Henrietta—had robbed her mind of “much of its energy and elasticity.” Also, she went on:

I feel the difficulty of employing a moderate language, in speaking of the degraded position of my sex … But what appears to me the most cheerless part of my task—I would almost say the “forlorn hope of my enterprise”— is that I am doubtful, whether any material good can be effected by this and similar lectures, seeing as I do, the rottenness of our institutions, and those especially which smell of rank injustice, in the disabilities set up against half the human race: WOMAN!

Addressing arguments often made at the time to justify the subjugation of women, Wheeler dismissed the notion that they were weaker than men in mind and body. “All the researches of anatomy, have not yet been able to prove a difference in the brain of either,” she said. “Both receive the same impressions, arrange and preserve ideas, for memory and imagination; judge, compare, and analyze; nor can indeed any difference be pointed out, but, that the organs of women are generally smaller, but equally fitted to the purposes for which they are intended.” The real source of women’s diminished status wasn’t biology but discrimination, Wheeler insisted.

Like Mary Wollstonecraft before her, she singled out the failure to provide proper schooling for girls as a particularly pernicious practice, which deprived women of the opportunity to fulfill their potential and also ended up hurting men. She told her audience: “‘Knowledge is power,’ says men, to keep women our slaves, we must keep them ignorant. Strange that men should calculate so badly! Who has not discovered even in the most ordinary actions of life, that ignorance makes a bad servant and a vexatious companion?” Wheeler went on: “Let a woman receive a rational education, and the only insuperable barrier is removed, to a state of social happiness, hitherto unknown to our wretched species  … Wisdom dictates such a course, necessity requires it!”37

At the end of her speech, Wheeler brought up Frances Wright, a Scottish-born freethinker and feminist dynamo who, in 1825, settled in the United States. Wright formed a cooperative community in Nashoba, Tennessee, and later moved to New Harmony, Indiana, where she edited a newspaper and associated with Robert Owen’s son, Robert Dale Owen, who had stayed in America after his father left. Wright was known for espousing a variety of progressive causes, including the abolition of slavery, birth control, sexual freedom, liberal divorce laws, and universal education for both sexes. These were all causes dear to Wheeler, who declared of Wright: “May she find an echo in every instructed woman, and an active ally in every man!”

Wheeler’s address was reprinted in an Owenite magazine, The British Co-operator. She was also associated with another progressive publication, The Crisis, for which she translated articles from French and contributed some pieces of her own using a pseudonym. In Paris, some young female writers were trying to combine the precepts of feminism with the cooperative doctrines of Saint-Simon and Fourier. One article that Wheeler translated, in 1833, came from Jeanne Victoire, a working-class Parisian who was associated with the Saint-Simonians. Declaring that “the time is arrived when woman shall find her place,” it went on to argue that this could be achieved only “on condition of forming ourselves into one solid union” comprising “women of the privileged class” and working-class women standing together. Only by uniting could women gain the power to tell men that “the social edifice must be re-built.”38 As a renegade member of the privileged class herself, Wheeler doubtless agreed with these sentiments.

★ ★ ★

It’s not clear how much contact Wheeler and Thompson had as they got older and Thompson’s health gradually failed him. On March 28, 1833, at the age of fifty-seven, he died at his home in Cork from complications of a respiratory illness. Later in the year, Wheeler wrote a lengthy letter eulogizing him that was read out at a literary salon hosted by Lord and Lady Hampden. The letter announced the passing of Thompson and called him “the devoted friend of humanity, the uncompromising supporter of systems of equal interest.” It went on: “Society has lost a man, and humanity a friend, a great man in a very humble citizen—an ambitious man in one who lived and died in obscurity!” Wheeler also praised Thompson’s unremitting commitment to improving the welfare of the masses, noting that “the greatest happiness principle was that which not only guided the pen but governed the minutest action of Mr. Thompson’s useful and laborious life.”39 As the historian Dooley noted in her book about

Thompson and Wheeler, this letter illustrated the “intimacy of affection” that had developed between the two.40

In Thompson’s will, he left Wheeler an annual annuity of £100. He asked for his estate to be bequeathed to the cooperative movement and his body to be donated for anatomical examination “to aid in conquering the foolish and frequently most mischievous prejudice against the public examination of corpses.”41 By the time the will was read, Thompson’s body had already been buried in a local graveyard on the orders of a nephew. In a final outrage to respectable Cork society, a local physician, Dr. Donovan, exhumed the corpse and preserved it for medical research. According to Thompson’s biographer Pankhurst, the medic later said that the body had actually been bequeathed to him on the condition of his “stringing up the bones” and sending them to Wheeler “as a memento of love.”42 Whether that was a final joke or a provocation from the provocateur of Glandore isn’t clear. In any case, that wasn’t the end of things. Thompson’s relatives challenged his will, and the case dragged through the Irish courts for decades. Eventually the family won, and the cooperative movement never got Thompson’s land.

In the years following his death, Wheeler remained a supporter of the movement even as its grand ambitions were frustrated. Thompson’s effort to establish a prototype community in Cork had come to naught. So had similar efforts in England and France. In 1836, a year before Fourier died, Wheeler wrote to him: “Now, I grieve that there is no Phalanstaire which would enable me to return to die in France.”43 But Wheeler also tried to assure the philosopher that his life hadn’t been in vain. She told him he had the “satisfaction of knowing that you have nobly performed your part to suffering and stupid humanity too perverted and corrupted now by a long course of error to lend their aid to your redeeming projects.”44

During the 1830s, Wheeler also became friends with two Parisian feminists, Desirée Veret and Flora Tristan. Veret, a Parisian seamstress and Saint-Simonian, was a cofounder of Tribune des Femmes, a pioneering journal written and managed by women. Tristan was a French-Peruvian writer who initially made a name for herself by writing about her trip to find her family in Peru. In 1839 Tristan visited London to take stock of the great metropolis. Wheeler showed her around Bethlem Royal Hospital, a pioneering psychiatric hospital that included a wing for the criminally insane. In a book that Tristan subsequently wrote about her time in England, she recounted that Wheeler “gave me detailed information on every inmate whose case was in any way remarkable.”45

Wheeler’s interest in social causes stayed with her to the end. As she aged, she suffered from poor health, but it isn’t clear when she died. Dooley says it was sometime between 1848 and 1851. Like Thompson, Wheeler had devoted much of her time on earth to the project of creating a more egalitarian society and eliminating divisions based on class and gender. In her lifetime, she never received much acclaim or recognition. Yet as Dooley noted, her journey from rural Ireland to the salons of London and Paris “offers a major challenge and counter-position to any society governed by a philosophy of competitive individualism.”46

6

“Abandon your isolation: unite with each other!”

Flora Tristan and the Universal Workers’ Union

When Flora Tristan visited London and toured Bethlem Royal Hospital with Anna Wheeler, she was a thirty-five-year-old writer living in Paris. Months earlier, she had suffered serious gunshot wounds during an attempted murder by her estranged husband. The attack, which was carried out in broad daylight on Rue du Bac, had been widely reported in the newspapers, and Tristan’s name had become well-known. In England, however, she was anonymous. As she and Wheeler were walking around the psychiatric wards at Bethlem, they encountered, among all the British patients, a Frenchman, a Monsieur Chabrier, who was being held at the hospital on the grounds that he believed he was God. The patient talked politely to Tristan and said he had been wrongly confined. “His observations were so just and his reflections so profound that I did not think it possible that he could be insane,” Tristan recounted.1

A bit further on in her tour of the hospital, Tristan encountered Chabrier again. This time he was agitated, and his body was trembling. “Listen!” he said. “Know you, my sister, that I am sent from your God, I am the Messiah announced by Jesus Christ. I come to accomplish his work; I come to make an end of every kind of servitude, to deliver woman from man, the poor from the rich, and the soul from sin.”2 The Frenchman pushed a homemade crucifix at Tristan and, throwing himself crying at her feet, declared that she looked like the Holy Virgin. At the urging of the warders, the visitors broke away.