Standard history texts rarely contain more than a few scattered and pedestrian passages discussing male-female relations during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—the critical period of feminist activism. The discussion in the available passages is usually restricted to the United States and Britain, limited primarily to the bare legal and social facts, and heavily weighted toward the later phases of the suffrage movement. So narrow a focus inevitably makes the suffragists appear a transient and extraordinary phenomenon, for it screens out the gathering momentum of the women's rights movement throughout the nineteenth century. A fair survey of feminism would see the pressure for women's emancipation building from the 1830's and 1840's and reaching well beyond the issue of suffrage. In fact, the well-documented militant suffrage campaign emerged late in the movement and its bitterness derived from the fact that, by the turn of the century, the vote had become a symbol—to both men and women—of much more than electoral equality.
The customarily perfunctory presentation of feminism ignores the fact that a major shift in sex relations (let alone transformations so rapid and revolutionary as those industrialism has caused in the West) necessarily produces severe cultural trauma. What touches on conventions of manliness and womanliness risks intruding on the most sensitive human situations of all personal relationships between men and women. Although the women's rights movement therefore had nearly universal ramifications, most historians have treated it as a relatively minor, circumscribed phenomenon.
Surely, it should be easy to see that by the late nineteenth century—in the wake of at least two generations of feminist organization and crusading—this supposedly marginal curiosity, called by its unperceptive opponents the woman problem had become an earth-shaking debate of the Western world, fully as serious as contemporaneous class or national conflicts. After all, the world's largest oppressed minority was threatening mutiny—something no thinking person could ignore. None did. Even where feminist activity was minor or nonexistent, it nevertheless provoked deep concern and much discussion. Tolstoi, for example, in a Russia nearly untouched by feminism, was as worried about keeping women in their place as was Britain's William Gladstone. The woman problem was argued, shouted, and agonized about endlessly. By the final decades of the century, it permeated everything. It is difficult to find any major cultural figures of the period who did not passionately address the subject of the rights of women. As for lesser figures, the quantity of writings produced by now-forgotten feminists and antifeminists surely outweighs the material on any other modern social issue. For some—thinkers of the caliber of Nietzsche, Ibsen, Shaw—the debate over sexual roles became an ever-recurring theme in their work, if not an obsession.
