In her article, “Thinking Gender with Sexuality in 1790s Feminist Thought,” Katherine Binhammer quotes Gayle Rubin and Judith Butler. She explains that feminism is the theory of gender oppression. It is not a theory of sexuality. There is a difference between gender and sexual oppression. If it is assumed that a theory of sexual oppression is the same as gender oppression, then erotic desire would lie outside the scope of sexuality.

Sexuality and gender are not necessarily unconnected, they assert. Rather than being universal, they are situational. Their relationship must be determined in particular situations. Furthermore, if one asserts that the chiasma of gender and sexuality in the 1790s “rights of woman” debates produced a “truth of sex,” then gender mixes with sexual identity in the 1790s’ feminist texts and sexual historians must include “thinking gender.” For example, Foucault’s innovative work in which sexuality is defined as male sexuality in historical studies must be recognized as ignoring women’s specific relations to sexuality and sexual oppression.

The early feminists wrote controversial tracts while writing steamy fiction. Maria in Mary Wollstonecraft’s “The Wrongs of Women” (1798) whose femininity justifies her committing adultery and Emma Courtney in Mary Hays’s “Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796), who claims the right to sex outside marriage, to Mary Robinson and her scandalous public affair with the Prince of Wales and Catharine Macauley, who married a man twenty-six years younger are all examples of 1790s writers who did not ignore female sexuality in their lives or work. However, female desire often has victimized women through rape, poverty, ruin, imprisonment or death.

In their polemical tracts, these early feminists began to critique how female sexuality was used to oppress them as women. Mary Robinson thought men classified women in three ways: handsome women for men’s vanity, licentious women for his amusement and good women for household drudgery.

By blaming the state of women as a classified, simpering system on male aristocratic sexual desire, these intellectuals circumscribe feminism within the radical class politics of the 1790s. They argue that men, not women, are sexually licentious and that women can control their sexual feelings better than men. Indeed, these feminists held that women were morally superior and more virtuous than men, thus locking women into an impossible standard that was not challenged until the 1960s.

In the 1960s and 1970s, women could not love a man without a man regarding it as sexual love and because the result of such a union could be children, many a man ran from women who were simply suggesting that they enjoyed their company.

If there were theorists beyond Catharine MacKinnon who could quell men’s instinctive fears that women’s caring for them meant a trip down the aisle or an affair, many a woman’s reputation would not be in tatters. Women’s oppression of men would fall away, men would be unchained from their mental cages, and friendships could exist free from the shackles of people classifying themselves as hetero- or homosexual.

Reference:

Binhammer, Katherine. 2002. “Thinking Gender with Sexuality in 1790s’ Feminist Thought.” Feminist Studies. Vol 28 (3) (Autumn 2002), 667-690.