Volume 24, Number 8 · May 12, 1977
The Age of Arsenic
By Neal Ascherson
Victorian Murderesses
by Mary S. Hartman
Schocken Books, 318 pp., $15.00
There's little in history more depressing than the collapse of the first wave of feminism after about 1820. It is one sort of shock that the 'civilized' mask of a culture can fall, revealing men who possess wristwatches and radios but who are prepared to send their neighbors to a gas chamber. It is a different shock, perhaps more insidious, to realize that an achievement of the mind in the modern era can be lost as surely and totally as an achievement like the building of metaled highways was lost in the European Dark Ages. The demand for women's rights was plainly and splendidly formulated in the years of the French Revolution, and came to the attention of literate women and men all over Europe and North America. But then, after the execution of the king and the long wars against France, the very idea of the rights of women came to be identified as 'French' and subversive. (How ironic that it was the moderate Girondins and their intellectual friends who took such an interest in feminism, while the radical revolutionaries of the Montagne who overthrew them regarded the cause as a sick deviation typical of the leisured classes! The story is well told in Claire Tomalin's life of Mary Wollstonecraft.[*] )
Review, 2146 words
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