Feminine Christian Nationalism

“The natural position of woman is clearly, to a limited degree, a subordinate one.” In her Letter to the Christian Women of America, Susan Fenimore Cooper presents a Christian political vision which holds this principle to be true. In this letter, she is appealing to her Christian sisters who seem to have forgotten their faith and feminine calling. She envisions a feminine Christian nationalism — not an effeminate Christian politics, but what it means for Christian women to be part of the republic as women. Within this vision, Cooper begins to grasp the meaning of an education in liberal arts and culture for women, and how such an education can be ordered towards the telos of womanhood.

Susan Fenimore Cooper was the daughter of James Fenimore Cooper, author of The Last of the Mohicans. While she never married, she was her father’s caretaker and secretary after her mother passed. Like her father, she was a faithful Anglican and a dedicated classical republican. She founded an orphanage after her father’s death, and also became an accomplished naturalist, publishing two works of local natural history. She died in her sleep in 1894.

Cooper argues out of both nature and the Christian faith for the general subordination of women below men. From nature, she brings to mind realities very familiar to conservatives and Christians today — women are physically inferior to men, men are more assertive, while women are more compassionate, etc. From Scripture and the Christian faith, “from the first of the Prophets to the last of the Apostles,” she argues that God’s creational design was always for men to be in leadership. This isn’t oppressive — in fact, it is the opposite: in no other society than Christendom has “woman enjoyed such a privileged position.” This was the case even back then, before women had suffrage.

How could this be? Women couldn’t participate in politics and culture! Men ruled with an iron fist and punished women with total arbitrary power!

And yet.

Those same terrible men very willingly listened to the cries of the suffragettes, despite their lack of actual particular cases of abuse (as Cooper says). Furthermore, the men who oppressed women politically… are the same men who willingly handed over voting powers to women. For Cooper, this is more than enough to prove that American men love their mothers, wives, sisters, and daughters. The cries of hate and abuse ought to have landed flat when the men said, “alright then.”

"...a woman’s political life is not to be a sad mimicry of man’s."

From here, she turns to universal suffrage. She says that “the elective franchise is not an end; it is only a means.” This is because merely voting is not the final goal and height of all politics. Voting is not an inalienable right, but “a good government is indeed.” It is to that end that the elective franchise is oriented. It is “just so far as [it conduces] to this great end… but no farther,” that voting becomes a right. So the question of “who votes?” ought to be answered by: will this person’s or group’s vote be conducive to the peace, freedom, justice, and security of our nation, or not? It’s obvious that we don’t actually have universal suffrage — as children, foreigners, and certain convicts plainly reveal. Even our enemies don’t want Russian influence on our elections.

“We know,” Cooper says, “that reason to be the good of society. It is for the good of society that suffrage is withheld from those groups of men. A certain fitness… is therefore necessary before granting it.” He who votes must be fit for such civic responsibilities, as they are oriented to the shaping of the political realm. So are women fit, as God intended them, for an active political life that looks the same as the masculine active political life?

Cooper’s answer is no: a woman’s political life is not to be a sad mimicry of man’s. Instead, she insists that the political calling of a woman is distinct, and while more hidden, it is no less decisive or influential. Rooted in the household, the education of children, the cultivation of culture, and the moral conscience of a Christian republic. She asks us to look at the home, and at the web of relations a woman holds, to see the locus of feminine political power:

“To all right-minded women, the duties connected with home are most imperative and most blessed of all… To women this class of duties is by choice, and by necessity, much more absorbing than it is to men. It is the especial field of activity to which Providence has called them.”

The care of food, clothing, health, and education — all the small but constant and consistent aspects of life — are crucial to the formation of people and their affections.

“The heart of every worthy American woman is in her home, and the American mother rules the very heart of her family. If at all worthy, she has great influence with her husband; she has great influence over her daughters; and as regards her sons, there are too many cases in which hers is the only influence for good to which they yield.”

The formation of leaders and shapers of culture includes the great women who are wives and mothers to the great men who drive the action. The education for such women must not be minimal and ornamental.

Cooper isn’t romanticizing motherhood, nor is she detracting from the reality of masculine political action. The woman who shapes and gives life to the affections, tastes, and conscience of her home shapes the future citizenry of her society. How has the total abandonment of women shaping households in this way gone for us? But this motherly and homely structure to woman’s influence is not confined to only the married — it is who woman is. Even when a young woman has no household:

 “She may, if she chooses, carry something of the home spirit with her… whatever be the roof that covers her head. She thinks for others, she plans for others, she serves others, she loves and cherishes others, she unconsciously throws something of the web of home feeling and home action over those near her.”

How do office spaces become lovely? Why are wedding choreographers almost universally women? And why do we laugh aloud when we think of the comparison between a “bachelor pad” and an apartment of three single ladies? This is a woman’s work — to craft and shape the web of home feeling, relations, and affections. The “whole unwritten law of society is under [woman’s] control,” and this is why Cooper insists that “to keep up the standard of female purity becomes one of the most stringent duties of every Christian woman.” A woman’s political influence shapes the norms of society around her, and so a woman must be shaped towards Truth, Goodness, and Beauty if she will shape society rightly.

What does all this mean for a liberal arts and culture education at New Saint Andrews College? The formation of leaders and shapers of culture includes the great women who are wives and mothers to the great men who drive the action. The education for such women must not be minimal and ornamental. Abigail Adams was no simpleton, nor was Martha Washington, nor Dolley Madison. When Melania Trump decorates the White House with the beauty of a traditional Christmas — against the godless postmodernism of her predecessors — she isn’t in Congress voting on bills. She is governing the public imagination. And that is not trivial.

I do not want my daughters to be merely literate; I want them trained for greatness, so that they may become the kind of women who marry great men and build great households. I want them prepared not only to think clearly but to adorn the truth with beauty. I want them to have the integrated philosophical and theological framework to produce Christian households radiant with glory. To form women in the liberal arts, therefore, is not a luxury but a necessity for the leadership of Christian civilization. As such an education for men is for the head and hands of politics, so for women it is for the heart of politics.

Sources:

All quotations are from Female Suffrage: A Letter to the Christian Women of America, by Susan Fenimore Cooper, which appeared in Harper's New Weekly Magazine, Vol. XLI (June-November, 1870). https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/2157/pg2157-images.html

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