The ideal of separate spheres and the rigid gender division of labor meant that middle-class women faced great obstacles when they needed — or wanted — to move into the man’s world of paid employment outside the home. Married women were subordinated to their husbands by law and lacked many basic legal rights. In England, a wife had no legal identity and hence no right to own property in her own name. Even the wages she might earn belonged to her husband. In France, the Napoleonic Code (see Chapter 19) enshrined the principle of female subordination and gave the wife few legal rights regarding property, divorce, and custody of the children.

Facing discrimination in education and employment and suffering from a lack of legal rights, some women rebelled and began the long-continuing fight for equality of the sexes and the rights of women. Their struggle proceeded on two main paths. First, following in the steps of women such as Mary Wollstonecraft (see Chapter 19), organizations founded by middle-class feminists campaigned for equal legal rights for women as well as access to higher education, professional employment, and the vote. Middle-class feminists argued that unmarried women and middle-class widows with inadequate incomes simply had to have more opportunities to support themselves. Second, feminists argued that paid (as opposed to unpaid) work could relieve the monotony that some women found in their sheltered middle-class existence and add greater meaning to their lives. In the late nineteenth century women’s organizations scored some significant victories, such as the 1882 law giving English married women full property rights. More women gradually found professional and white-collar employment, especially after 1880, in fields such as teaching, nursing, and social work.

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Progress toward women’s rights was slow and hard-won. In Britain, the women’s suffrage movement mounted a militant struggle for the right to vote, particularly in the decade before World War I. Inspired by the slogan “Deeds Not Words,” women “suffragettes” marched in public demonstrations, heckled members of Parliament, and slashed paintings in London’s National Gallery. Jailed for political activities, they went on highly publicized hunger strikes. Yet conservatives dismissed what they called “the shrieking sisterhood,” and British women received the vote only in 1919.

In Germany before 1900, women were not admitted as fully registered students at a single university. Determined pioneers had to fight with tremendous fortitude to break through sexist barriers to advanced education and subsequent professional employment. (See “Individuals in Society: Franziska Tiburtius.”) By 1913 the Federation of German Women’s Association, an umbrella organization for regional feminist groups, had some 470,000 members. Their protests had a direct impact on the revised German Civil Code of 1906, which granted women substantial gains in family law and property rights.

Women inspired by utopian and especially Marxist socialism (see Chapter 21) blazed an alternative path. Often scorning the reform programs of middle-class feminists, socialist women leaders argued that the liberation of working-class women would come only with the liberation of the entire working class through revolution. In the meantime, they championed the cause of working women and won some practical improvements, especially in Germany, where the socialist movement was most effectively organized. In a general way, these different approaches to women’s issues reflected the diversity of classes in urban society.