On this International Women’s Day, we celebrate Tipperary’s Anna Doyle Wheeler - feminist, intellectual and radical from Clonbeg in the Glen of Aherlow.
In 1825, Wheeler, along with William Thompson, co-authored “Appeal of One Half the Human Race, Women, Against the Pretensions of the Other Half, Men, to Restrain Them in Political and Thence in Civil and Domestic Slavery” (19th century book titles tended to be a bit of a mouthful).
The book was seen as a response to a James Mill article which appeared in the Encyclopedia Britannica in 1820. Mill, a Scottish philosopher and political theorist, dismissed women’s rights as unnecessary since their interests were represented or ‘covered’ by their husbands or fathers. Thus, Mill concluded, women’s interests ‘may be struck off without inconvenience.’
Anna Doyle was born in 1785, exact date unknown, to Rev. Nicholas Milley Doyle and Anna Doyle (née Dunbar). Young Anna had no formal education but was self-taught in French, philosophy, geography and politics. In 1800, at the age of 15, Anna met Francis Massey Wheeler, a young inheritor of his father’s estate in Ballywire, close to Clonbeg. Wheeler proposed to Doyle shortly afterwards and although her family opposed the match, she married Wheeler and in a marriage that lasted 12 years, she gave birth to six children, only two of whom survived infancy.
When Francis Wheeler became abusive, their daughter Rosina recalled her mother taking refuge in books. She remembered her mother lying on the couch reading the French philosophers of the day and Mary Wollstonecraft, an English writer, philosopher and advocate for women’s rights. When the marriage became completely unbearable, Anna fled with her children to Guernsey, one of the Channel Islands where her uncle, Sir John Doyle, was governor.
Margaret McFadden, writing in ‘The History of Women in Philosophy’, claimed that amongst high society on Guernsey, Anna Wheeler was ‘lionized by the aristocratic and wealthy’. Her education in French, Italian, and philosophy continued in Guernsey and she nurtured her skills of diplomacy, social repartee, and politics.
Later she moved to Caen in northern France where she was influenced the Saint-Simonian socialists (a socialistic ideology according to which the state should own all property and the worker should be entitled to share according to the quality and amount of his work) and she became known as ‘the Goddess of Reason’. She honed her arguments to explain the social conditioning in women's subordination, and repudiated claims that women's inferior social status simply reflected differences of ‘innate nature’. Her social philosophy incorporated the social critique of Mary Wollstonecraft's ‘Vindication of the rights of women’ (1792). Wheeler accepted Wollstonecraft's arguments on women's entitlement to rights, but criticised her work for failing to address proposals for a redistribution of wealth that might allow women to be economically independent.
During the early 1820s in London, Wheeler forged friendships and intellectual collaborations with Jeremy Bentham, the cooperative philosophers Robert Owen and Frances Wright, and William Thompson, the political economist and feminist from Cork. In 1823 she moved to Paris, where she frequently met Charles Fourier, the French utopian socialist, at her own salon, which became a base of respectability and power.
She always claimed that Fourier's system was essentially the same as that of Robert Owen and Saint-Simon. In all three, she said, co-operation is central; men and women are entitled to both equal education and employment opportunities; and marriage and divorce law changes eliminate the double standard and give women equal rights. For the rest of her life she attempted to bring these three versions of socialism into union.
In 1825, “Appeal of One Half the Human Race…” appeared under Willian Thompson’s name but the introductory letter makes the fact of co-authorship clear. The essay begins with the proposition that a social system cannot provide for the greatest happiness for the greatest number if one-half of that number is removed from consideration. It criticised the main social institutions of education, church, marriage, and politics, showing how each had become ‘engines of oppression’ and failed the utilitarian requirement of justice to advance the happiness of all persons regardless of class, gender, and race.
The “Appeal…” gave Wheeler a visibility that drew audiences to hear her public lectures urging a social commitment to the pursuit of happiness in a non-adversarial way for women and men equally. This was at a time when women were not often allowed to speak to mixed-sex groups. In a famous lecture (1829) at Finsbury Square, London, Wheeler insisted that if women remained ill-educated, lacked development of their faculties, and were little more than ‘beasts of burden’, then this would redound negatively on men and perpetuate their ignorance, when they might otherwise benefit from the conjugal company of learned and independent women.
Unsurprisingly, Doyle Wheeler’s radicalism was met with contempt by many powerful men at the time. Edward Bulwer Lytton, writer and politician stated ‘the only excuse for Mrs Wheeler was that she was mad’. Benjamin Disraeli, future prime minister said of her: Mrs Wheeler was there [at dinner]; not pleasant, very clever but awfully revolutionary. While Michael Sadleir said that she was ‘the “Goddess of Reason" to a small group of embittered cranks in Caen. Her unhappy children played acolyte on either side her altar.’
The exact date of Anna Doyle Wheeler’s death is unknown but it is thought to be 1848/9. She was survived by one daughter, Rosina Bulwer Lytton, a well-known author in her own rite who would publish 14 novels.
#internationalwomensday #annadoylewheeler #feminist #radical #intellectual #author #glenofaherlow #clonbeg
Sources:
McFadden, Margaret. “Anna Doyle Wheeler (1785-1848): Philosopher, Socialist, Feminist.” Hypatia, vol. 4, no. 1, 1989, pp. 91–101. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3809936. Accessed 14 Feb. 2025.
James Mill's essay on Government from The Encyclopedia Britannica 1820 – available at http://studymore.org.uk/xmilgov.htm
https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/english/documents/working-with-english/volume-2/wetherall-dickson-the-construction-of-a-reputation-for-madness-the-case-study-of-lady-caroline-lamb.pdf
https://www.dib.ie/biography/wheeler-anna-doyle-a8987
https://speakingwhilefemale.co/womens-lives-wheeler/
