- "But to the extent that we use "experience" in discussing subjectivity -- as we do when we write about "coming to consciousness" -- we have been, in recent years, humbled. And not only by poststructuralist critics. In recent feminist politics as well, we have had to acknowledge that we cannot truly know how women who are different from ourselves-- women of other races, ethnicities, religions, classes, sexual orientations -- experience oppression,; nor can we know this for women of the past." p. 3
- "Feminism, Socialism, and French Romanticism takes us to Paris in the late 1820s and 1830s and turns our attention to what continues to strike us as one of the most extraordinary of early women's movements. It grew out of a social movement whose members called themselves Saint-Simonians after their deceased leader, Claude Henri, comet de Saint-Simon. They pledged themselves to develop his ideas for a world order based on peace, love, and cooperation. Having first developed the more rationalist elements of Saint-Simon's ideas on social and economic justice, they had, by the late 1820s, begun to emphasize the more romantic elements of his work and especially his ideas for a "new religion" based on love. Woman and the sociosexual relationship between the sexes emerged as the movement's central concern." p. 6
- "Although their ideas and acts belong to the specific historical context of the romantic age, the Saint-Simoniennes share with out contemporaries striking similarities that set them apart from feminists after 1848 and before the 1960s. Both are sexual radicals who analyze the repression of women's bodies as structurally fundamental to a system of social and economic oppression. Both choose as a strategy of liberation the development of a separate women's cultural movement and, in particular, a feminine practice of the written work, which one of these Saint-Simonian writers, Claire Demar, called a "parole de femme" (word of woman.)" p. 6
- "The translated writings included in this volume are from Suzanne Voilquin's Souvenirs d'une fille du people (Memories of a Daughter of the People), from the many letters collected in the Saint-Simonian archives, and from the Saint-Simoniennes' journal, the Tribune des femmes. Also included are Claire Demar's essay Ma Loi d'avenir (My Law of the Future) and the foreword and preface to Flora Tristan's Peregrinations d'une paria (Peregrinations of a Pariah), reprinted in their entirety. Many of these writings have never been published; all are previously unavailable in English." p. 7
- "A third point of comparison that can be drawn between nineteenth-century U.S. and English women and the Saint-Simonienne is their attitudes toward religion. The significant role that Barbara Berg, Ellen DuBois, Nancy Hewitt, Jane Rendall, and Barbara Taylor grant to religion in inspiring U.S. and English feminists in the early nineteenth century finds its parallel in the Saint-Simonians' "new religion." Although one usually associates French social-change politics -- including feminism -- with secularism, in general, and anticlericalism, in particular, these romantic feminists were deeply committed to a politics that was religious. True, they created a "new religion" that was to challenge traditional Christian theology and the organized Catholic church, but their frequent references to their "word" or "words" and their "acts" and their self-representation as "apostles" purposely reflect the early Christians. They organized a Saint-Simonian "church" that would be headed by a "couple-pope"; they awaited a female messiah; and God became "God the Father and Mother." " p. 9
- "Moses also finds that when one takes account of the Saint-Simonians the historical practice of tracing the origins of socialist feminism to Fredrick Engel's Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State no longer holds. Many of the Saint-Simonian women's writings, such as Claire Demar's My Law of the Future and certain articles in the Tribune des femmes, already -- fifty years earlier than Engel's treatise -- contains the most valuable elements of Engels theory, while remaining free of its now-outdated elements. The feminists of the 1830s analyze the relation between private property inheritance, the patriarchal nuclear family, and women's oppression, but without Engel's mechanical stages or his dubious anthropology." p. 10
- "The final part of this book introduces English-language readers to the writings of these Saint-Simoniennes. Suzanne Voilquin's memories of a Daughter of the People recounts the life of a young working-class woman who became one of the most noteworthy Saint-Simonian organizers, gained a medical education, and practiced midwifery for poor, unwed mothers. The excerpts reprinted here offer a unique view of early nineteenth-century working-class family life from a feminist perspective and describe Voilquin's involvement from the early 1830s in both the male-led Saint-Simonian movement and in the separatist women's movement.
Claire Demar wrote My Law of the Future shortly before committing suicide; Voilquin published it posthumously. Taking the form of a polemic against what Demar sees as the excessive timidity of the other Saint-Simonians, she advocates women's sexual freedom "without rules or limits" ad without fear of exploitation and ostracism. She also analyzes the relationship between women's sexual repression, the nuclear family, and patriarchal property inheritance.
The letters presented here offer a more intimate view of Saint-Simonian relationships. Although they were never intended to be published, they were collected -- some were even recopied -- in order to become part of the official Saint-Simonian archives. The letters of Claire Bazard and Cecile Fournel -- the two most important female leaders within the male- and bourgeois-led Saint-Simonian movement by virtue of being married to prominent Saint-Simonian men-- offer insiders' perspectives on the relationships between women and men in the movement. The letters of Voilquin, Demar, Clorinde Roge, and Pauline Roland offer a more distanced view of the movement as well as fascinating information about the writers' experiments with the new sexual morality. Pauline Roland's letters, of which we present here but a sampling of a voluminous body of texts, trace her development from a naive provincial neophyte to one of the most daring of the experimenters.
The articles from the Tribune des femmes were first published between 1832 and 1834. they contain unprecedented debates on the necessity to do away with conventional, Christian sexual morality, on the role of sexual liberation in a general strategy for women's socioeconomic liberation, and on such issues as class differences among women, prostitution, paternity, and the position of women in French law. In these articles, the writers also debate their relation to Enfantin's "new morality" and to the Saint-Simonian men. The articles were chosen for the diversity of their positions in these debate.
The foreword and preface to Flora Tristan's Peregrinations of a Pariah are also presented here in English in their entirety for the first time. While Tristan did not join with the other Saint-Simonian women, but acted alone somewhat later in the decade to organize the working class into a political force, she nonetheless belongs in this volume because she was influenced by the Saint-Simonians and associated with many of them. Although these memoirs of her voyage to Peru have received recognition as a significant work of literature and social theory, the recently republished French edition left out the foreword and preface, which are arguably their most important element. A recent English translation, apparently based on the modern French edition, has also left out the foreword and preface which are now in danger of being lost. In these pages, Tristan expounds a revolutionary theory of feminine autobiography, criticizes George Sand, and recounts the experiences of her early life up until her departure for Peru." pp. 14-16
From the chapter by Claire Goldberg Moses
- "Saint-Simonian feminists of the 1830s approached the difficult question of woman's nature with a set of assumptions centering on the notion of "difference." The words and acts that sprang from these assumptions should resonate for contemporary feminists who have joined in a debate that pits "difference" against "equality." In this debate, feminists of the so-called equality perspective emphasize the similarities between women and men, affirm androgyny, and argue that an equal-rights, gender-blind strategy is the sensible way to achieve women's freedom and equality. In seeming opposition, the "difference" group stresses the differences between women and men, affirms the female, and argues that sex-differentiated policies may be necessary to achieve gender justice." p. 17
- "Most often "difference" has been used in discussing the work of those whose concern is in defining the differences between women and men. But even in these instances its meaning is uncertain, for some theorists of "difference" view the differences between the sexes as innate and therefore "essential." while others stress that these differences are socially constructed, that is, that they are explained by the differences in women's and men's lived experience. To theorists who are more interested in feminist practice than in definitions of womanhood, the "difference" that matters is the distinctive culture that feminists might create to nurture feminist ideals. But for still another group, the "differences" of key interest are the distinctions among women -- the differences of class, race, religion, nationality, ethnicity, sexual orientation, age, and physical capacity. The views of this group are often-- but not always-- incompatible with those of others who stress the importance of difference but who typically focus on what unites rather than on what separates women from one another.
For several reasons, an examination of the theory and practice of French feminists in the 1830s can help to clarify the many meanings of "difference" used by contemporary feminists. First, feminists of the 1830s grounded their claims for sexual equality in a discourse that stressed the differences between the sexes. They did so in conscious challenge to the "equality" arguments fashioned by earlier feminists. Next, the women among these feminists deliberately developed a set of practices and institutions that allowed them to act independently of Saint-Simonian men. Declaring that 'women alone shall say what kind of liberty they want," they held their won meetings and founded a newspaper that would "publish articles only by women." Through its pages, we can trace the development of a feminism that differed from an original, male-inspired Saint-Simonian feminism and we can seek to understand the significance of this "difference." finally, Saint-Simonian feminists deconstructed the essentialist category "woman" that they themselves had originally constructed, replacing it with an analysis of the differences among women of different classes. Their blending of sex and class analysis is a model for a feminism that is both radical and socialist, sensitive to the specificity of both sexual and class experience and dedicated to the attainment of universal ideal of equality. Thus, an examination of the feminist view of "difference" at the moment of its original articulation, in France of the 1830s, should help us to see that positioning of "equality" and "difference" in opposition to one another is itself a construct that is open to challenge." pp. 19-20
- "Condorcet's "Essai sur l'admission des femmes as droit de cite," which appeared in 1790, called for the same rights for both sexes. "Either no individual of the human race has genuine rights, or else all have the same." In this short document (about the length of a speech), Condorcet specifies the right to assist "in the making of laws," the "right of citizenship," and "the franchise" for women as well as men. He goes on to state that the "tyranny of the civil law," which "subjected wives to their husbands," should be destroyed.
Condorcet bases his argument on the claim that women have the same "natural" rights as men. These so-called natural rights, or "rights of man," derive from our human capacity to reason and acquire moral ideas. Women have "these same qualities," but people have become so accustomed to women's oppression that "nobody thinks to reclaim [their rights]." Sexual inequality, then, is the triumph of the "power of habit" over reason (99). To those who would deny that women have the same capacity to reason as men, Condorcet replied that educational disabilities and legal discrimination alone explain the seemingly different reasoning capacities of the sexes.
It is not nature, it is education. . . which is the cause of this difference. . . Banished from affairs, from everything that is steeled according to rigorous justice and positive laws, the matters with which they occupy themselves are precisely those which are ruled by natural amiability and feeling. It is hardly fair, therefore, to allege as a ground for continuing to deny women the enjoyment of their natural rights, reasons which only possess a certain amount of substance because women do not enjoy these rights. (100-101). " p. 23
- Like Condorcet, Gouges based her argument on natural rights theory. Equality was not something to be granted, like a gift; equality was "natural" and had only to be recognized ("Woman, wake up; . . . discover your rights"). And the law "must be the same for all" because natural rights are the same for all: "What is there in common between [women] and [men]? Everything." Only "prejudice, fanaticism, superstition, and lies" and perhaps also some "non sequitur in contradiction to principles" have denied women their "inalienable" rights (92,89).
The same claims were advanced by Etta Palm. She wrote that "justice. . . calls all individuals to the equality of rights, without discrimination of sex; the laws of a free people must be equal for all beings. . . . The powers of husband and wife must be equal. . . . Girls [must have] a moral education equal to that of their brothers; for education is for the soul what watering is for plants." p. 24
- "The language of these Revolutionary feminists -- two hundred years old now-- is familiar. It emphasizes values -- equality, fairness, property rights, education, and sovereignty vested in an independent citizenry -- that were codified in both American and French eighteenth-century Revolutionary documents and that are fundamental to contemporary Western thought. Placing this discourse back into the moment of its original articulation helps us to understand its appeal. Not surprisingly, the views of Revolutionary feminists partook of the broader Revolutionary discourse of the late eighteenth century, which, in turn, was rooted in long-term historical and social changes. Both the American and the French revolutions were the culmination of a centuries-long process by which sovereignty was redefined in public rather than private terms. With the growth of national bureaucracies and the economic transformations we associate with mercantile capitalism, people came to value education and independence, in part because, unlike those who held power in feudal times, the new bureaucrats, diplomats, and merchants found that these attributes were critical to their success. Equal rights of "citizenship," as defined in the new Declaration of the Rights of Man, and equal access to newly promised national educational programs were important, then, to Revolutionary feminists because the intense political debate of that historic moment had made these goals important to all French people. " p. 25
- 'But the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century feminists -- Erna Hellerstein identifies Chevalier de Jaucourt, Claude Adrien Helvetius, and Antoine Leonard Thomas as well as Condorcet; Londa Schiebinger identifies Poullain de la Barre -- cited "scientific" evidence to support their claims for women's rights." p. 25
- "But there was also precedent for a more radical stance dating back at least to 1792 when, within days of the establishment of the first French Republic, the Legislative Assembly passed a divorce law that was extraordinarily liberal even by late twentieth-century standards. Divorces were permitted simply by mutual consent, so long as both spouses petitioned jointly to dissolve the marriage. The procedures for these mutual-consent divorces were inexpensive and informal -- before 1796, they did not even come before the courts. Divorce could also be obtained at the request of one spouse, if the other did not contest the action. Alimony was granted to the financially worse-off partner; child support payments were also established, and custody was determined by the parents themselves. In cases when custody could not be agreed upon, the family courts granted mothers custody of children younger than seven; for other children, mothers were granted custody of daughters; fathers, of sons.
Although women and men were treated equally under this 1792 divorce law, these Revolutionaries believed it favored women because divorce restored rights to them -- for example, to live where they chose and to manage their own financial affairs -- that they lost upon marriage. Indeed, the subjugation of wives to husbands gave women no recourse other than divorce, to escape from a husband's physical or emotional cruelty or mismanagement of the family's financial resources. Husbands, of course, were not subject to a wife's authority; moreover, because men had greater opportunities to find employment, they were freer to simply leave unhappy marriages and even form new liaisons.
. . . Revolutionary-era feminists such as Olympe de Gouges and Etta Palm favored divorce for this reason; Gouges, who had called for a "social contract between a man and a woman," viewed divorce as an important step toward equality. Feminists were joined in their demands for family reform by many republicans who in all probability would not have entertained the thought of granting women political rights. In keeping with the values that prompted this interest in divorce, legislators also passed other self-consciously "republican" family reforms in the early years of the first Republic: the abolition of lettres de cachet de famille, the private warrant that permitted men to have their wives and children imprisoned; the requirement that all children -- regardless of sex, birth order, or briefly in 1793, legitimacy -- be treated equally in inheritance; permission for married women to control property they brought with them into marriage and to enter into contracts without their husband's authorizations.
But the liberal divorce law did not outlast the Revolutionary era. In 1803, under Napoleon, the grounds for divorce were reduced in number; most significantly, incompatibility could no longer serve as a ground for divorce by mutual consent. Worse, a double standard was introduced: a woman could be divorced for adultery, but adultery was now round for a woman divorcing her husband only if he brought his mistress into the family home. A year later, the property rights of women, which had only recently been obtained, were rescinded and husbands' authority over wives was made explicit in article 213 of the Civil Code (". . . the wife owes obedience to her husband"). Yet even these restrictions did not satisfy the traditional Right, which resumed power in 1815. Not surprisingly, the Right identified divorce with the Revolution's undermining of the authority of both Church and king. In 1816, Louis XVIII abolished divorce.
Divorce may have been the catalyst for the Right's attention to family matters after the Restoration, but it was not its only concern. . . . . The Right's family "reform" politics was an attack, then, on the growing prevalence of independently minded women -- a trend they associated with the eighteenth century aristocracy. At the same time, their "reforms" were a way of opposing Revolutionary individualism. . . .
Interestingly, the "family reform" politics of utopian socialists were also an attack on individualism, also in favor of a more collective or communitarian approach to life. Unlike Rightists, however, the utopian socialists -- at least the sexual radicals among them -- viewed the family as individualistic and the exclusive love of married couples as isolating, separating couples form the larger community. Charles Fourier set the agenda. His Theorie des quatre mouvements, written in 1808 but not generally known until decades later, envisioned an ultimate stage of human progress when women and men would live in agrarian communities -- phalanxes -- based on associations that would organize production, households and housekeeping, and even sexual experience in new ways. . . .
It is important to note how much farther Fourier was willing to go than even the more radical of the republicans -- those who had advocated divorce and rights for women within the family but who had never intended to abolish marriage, simply to revitalize it." pp. 36-38
- "In France of the 1830s, this was a common enough occurrence. The number of nonmarital births was actually increasing at the very moment that the overall birthrate was falling. Until 1750, "illegitimacy" had been essentially unknown in France; but by the mid-nineteenth century, it accounted for between 5 and 10 per cent of all French births, and in certain areas, including Paris and Lyon where Saint-Simonians were active, illegitimacy accounted for between 30 and 50 percent of all births." p. 57
- "But in part the differences occurred because the men and the women each read or heard that which best explained their perception of reality." p. 63 - a wise observation that is generally applicable.
- "They [Saint-Simonian women] presented their decision to create "women-only spaces" as a well-thought-out strategy to attract more women to the movement. . . . .
But while the call for separatism was couched in terms of helping women feel comfortable within the movement, it actually encompassed a broader goal: the creation of an autonomous women's movement." p. 67
- "Still, from the very first, it was clear that the femmes nouvelles understood that "woman" was not one, and that the unity of women was more aspiration than reality. Women were divided by economic class into rich and poor and were divided by "moral" class into "submissive slaves" and "rebellious slaves" ("never free") (Tribune 1, no. 1:3) or into married women and prostitute (both "sold")." " p. 71
- "But to the Saint-Simoniennes, the differences among women were not only economic. They held that the conventional (of "Christian") moral order did as much to divide women from one another as did "fortune." Their interest in these two strains of difference converged in the figure of the prostitute, who represented both class and sex oppression and is featured prominently in their writings." p. 73
- "All women, then, not just poor women, were vulnerable to prostitution. Christine-Sophie spelled out this belief by, in essence, deconstructing the category of "prostitute." Although it was claimed that there were 35,000 prostitutes in Paris, she wrote, this number included only those registered by the police. But prostitution, she continued, was everywhere. An unfortunate girls turns to prostitution "for a piece of bread . . . [to bring] home to her old, sick mother" because her wages are insufficient. Young, beautiful, ambitious, pleasure-seeking women from families without fortune or rank prostituted themselves simply to satisfy their desires for "glory." And among the privileged classes, women are sold into marriages, "condemned to bestow [her] caresses on a stranger [she doesn't] known and who, perhaps, will never be able to really understand [her]." And even the "noble daughter of the king. . . slave of some diplomats" is a prostitute (1, no. 3:2-4)
Thus, in analyzing how women differed from one another, the femmes nouvelles found that women were, despite apparent distinctions, fundamentally united in their subjugation to sex oppression, and while there seemed to be possibilities for healing the breach between rich and poor women, it was nevertheless true that many women suffered from economic oppression. The answer to this dual oppression would have to be a politics that challenged both of its sources, those of class and those of sex. "Emancipation for the people; emancipation for woman" (1:47). Workers have a stake in women's liberation; women have a stake in workers' liberations: "Only by emancipating woman will we emancipate the worker" (1:37). "Women, understand this well: Our fate is always improved with that of the people."
It was a challenge, however, to bring together a workers' politics and a women's politics into a unified movement. The women had no precedent to turn to in trying to meet this challenge. In Saint-Simonian discourse, the two kinds of politics were distinct. Women's emancipation required a new moral order; workers' emancipation required a reorganization of the economy. Femmes nouvelles recognized the insufficiency of Enfantin's vision: women were empowered "religiously," raised up from the damnation of original sin; but the problem of their dependency on men had not been addressed. Workers were promised that the productive investment of wealth that would spur industrial growth would provide them with sufficient work at sufficient wages to lift them out of poverty; the problem of women's poverty was ignored. The abolition of inheritance would usher in a new meritocratic order that would provide workers the opportunity to enter the "directing classes"; opportunities for women in the new order were undefined. Thus femmes nouvelles were in a position of double jeopardy -- as women, dependent still on men; as workers, disempowered even within the Saint-Simonian new world order." pp. 74-75
- "After 1834, feminist activism in Paris became less visible. The Tribune des femmes ceased publication in the spring of that year. All of the Saint-Simonian collective ventures, including the men's retreat at Menilmonant, had collapsed. Claire Demar was dead. Many of the other Saint-Simonian feminists had left France. Desiree Veret was in London, Clorinde Roge and Cecile Fournel in Egypt." p. 76
- "The femmes proletaires were still in contact with each other when Voilquin returned to Paris in 1836. She lived for a while with Reine Guindorf-Flichy, who was now married, before taking on some freelance writing assignments -- adequate, evidently, to support living on her own and her medical studies. In 1836, she proposed the establishment of a "maternal society" for young unmarried mothers. Twenty-eight women agreed to support it with monthly payments, but evidently this funding was not enough to sustain such an institution.
Another venture, this one successful but short-lived, was undertaken by a group of former, mostly bourgeois, Saint-Simoniennes, Eugenie Niboyet included. The came together, in 1836, in support of the publication of the Gazette des femmes, a journal that proclaimed itself "for the exercise of POLITICAL AND CIVIL RIGHTS FOR WOMEN." It focused attention primarily on legal issues and encouraged the writing of petitions to the legislature -- a new strategy for feminists, borrowed from the American and British antislavery movements." p. 76
- "It is in the context of these years that we must place Flora Tristan, the most celebrated of all French feminists of the nineteenth century. Too often, Tristan is treated as exceptional; but we can now see that this view robs feminism of its collective history. We do not minimize Tristan's significance, but rather enrich our understandings of her, in pointing out the influence that Saint-Simonian words and acts had on the development of her politics." p. 77
- "In fact, feminism was the significant legacy of the Saint-Simonians to later socialists -- at least as significant, if not more so, than their class analysis and studies in baking and credit." p. 79
- "Feminists have tended to overlook the fact that, like all ideologies, feminism varies across time and place, that it is shaped by historically specific forces -- some social, some economic, some intellectual. Hence, there is no one unified feminist discourse. At various moments, under one or another set of circumstances, feminists' preoccupations have shifted. And when feminists have reordered their priorities, their view of the causes of the status quo and their strategies for change, including their rhetorical strategies, have also shifted." pp. 79-80
- "Historians tell us, however, that this Revolutionary vision of feminism is not our only historical tradition. Writing in 1964, Aileen Kraditor, in The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement, 1890-1920, examines "two major types of suffragist arguments" -- one of which she calls the justice argument, based on "the ways women were the same as men and therefore had the right to vote"; and a second, the expediency argument, based on "the ways [women] differed from men, and therefore had the duty to contribute their special skills and experience to government." More recently, Denise Riley, in "Am I That Name?" Feminism and the Category of "Women" in History, identifies these same kinds of arguments in English suffragism. Karen Offen, in her recent article "Defining Feminism: A Comparative Historical Approach," seems to concur with Kraditor and Riley in identifying "two distinct modes of argumentation or discourse" -- which she terms "individualist" and "relational" -- but she suggests that these two schools of thought differ from one another not only in mode of argument but also in goals. ("Instead of seeking unqualified admission to male-dominated society, [relational feminists] mounted a wide-ranging critique of the society and its institutions".) " p. 80
- "Among the Saint-Simoniennes, "difference" was not a conservative doctrine. Also, the "difference" perspective, which in its essentialism would seem to unity women, at a later time actually divided women when it denied the very real differences of women's lived experiences. But, again, this was not the case among the class-conscious femmes nouvelles.
Nancy Cott has recently written that "feminism is nothing if not paradoxical":
It aims for individual freedoms by mobilizing sex solidarity. It acknowledges diversity among women while positing that women recognize their unity. It requires gender consciousness for its basis, yet calls for the elimination of prescribed gender roles. These paradoxes of feminism are rooted in women's actual situation, being the same (in a species sense) as men; being different, with respect to reproductive biology and gender construction, from men." pp. 83-84
From the chapter by Leslie Wahl Rabine
- "In 1831, an intense debate on sexual morality and its role in a movement of social and economic reform would lead both to the demise of Saint-Simonianism as a widespread social movement and to the birth of the first modern women's movement.
During this debate, Enfantin redefined the Mother as a mystic Woman Messiah who alone could liberate her sex. although he called upon women to speak their own needs, he also announced that women were not yet ready to assume equality with men, much less to assume the august role of Mother. She could not be any woman present within the group but the absent object of a quest. Her future coming was to be desired with great fervor.
Some scholars have insightfully analyzed Enfantin's call to the women and his emphasis on women's emancipation as a tactic to silence his male opponents and to wrest power from Bazars. But as significant for the nascent women's movement was Enfantin's motivations are the contradictory, unconscious ideological structures surrounding his concept to the Woman-Messiah." p. 88
From Flora Tristan's Peregrinations of a Pariah
- "It has been observed that the degree of civilization attained by diverse human societies has always been proportionate to the degree of independence enjoyed by its women." p. 207
From La Femme libre [Tribune of femmes 1, no. 1], 1-3, Call to women
- "We are born as free as man, and one half of humanity cannot be enslaved to the other without injustice." p. 283
Noted book
- Susan Groag Bell and Karen M. Offen, Women, the Family, and Freedom: The Debate in Documents (2 vols), Stanford University Press, 1983
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