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Jenny P. d'Hericourt
actually Jenny P. d'Héricourt
1807 - 1875
Jenny P. d'Hericourt (1809-1875), writer, women's rights activist, and physician-midwife, was born as Jeanne-Marie-Fabienne Poinsard, in Besançon, France. Her religious background is mixed: her father was a Montbéliard Lutheran and her mother was a Swiss Calvinist. After running a private girls' school, Poinsard married Gabriel Marie. They soon separated, divorce being impossible under French law at that time. A native of Franche-Comté, d'Hericourt produced a novel, Le Fils du reprouve (1844), under the pseudonym Félix Lamb. An enthusiastic supporter of Etienne Cabet (a French socialist along the lines of the British Robert Owen), d'Hericourt took part in the Revolution of 1848, studied medicine privately in Paris in the 1850s, and later practiced midwifery in Paris and in Chicago. (She lived in America from 1863 to 1873. ) Such is the main outline of d'Hericourt's life. D'Hericourt had at least two lasting influences on the feminist movement. First, she formed part of that unofficial international network of feminists who provided one another with moral support and intellectual companionship in the first half of the 19th century. Second, she penned an influential rebuttal to the anti-woman works by the then-highly regarded and influential P. J. Proudhon, Michelet, . . . and Other Modern Innovators in the late 1850s.
Like many other feminists of her time, d'Hericourt was active in the 1848 revolution. In early 1848, along with Jeanne Deroin, d'Hericourt helped to found a small society, Société pour l'émancipation des femmes, to work for women's civil liberties. She organized evening schools for workers of both sexes and worked to influence the elections. She might be the same person as "Jeanne-Marie" who played an active role in the Voix des femmes group.
As noted above, in the 1850s, d'Hericourt lived a more conventional life, studying to become a licensed physician and midwife. In 1856, d'Hericourt converted the Russian M. L. Mikhailov to feminism with her anti-Michelet arguments while he was on his trip to Paris. He returned to Russia, published his new ideas for his readers, and translated Harriet Taylor Mill's The Enfranchisement of Women into Russian.
D'Hericourt's international feminism once again came to the fore when she was visited by Ernestine Rose in 1856. Most of our knowledge of Rose's early life comes from d'Hericourt's memoirs of her, written shortly after their meeting in Sept 1856. Rose and d'Hericourt, both well-regarded in international free thought and feminists circles, liked one another and published articles about each other after their meeting.
By the mid-1850s, the counter-revolutionary backlash was well established. Most of the prominent feminists and revolutionaries of 1848 had died, been imprisoned, fled the country, or tried to live as unobtrusively as possible so not to call the attention of authorities to themselves. No women's organizations survived to bring together like-minded women to work for the emancipation of women, to solace one another in their defeats, to encourage one another to keep up the worthwhile struggle, to celebrate their successes, to trade ideas, to create a woman-friendly social space. Anti-feminists and misogynists had an open field which they exploited to their advantage.
Possibly the most dangerous of the anti-feminists, the misogynist P. J. Proudhon was a socialist who envisioned a future society, much like the past, centered on small family-owned and operated workshops headed by the man-of-the-house. In such a society, emancipation of women would be a social disaster. As early as the 1840s, Proudhon resurrected Rousseau's patriarchalism, stripped it of its chivalrous cloak, and mounted an attack on women's emancipation from the political left which, as we have seen, had been somewhat supportive of women's emancipation. Proudhon is infamous for his assertion that women are fit only to be housewives or harlots. By the 1850s, Proudhon was the leading social theorist on the left and remained influential for the rest of the century, at least among the socialists in the working class. In the late 1850s he published two works which dealt with "the woman question" one of which dealt solely with the woman question.
The French feminist movement of the 1850s consisted of two women who had the daring to write against several prominent social theorists. In the mid-1850s D'Hericourt began her counter-offensive against Proudhon by writing articles for the French freethought journal Philosophical and Religious Review and the Turin journal, La ragione (Reason). Articles from the French Review were translated into English by Bessie Rayner Parkes and published in George Jacob Holyoake's British freethought journal, the Reasoner.
When Proudhon produced another anti-feminist, anti-woman diatribe, Juliette Lambier Lamessine Adam visited d'Hericourt and encouraged her to take up the pen once again. For whatever reason, several months later, Lambier's response to Proudhon, Idées anti-proudhoniennes sur l'amour, la femme et le mariage (Anti-proudhonian ideas concerning love, women and marriage) (1858) appeared.
Perhaps stimulated by her visit from Lambier and Lambier's book, d'Hericourt once again put pen to paper and wrote a logical, insightful, forceful, and sweeping indictment of several contemporary theorists, not just Proudhon. La Femme affranchie: réponse MM. Michelet, Proudhon, E. de Girardin, A. Comte et aux autres novateurs modernes (Brussels: Van Meenen et Cie, and Paris: A. Bohn), 1860 was soon translated into English under the title The Emancipated Woman: A Reply to Monsieurs Michelet, Proudhon, etc. In addition to Proudhon, her targets included Jules Michelet, Auguste Comte, Ernest Legouvé, De Girardin, Modern Communists, Saint Simonians, Fusionists, Fourierists (which she calls Phalansterians), all of whom were internationally respected liberals and each of whom advocated an image of woman or a way of organizing society that was detrimental to women. She begins by addressing Michelet, but the longest section is devoted to her rebuttal of Proudhon's work which she dissects line-by-line. Ernest Legouvé she treats gently, believing his heart to be in the right place. In part two, she discusses other objections to the emancipation of woman, the nature and functions of woman, love, marriage, and legal reforms. Woman Affranchised was read and discussed in France, northern Italy, Russia, and the US.
Jules Michelet, whose audience came from the middle-class and included both the intellectual elite and the part of the general public that identified as liberal or republican, also penned several anti-feminist works. By 1850, Michelet was a leader of French intellectual life; his reputation rested in part on his celebrated six volume history of France. Concerned with the physical deterioration in the health of the population as well as a decrease in the number of marriages, Michelet wanted to restore the family to its former glory before it was too late for French civilization. (Yes, they sounded that way 150 years ago, too.) In the late 1850s Michelet wrote two books about women for men. When stripped of their Romantic chivalry, they differed little in content from the writings of Proudhon. Michelet claimed that women are "eternally wounded," unfit to work more than one week a month because of their "monthly crisis," unfit to work the previous week because the woman is troubled about the on-coming crisis, unfit to work the week after the crisis because she is recuperating from the crisis. (Frankly, it sounds like Michelet was married to a woman who didn't relish the idea of engaging in sex with him so she became adept at coming up with excuses not to perform her "wifely duties." I wonder why any woman would feel that way about such an obviously concerned man.) His veneer of condescending patriarchal concern for the weaker sex provided another generation of men with a socially (at least among men) approved excuse to deprive women of their dignity and rights and so appealed to a large segment of men.
Probably the most women-friendly of the social theoreticians of the time, Ernest Legouvé was the author of the enormously popular 1848 lecture series 'The Moral History of Women' which was eventually published in 1849 as a 2 volume work Histoire morale des femmes (Paris: Gustave Sandre, later translated into English as The Moral History of Women). Applauded by women around the world including d'Hericourt, Legouvé's book celebrated women and their influence on history. The work was so popular that it went through ten editions between 1849 and 1896. Legouvé was probably a feminist at heart and many of his ideas were female-friendly, but he was a product of his time and could not recognize the impracticality and subtle anti-feminism of some of his ideas. D'Hericourt writes of him, "In every page of this book (Histoire morale des femmes), we detect the impulse of an upright heart and lofty mind, indignant at injustice, oppression, and immorality" before gently pointing out the short-comings of some of his ideas.
D'Hericourt uses a very effective technique for skewering her opponents: she reproduces a couple of lines from their writings, comments on them, reproduces a couple of more lines from their writings, comments on them, etc. In dissecting their work with such a fine scalpel she exposes their underlying assumptions, their illogic, and their inconsistency.
By turning her scalpel to the Saint Simonians, Fourierist, and other early socialist groups, d'Hericourt, an anti- free-love and pro-family advocate, effectively disconnects French feminism from its socialist roots. She supported the traditional French feminist demands – education, Civil Code reforms, right of woman to sit on juries, boards of trade, and chambers of commerce; married women's property right; formation of women centered social organizations (schools, unions, trade associations, etc.). Socialist feminists had traditionally supported true universal suffrage, suffrage for all men and women. When d'Hericourt writes about woman suffrage, she further separates the socialist feminist by advocating suffrage for women under the same conditions as for men, essentially a demand to give middle- and upper-class women, i.e. educated, property-owning women, the franchise. Her critique of her contemporary social theorists circled the globe and provided woman's rights advocates around the world with arguments to rebut the newest manifestation of patriarchy.
As noted above, after her book was published, she moved to the United States and lived there for about 10 years, participating in the American woman's rights movement. She appears in the historical record once again in France when she spoke at Richer's Association pour le Droits des Femmes on Feb. 2, 1873.
From Woman Affranchised
READER. Now, let us take up the political right.
AUTHOR. A nation is an association of free and equal individuals, co-operating, by their labor and contributions, to the maintenance of the common work; they have an incontestable right to do whatever is necessary to protect their persons, their rights and their property from injury. Man has political rights because he is free and the equal of his co-partners; according to others, because he is a producer and a tax-payer now, woman being, through identity of species, free and the equal of man; being in point of fact, a producer and a taxpayer; and having the same general instincts as man, it is evident that she has the same political rights as he. Such are the principles, let us proceed to the application.
We have said elsewhere, that it is not enough that a thing should be true in an absolute sense; it is necessary under penalty of transforming good into evil, to take into account the surroundings into which we seek to introduce it; this men too often forget, the practical truth in our question is that it is profitable to recognize political rights only to the extent to which it is demanded, because those who do not demand it are intellectually incapable of making use of it, and because if they should exercise it, in a majority of cases, it would be against their own interests; Prudence exacts that we should be sure that the possessor of a right is really emancipated, and that he will not be the blind tool of a man or a party.
Now, in the existing state of affairs, women not only do not demand their political rights, but laugh at those who address them on the subject; they pride themselves on being thought unfit for that which regards general interests; they recognize themselves therefore as incapable.
On the other hand, they are minors civilly, slaves of prejudice, deprived of general education, submissive for the most part to the influence of their husbands, lovers or confessors, clinging as a majority to the ways of the past. If therefore they should enter without preparation into political life, they would either duplicate men or cause humanity to retrograde. You comprehend now why many women who are more capable than an infinite number of men of cooperating in great political acts, choose rather to renounce them than to compromise the cause of progress by the extension of political right to all women.
READER. Personally, I am of your opinion; but it is necessary to foresee and to refute the objections that may be made to you by very intelligent women; these women will say, Reflect, the negation of right is iniquitous, for it is the negation of equality and of human nature. It is as false as dangerous to lay down the principle of the recognition of right only to the extent in which it is claimed; for it is notorious that slaves are not the ones in general to demand their own rights; your affirmation therefore condemns the emancipation of slaves and serfs, and universal suffrage.
The objection that you raise against the right on account of incapacity of women and the low use which they would make of it, might apply quite as well to men who are scarcely more fully emancipated than they; who are often the duplicate of their wife or confessor, or who have no other opinion than that of their electoral committee. In right, as in everything else, an apprenticeship is necessary: women will make use of it at first badly, then better, then well; for we learn to play on an instrument much more quickly by using it than by learning its theory.
The exercise of right gives elevation and dignity, elevates the individual in his own esteem, and causes him to study questions which he would have neglected had he not been obliged to examine them in order to concur in and resolve them. Do you wish women to take to heart matters of general interest? Then give them political right.
These objections, may be raised against you.
AUTHOR. They were raised against me in 1847 by a number of eminent women, and by many men devoted to the triumph of the new principles.
I answered them then and I answer them again to-day: We should speedily agree, if our modern society were not the scene of conflict between two diametrically opposite principles.
The question is not to decide whether political right belongs to woman, whether she would develop it, enlarge it, etc. but rather whether she would use it to ensure the triumph of the principle that says to humanity, Advance! or of that which gives as the word command, Retreat!
What is the end of political right? Evidently, to accomplish a great duty in the direction of progress. Well, is it not dangerous to accord it to those who would employ it against this end?
What! you struggle for right, in order to obtain the triumph of a holy cause, yet feel no hesitation in according it to those who would certainly make use of right to kill rights!
You reproach me for acting like the Jesuits, who value justice much less than expediency. Well, gentlemen, if you had had half their ability, you would have been successful long ago. Like true savages, you would think yourselves dishonored by possessing prudence and practical sense, by offering yourselves to battle otherwise than with naked bodies; this may be very fine, very courageous -- but as to being sensible, that is another thing.
I am not guilty of the crime of denying right, since I do not deny it; I only desire that it shall not be demanded since this would be suicidal, I do not lay down the principle that every kind of right should be recognized only to the extent in which it is claimed, since I speak to you of political rights alone; there are rights which make their own demand, such as those of living, of development, of enjoyment, of the fruit of one's labor, and it is shameful for society not to recognize them to their full extent. But we awaken later to the sentiment of civil right, and still later to that of political right; take the logical advance of humanity into account therefore and do not remain in the absolute.
I know that my objection on the score of the incapacity of women is quite as applicable to that of men; but it is a reason, because you have admitted the right of the ignorant masses of men who had not demanded it, to show yourselves equally unwise with respect to women who are in the same position? I will correct myself, gentlemen, of what you term my aristocratic spirit, when I see your political freedmen comprehending the tendencies of civilization, and making use of their right to drive the abettors of the past to despair by promoting the triumph of liberty and equality. Until then, permit me to keep my opinion.
And I have kept my opinion, which is this: the exercise of political right is a means of reform and progress, only if those who enjoy it believe in progress and are anxious for reforms: in the opposite case, the popular vote can be nothing but the expression of prejudices, errors and passions -- instead of learning to exercise it through the use of it, as it is urged, they employ it simply to cut their own fingers.
READER. May it not be objected that, in accordance with your theory of right, all being equal, no one can arrogate to himself the function of distributing rights?
AUTHOR. Theory is the ideal towards which practice should tend; if we had not this ideal, we would not know by principle to guide ourselves; but in social reality, there are individuals who have attained majority, and others who, being minors, are destined to attain it.
If I should assert that those who have attained majority can rightfully accord or refuse right to the minors, I should depart essentially from my principles; it is by the law, which is the expression of the conscience of those most advanced, while waiting until it shall be the conscience of all, that political majority is decreed and that its conditions are established. The right is virtual in each of us; no one therefore has the right to give it, to take it away, or to contest it; it is recognized when we are in a condition to exercise and to demand it; and we prove that we are in a condition to exercise it when we satisfy the conditions fixed by the law.
READER. What should be these conditions for the enjoyment of political right, in your opinion?
AUTHOR. Twenty-five years of age; and a certificate attesting that the individual knows how to read, write, and reckon, that he possesses an elementary knowledge of history and geography of his country; together with a correct theory with respect to Right and Duty, and the destiny of humanity upon earth. The knowledge of a small volume would be sufficient, as you see, to enable every man and woman, twenty-five years of age and healthy in mind, to enjoy political rights, after having been subjected to an initiation by the enjoyment of civil rights. But, I ask you, what could those do with political right who confound liberty with license, who scarcely know the meaning of the words Right and Duty, and who are even incapable of writing their own vote! Men have their rights, let them keep them! A right once admitted cannot be taken away: let them render themselves fit to exercise them. As to women, let them first emancipate themselves civilly and become educated: their turn will come.
READER. It is very important men should comprehend that you do not deny, but merely postpone the political rights of our sex.
AUTHOR. Be easy; they will comprehend it rightly; they will not mistake counsel dictated by prudence for an acknowledgment of inferiority and a resignation of functions.
Footnotes:
References:
Bonnie S. Anderson, Joyous Greetings: The First International Women's Movement 1830 – 1860 [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000]
Susan Groag Bell and Karen M. Offen, Women, the Family, and Freedom, the Debate in Documents, Vol. 1, 1750 – 1880 [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1983]
Jenny P. d'Hericourt, A Woman's Philosophy of Woman; or Woman Affranchised. an Answer to Michelet, Proudhon, Girardin, Legouve, Comte, and Other Modern Innovators [New York: Carelton, 1864], reprinted [Westport, Conn.: Hyperion Press, Inc, 1993]
Margaret MaFadden, Golden Cables of Sympathy: The Transatlantic Sources of Nineteenth-Century Feminism [Lexington, Ky: University of Kentucky Press, 1999]
Claire Goldberg Moses, French Feminism in the 19th Century [Albany: State University of New York, 1984]
Karen Offen, European Feminisms 1700 – 1795: A Political History [Stanford, Ca: Stanford University Press, 2000] pp. 127 - 129
on page 439, note 55, Offen references herself in Karen Offen, "A Nineteenth-Century French Feminist Rediscovered: Jenny P. d'Hericourt, 1809-1875," Signs, 13:1 (Autumn 1987) pp. 144-58
Karen Offen, 'Jenny P. d'Hericourt (1809-1875)' at Encyclopedia of Revolutions of 1848 © 1999 James Chastain.
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