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Eugénie Mouchon Niboyet
(1799 - 1883)
Born in Montpellier to a wealthy, Protestant bourgeois family, in 1822 Eugénie Mouchon married Paul-Louis Niboyet, a lawyer in Lyon. For the remainder of her life, Niboyet was involved in various reform movements. At this time, she joined the radical Christian organization, the Sociéte de la morale chrétienne. Considered somewhat disreputable because of its republican leanings and pro-English stance (remember the Reign of Terror and Waterloo had happened not long before this time), the Sociéte de la morale chrétienne was involved in prison reform, the improvement of education, and the abolition of slavery in the French colonies. Another religious organization, the inter-denominational Comité des dames, introduced her to feminist ideas.
In 1830 the Sociéte de la Morale Chrétienne shared its lecture halls with the Saint-Simonians. One evening Niboyet stayed beyond the appointed time to hear the Saint-Simonians speak. Won over to their cause, she converted her husband and son to the new group. Preaching a message of social, legal, economic, and religious reforms which, if implemented in the correct way, would have ameliorated the worst aspects of patriarchy, the Saint Simonian movement attracted a considerable number of women. An enthusiastic supporter of this nascent movement, Niboyet rose to co-director of the fourth arrondissement, degré des industriels . As with any movement, various factions of the Saint Simonians emphasized different parts of Saint Simon's philosophy. When one of the highest leaders of the movement, Barthélemy Prosper Enfantin, proposed to radically alter the rules of sexual experience, Niboyet left the movement in protest.
Not yet disenchanted with the economic message of the Saint Simonians, in 1832 Niboyet became involved with the Fourierist movement. In some respects quite similar to the Saint Simonians, Fourierism focused on economic changes through the development of "phalanxes" or "associations," where much of the labor, particularly domestic labor, was to be shared among all members of the group. Lacking the Saint Simonians' religious mysticism and downplaying sexual freedoms which threatened the family and traditional sexual mores, Fourierism attracted many former Saint Simonians. Insisting that a society's treatment of women was the truest measure of social progress, Fourier's philosophy influenced many early feminists including Désirée Véret, Flora Tristan, Anna Wheeler, Anne Knight, and Louise Otto. Unable to raise capital to establish trial Fourierist communities, the organized movement slowly turned into a literary society. The society's journals slowly began to shy away from feminist concerns and to adopt mostly class issues and pacifism .
By 1833 Eugénie Niboyet was back in Lyons where she founded the newspaper Conseiller des femmes (The Woman’s Advisor), the first non-Parisian feminist journal. The next year, Niboyet helped to found a group of French pacifists and started another newspaper for that movement, La Paix des deux mondes . Other feminist efforts included founding the Athénée des femmes. Niboyet supported a variety of reforms applicable to women including reforms in education, in industry, in the law and politics, and in the home.
Still seeking a way to improve the status of women, Niboyet became involved in the new journal, first published in July 1836, Gazette des Femmes. Targeted to property-owning, voting bourgeoisie, not more than 2% of the French population, Charles Frédric Herbinot de Mauchamps's journal billed itself for men and women "for the exercise of POLITICAL AND CIVIL RIGHTS FOR WOMEN." Modeled after the American and British anti-slavery organizations, Gazette des Femmes emphasized legal reforms and encouraged petitioning the legislature. Because laws restricted public meetings, the newspaper's editors and subscribers would meet together once a week for "business meetings". Part of the business was to assure that the journal reflected the views of its subscribers as well as of its management, so political topics were debated at the business meetings. Eugénie Niboyet, who interested Flora Tristan in the group, was one of the people to attend those business meetings. Among other things, Gazette des Femmes, heralded publications by "friends," including the works of Eugénie Niboyet.
When the Revolution of 1848 broke out, Niboyet was at the forefront of the struggles on behalf of women. Lifting restrictions on the press and assembly allowed many mass organizations, including feminists groups, to form. On March 19, the first issue of Eugenie Niboyet's Voix des femmes (Voice of Women), a "socialist and political journal, organ of the interests of all women" and the first feminist French daily newspaper, was published. Voix des femmes soon expanded to include a political club. Feminists, including Jeanne Deroin, Desiree Gay (formerly Veret), Suzanne Voilquin, Elisa Lemonnier, and Anais Segalas, who had been active Saint-Simonists or Fourierists or who had written for the Gazette des femmes joined the new organization. Popular writers like Gabrielle Soumet, Amelie Prai, and Adele Esquiros contributed to the journal. Although articles were written by both women and men, including Victor Hugo, Jean Mace, and Paulin Niboyet (Eugenie Niboyet's son), the feminist message was still strong.
Adopting a wide-ranging platform of domestic and civic reforms, Voix des femmes advocated, among other things, the right of women to form political clubs, to speak in public on political issues, to vote, to run for office, and to serve in elected office if legally elected. Understanding the importance of the vote when suffrage was extended to all men without property qualifications, women demanded suffrage for themselves, too. Defeated, the women did not give up. On April 6, Niboyet's journal called for George Sand's election to the Constituent Assembly – an "honor" that Sand promptly disavowed. Continuing efforts by several women's organizations to press the issues of woman suffrage and women's rights, the government finally closed all women's clubs. Only then, on June 20, did the Voice of Women cease publication and its editor, Eugénie Niboyet, withdraw from public life.
The severity of the counter-revolutionary government's repressions and the ensuing devastating effects on the feminist movement cannot be over stated. By 1852, all feminist leaders were scattered – Suzanne Voilquin to the United States, Jeanne Deroin to London, Eugénie Niboyet to Geneva, Désirée Gay to Belgium – or dead. By the end of the decade a few very brave voices (Jenny d'Hericourt and Julliette Lamber Adam ) spoke out in defense of women, but it would be almost twenty years before the feminist movement would regroup. Even then, fearing more government reprisals, the movement would be timid. The reconstituted French feminism of the 1860s could not rely on the 1848ers of whom only Niboyet had returned to France. Now over sixty years of age and supporting herself by her writings, she disavowed the more revolutionary aspects of her past, possibly to keep from alienating her purchasing public. During the post-1848 years, Niboyet worked as a translator, notably of Dickens, Lydia Maria Child and Maria Edgeworth, published children’s books, and told the true story (according to her) of the 1848ers in Le Vrai livre des femmes (Paris: E. Dentu, 1863).
Yet Niboyet was still interested in the feminist movement as her letters to Leon Richer's Le Droit des femmes attest. At the age of 78 Niboyet was celebrated at the 1878 feminist congress in Paris.
Unlike other selections of excerpts in this series, today's selection focuses on sexual harassment in the workplaces of nineteenth-century working-class women. Written in 1834 by Jane Dubuisson for Niboyet's Le Conseiller des Femmes, "Des femmes de la class ouvriere a Lyon" graphically illustrates the necessity for women both to have the vote and to be elected to public office. Translated by Karen M. Offen, it is taken from Bell and Offen's Women, the Family, and Freedom, the Debate in Documents, vol. 1, 1750 – 1880 pp. 201 – 202.
"Des femmes de la class ouvriere a Lyon"
Jane Dubuisson
Le Conseiller des Femmes (Lyons)
15 March 1834
For a long time eloquent pens and generous hearts have pleaded the cause of the unfortunate workers in our city but, with the exception of M. Jules Favre1," no one has considered the deplorable situation of the women and daughters of the working class. And by working class I mean not only those who work at the loom but also those directly or indirectly attached to the fabrication of silk; included in this group are the winders, fringers, stitchers, shawl cutters, etc. etc., in this unfortunate and useful portion of the population of our opulent city. Misery and its horrors do not even spare children. From the age of six an unfortunate little girl is harnessed to a mechanical wheel eighteen hours a day. She earns eight sols, spends two or at the most three of them to add an insufficient portion of coarse prepared food to her even coarser bread. Wilted by a type of work that exceeds her strength, brutalized by an existence that is entirely contrary to nature and that proceeds in hideously unclean, unhealthy workshops, this child vegetates in the most deplorable ignorance. If her sickly childhood withstands all these evils, she will arrive at an even more unfortunate adolescence. Restricted to the fabrication of étoffes unis (the most poorly paid), a woman works fifteen or eighteen hours, often Sundays and holidays, in order to earn a salary that just about suffices for half of her most urgent needs. Should she become weary of this situation that is killing her, and if the continuance of work permits her to do so—if, I say—a woman worker wishes to seek an occupation from which she can live, her native intelligence, suppressed since childhood, prevents her from entering any of those occupations that demand a bit of study. Does she wish to mill the silk? In order to get work, it is not sufficient to be able to do it well and to be scrupulously honest; she must first be recommended, by whatever possible means, to the clerk who makes the decisions.
This person, though of secondary importance himself, pays little attention to the orders of the boss [chef], or, if he cannot evade an order to give work to some woman worker who has not sought out his protection, she then becomes subject to a series of vexations that would reduce the most patient person to despair. Disgusted by a situation in which it is impossible to work except under a revolting patronage, the woman worker goes on to sacrifice a long and irretrievable period in a shawl-making workshop in order to learn a more lucrative trade. There she will first discover that the mistress of the workshop is a relative either of the head man or of his principal clerk, or belongs to them in some other fashion, the only conditions for obtaining a monopoly on the work of a shop. Thus the woman worker must either seek employment in workshops in which the mistress, following the example of the manufacturers, will make enormous profits by paying her only the most minimal wages (without overlooking any of the illicit and vexatious acts that it will be in her power to inflict) or the woman worker herself must accept ignoble and revolting conditions. And do not think that all those women who are exposed to so many horrible seductions give in, oh no! I have seen upright women, however miserable, who, given a choice between vice and hunger, refuse such shameful transactions and, thanks to this refusal, have their work taken away from them. Their work! Their daily bread! • • •
Thus the woman worker who has not been corrupted by misery and bad example must work all her life, sustain the most extreme deprivation, and, in the midst of this struggle between misfortune and infamy, must witness the early arrival of infirmities, an anticipation of old age. What she is not given, or more clearly, what is stolen from her, makes the fortune of those who do not blush to become rich off the sweat of the poor.
Perhaps someone will try to counter this tableau by pointing to the immense amount of charity that is distributed every year. But it is not charity that withers [these women]. What do these poor victims of greed desire? They ask for work, difficult, continuous work—work that will nourish them and that will not leave them with only starvation and the hospital2 to look forward to!
When such abuses display themselves—bleeding, palpitating, hideous —should one not scorn this philanthropy that does not cure, because it does not recognize, the real wounds of humanity, the real evils that society endures? Oh! if you had seen, as we have, the bitter tears that How from these eyes, reddened by working half the night, if you had heard the sorrowful cries of these ulcerated hearts, you would curse as we do these murderers who strike down a generation at its roots, who gnaw away at it slowly until, as a result of the evils with which they flood it, it is entirely extinguished.
1 Favre was an aspiring, reform-minded lawyer in Lyons who later became prominent in republican politics.— Bell and Offen
2 The hospitals of the nineteenth century served almost exclusively as a last resort for the sick and dying poor. — Bell and Offen
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] pp. 199-202
Book review by Doris Y. Kadish of Lawrence C.Jennings's French Anti-Slavery: The Movement for Abolition of Slavery in France, 1802-1848. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000.
'Biographies: Women's Suffrage,' The Development of Women's Movements, 1789-1914 © - Professor James F. McMillan, University of Strathclyde. accessed June 22, 2002
Claire Goldberg Moses, French Feminism in the 19th Century [Albany: State University of New York, 1984]
Claire Goldberg Moses and Leslie Wahl Rabine, Feminism, Socialism, and French Romanticism [Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1993]
Karen Offen, European Feminisms 1700 – 1795: A Political History [Stanford, Ca: Stanford University Press, 2000]
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last updated February 2003