Women, Resistance and Revolution (16 page)

Come all you false young men

That leave me here to complain

For the grass that is now trodden underfoot

In time it will rise again.

‘The Seeds of Love’, early English ballad;
first recorded version, seventeenth century

How hard is the fortune of all womankind;

They’re always in fetters, they’re always confined;

Bound down by their parents until they’re made wives,

Then slaves to their husbands the rest of their lives.

Popular song; first recorded version, eighteenth century

The woman who comes forward now in the streets is strong, loyal, tragic; she knows how to die as she loves, because of that pure and generous vein which, since 1789, has run richly through the heart of the French people. She who was before a partner in life and work now wants to share her man’s association with death.… She does not hold her man back; on the contrary, she thrusts him into battle, bringing soup and linen to him in the trenches as she did when he was out at work. Many women do not want to go back home, but take up a rifle.…

Lissagaray

The hands of Jeanne-Marie are strong

Dark hands tanned by summer’s heat,

They have gone pale

Under the sun of burdened love …

Rimbaud

No matter what your fight

Don’t be ladylike.

American trade union organizer, ‘Mother’ Jones

That man over there says that a woman needs to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helped me into carriages, or over mud puddles, or gives me a best place.… And ain’t I a woman? Look at me. Look at my arm! I have plowed and planted and gathered into barns and no man could head me.… And ain’t I a woman?

Sojourner Truth: Speech before Women’s Rights Convention, Ohio, U.S.A., 1851

As we come marching, marching in the beauty of the day

A million darkened kitchens, a thousand mill lofts gray,

Are touched with all the radiance that a sudden sun discloses,

For the people hear us singing: ‘Bread and roses! Bread and roses!’

As we come marching, marching we battle too for men,

For they are women’s children, and we mother them again.

Our lives shall not be sweetened from birth until life closes;

Hearts starve as well as bodies; give us bread, but give us roses!

As we come marching, marching, unnumbered women dead

Go crying through our singing their ancient cry for bread.

Small art and love and beauty their drudging spirits knew

Yes it is bread we fight for … but we fight for roses too.

As we come marching, marching we bring the greater days

The rising of the women means the rising of the race.

No more the drudge and idler – ten that toil where one reposes,

But a sharing of life’s glories: Bread and roses! Bread and roses!

James Oppenheimer, inspired by banners carried by young mill girls in the 1912 Lawrence Massachusetts textile strike

Not everyone learns from books. Not everybody’s story is written down. There is a world of experience that belongs to the women who were not given to prophecy, who knew nothing of the privileges of education, who read no novels, who never heard of the innumerable utopias which promised them freedom, and were innocent of Marxist or anarchist theory. It is this world which is the most difficult to
recapture and recreate. Yet it was through the interaction of this experience with the ideas of revolutionary feminism that the beginnings of answers were made. The silent people of no name, the ignorant and ignored, move reluctantly into ‘official’ history which reflects those who have power in the world as it is. An essential task of a revolutionary feminist movement is the investigation of the past of the women of the people who have been neglected because of their class and because of their sex. As yet we are only able to touch the outermost limits. We only know what was happening to these women in a superficial way. But we can watch something of the growth of a radical and ultimately revolutionary consciousness, we can see what actions and demands and forms of organization came from their specific situation as women. We can also note the particular problems and dilemmas which women encountered as a result of this activity; note too the resilient face women put against change, the persistent traditional fatalism carried through in folk song into the dramatic economic and political changes of nineteenth-century capitalism – and beyond. The timeless tragedy of the continuing cycle of love, loss, encounter, parting, birth, joy, sorrow, pain, life and death. Repeatedly revolutionary political movements proved incapable of relating to this.

The woman confronts the man personally. The essential difference between them is his freedom and her bondage. Here it is the fact of reproduction that holds the woman and governs her consciousness:

They’ll kiss you and they’ll court you

And tell to you more lies

As the hairs upon your head, love,

Or the stars in the skies.
¹

Pretty girls are warned not to place all their affection on a green willow tree. All sweetness carries its own bitterness:

He gave me honey all mixed with gall

He gave me words and vows withal.

He gave me a delicate gown to wear,

All stitched with sorrow and hemmed with fear.

Childbirth traps the woman in her pleasure:

When my apron strings hung low

He’d follow me through frost and snow,

Now my apron strings won’t pin,

He’ll pass my door and not come in.

Hopeless love entangles her. She wonders:

Must I go bound and he go free.

Songs of girls who were easily led, who yielded gently to delight, forgetful in the dark night of love; girls easily persuaded, who believed handsome wanderers with false promises, who waited for soldier boys who never returned, whose lovers picked up their clothes and left them to face pregnancy alone. Some of them bargain like the lass of Islington, ‘her hand on the Cellar Door’.
²
Occasionally they combine. The miller’s wife and the servant girl he is pursuing change beds and he enjoys his own wife. In Jamaica the same joke was played on the white slave-owner. More often they try for a brief escape from womanhood; like sweet Polly Oliver, dressed as a boy they join the army to find their man or lie disguised beside their pressganged sailor lover:

In pulling off my britches, to myself I often smiled

To think I lay with a hundred men and a maiden all the while.
³

But for every Polly (or in real life Hannah Snell, a marine in the East Indies) or Mary Reed, a female pirate, there were thousands who didn’t escape and didn’t want to, thousands who had no idea of making their own lives, of controlling events, of getting out of the rut of what had always been. The essentially distinct experience of women was encountered by its nature alone, and this traditional consciousness was a lonely consciousness which did not think in terms of future and had no idea of how to act upon the world. It knew only a protective, defensive women’s lore. Before any form of reliable or widespread contraceptive methods it was impossible for women to take the control of their sexuality into their own hands.

It is really from women’s relationship to consumption that the experience of collective action emerges. Most important was the price of bread, the basic item in the diet of the poor. With a primitive communications system local supply was all important. A bad harvest meant scarcity and hoarding on the market to raise prices. The food riot and price fixing which often went with it was a popular means of controlling distribution. Thus in Nottingham in 1812 it was reported that:

several women in Turncalf Alley sticking a half penny loaf on the top of a fishing rod after having streaked it with red ochre and tied around it a shred of black cloth, emblematic, it was said, of ‘bleeding famine decked in sack cloth’; by the elevation of this and the aid of three hand bells, two carried by woman and one by a boy, a considerable crowd of people, chiefly women, soon congregated together.
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They demanded that flour should be reduced to 6d per stone. Their example was contagious. Mobs set to work in every part of the town. One group carried a woman in a chair who gave the word of command and was given the name of ‘Lady Ludd’. Such actions were half ritual, half political. They came naturally from the role of women in the family. Their organization was based on the immediate community. They did not require a conscious long-term commitment like that of joining a union or a party, nor were they feminist in any explicit sense. However, during the nineteenth century the context of the food riot changed because of the development of other forms of political action. In the case of women too, certainly in France, the traditional action of women in relation to consumption became intertwined not only with revolutionary events and ideas but also with the emerging popular feminism of the streets and clubs.

In the months immediately before the march to Versailles the women were growing impatient with what they felt to be the men’s ineffectiveness. The bread crisis was peculiarly their own. In September they stopped carts and besieged the town hall. On 5 October the revolt started from several central markets. In the Faubourg Saint-Antoine women were in the lead – fishwives, stallholders, working women along with smartly dressed bourgeoisies. Again in 1792 and 1793 laundresses from the Faubourg Saint-Antoine invaded grocers’ shops. Though women were present they were less active in military operations like the taking of the Bastille, or the political demonstrations. Individual women like Constance Evrard, a cook arrested on the Champ de Mars demonstration, were conscious of the political significance of demonstration and petition. Predominantly though the women were moved by economic concerns which affected them in their position as housewives. This continued to be the pattern during subsequent periods of revolutionary agitation. The history of popular action in 1848 has still to be written. But in the Commune of 1871 women again were involved in price fixing and in attacks on the food shops. This is hardly
surprising for they had to face the endless queueing. A popular song described this hopeless quest for food and provisions:

Not a single shop or store

Has got anything on show,

And whatever way you go,

Knock at each and every door,

It won’t do you any good.

There’s not even any wood.
⁵

In 1871 too they possessed an added element, a revolutionary memory of women’s earlier collective action. The idea of a march of women to Versailles to stop the bloodshed spread in April 1871. Beatrice Excoffon, the daughter of a watchmaker who lived with a compositor, told her mother she was leaving, kissed her children, and joined the procession at the Place de la Concorde. There were about 700 to 800 women. Nobody was clear about the aims of the march or knew definitely what they should do, but there were political rather than strictly economic motives:

Some talked about explaining to Versailles what Paris wanted. Others talked about how things were a hundred years ago when the women of Paris had gone to Versailles to carry off the baker and the baker’s little boy, as they said then.
⁶

Also the role of women had been raised. There was a dispute about whether women could only ask for peace or whether they should defend their country as much as the men. For although the women had been taking action they had been taking action from their traditional position as women. Rather similar was the way in which they walked ahead of their men in the Commune to meet the soldiers, saying ‘Will you fire on us? On your brothers, our husbands? Our children?’
⁷