Women, Resistance and Revolution (8 page)

Behind his thinking was the conviction that the happy society was one organized to allow human beings to develop fully. He didn’t want to change individuals for their own good so they would be worthy of the good society. He wanted rather to devise forms of social organization which would be the best adapted to allow everybody to do what they wanted without upsetting anyone else. He had ingenious ideas about the organization of work. Noticing that young adolescents often liked getting dirty, he allocated dirty work to them. Grown-ups who hadn’t outgrown the delights of dirt could join them. These dirt-lovers organized themselves in bands or gangs called the Little Hordes. Non dirt-loving youths were given artistic
work. He seemed to think the girls would prefer the latter. But if they wanted they were welcome amongst the Little Hordes.

Fourier’s ideas about the position of women were not the only ones being discussed in ateliers and cafés in France in the first half of the century. ‘La nouvelle femme Saint-Simonienne’, an extraordinarily modern creature wearing a kind of smock over trousers, the forerunner of Amelia Bloomer, made her appearance in innumerable cartoons. Much to the disgust of many of Saint-Simon’s followers, one of his disciples, Enfantin, developed the master’s ideas of the need for a New Christianity and spiritual regeneration in a feminine direction. Resembling many aspects of the millenarian movements, these new heretics organized like the early Christian apostles and, sharing their goods in common, awaited the apocalypse and a new messiah. But they believed total redemption was impossible unless this time it was a Mother. The church needed the marriage of Father and Mother to symbolize the union of intellect and feeling. It was necessary to transcend the Christian denial of the flesh by its exaltation as the complement of the spirit. They shared the symbolism of the Christian fathers – woman was flesh, animality, fertility.

Enfantin and his believers, waiting for La Mère and setting off on a disastrous expedition to Egypt to find her, appear now as simply preposterous. But the fury their preaching unleashed was real enough, as was the persecution they suffered for their ideas of free unions. Their significance is rather in the effect they had upon women who had nothing else to hope with. From the interaction between the emerging labour movement and workers’ associations and the extraordinary ideas of these utopian thinkers, a number of women emerged with a new conception of their own worth and dignity. It gave them the confidence to express themselves and provided them with the courage to formulate conceptions about their own possibilities, which would have been quite inconceivable to women a generation before.

George Sand’s is the name that survives now but there were many much humbler women thinking about these ideas who received no adulation or acclaim. Some even have no name now. In the Club Lyonnais in 1848, ‘a simple working woman, born of a poor family, the wife of a good republican’
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stood up in the tribune and demanded that women shouldn’t be slaves to men. She wanted them to be admitted into the assembly, to discuss their rights and direct their
own affairs. They ought to get a decent wage for their work so they wouldn’t have to depend on men. Young girls who had been seduced and abandoned ought to be able to look after their children without disgrace, and the shame should fall on the man.

It is impossible now to discover what had happened to women like her, or how they came by such ideas; impossible to retrace the slow subterranean growth of consciousness behind her words. We know a little more about other women – the ones who wrote. Susanne Voilquin, a working girl who went off to Egypt in search of La Mère, described in her ‘Memories of a Girl of the People’ the extraordinary effect of Enfantin’s ideas upon her at a meeting. She said the discovery that the capacity for thought, feeling and independent action was within herself brought her great joy. Clair Demar produced two short books before committing suicide with her lover. She dreamed of a new social era of association, concord and harmony where there was no longer either industrial or sexual bondage.
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She believed that the emancipation of the proletariat and of women was indissolubly linked and imagined a greater freer love between men and women. A future where there would be no longer the love of slave for master but the free proud love of equal for equal, and a revolution in sexual customs. Jeanne Deroin, a self-taught working woman, also believed that the liberation of women and the working class was inseparable. She was active in the early French labour movement and worked out an early project for the federation of unions. She produced many practical proposals to improve the domestic and working conditions of women. In her ‘Cours de droit social pour les femmes’ in 1848, she describes the submission of women:

Woman, still slave, remains veiled and in silence. She has lost the memory of her divine origin, she is unable to understand her noble social mission, she has neither name nor country, she is banished from the sanctuary, she seems to have accepted shameful servitude. Held down by man’s yoke, she has not even the aspiration towards liberty, man must liberate her.
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Despite the religious language this expresses a consciousness of the internalization of women’s subordination, which makes it peculiarly difficult for them to struggle against oppression.

Jeanne Deroin felt the liberation of women was not possible without a great social change but that women must play their part in
effecting it. Men from long association with egoism inclined always towards despotism. With a naïve faith she believed women, previously denied responsibility for the world, would be able to organize with love.

Flora Tristan is slightly better known than Voilquin, Demar or Deroin. In her
L’Union Ouvrière
, published in 1843, she worked out one of the earliest conceptions of a world-wide Workers’ International. She devoted a chapter to the rights of women, showing how important the relations between men and women in the working-class family were in creating consciousness. She thought many working-class women became soured by the contempt with which they were treated. ‘I am not criticizing working-class women. It is society that is entirely to blame … it must be admitted that there are few workers’ homes that are happy. The husband is head by law and also by reason of the money he brings in. He believes himself superior to his wife, who only earns a fraction of his wage and is his very humble servant.’

The man sought refuge from his wife’s bitterness and frequent quarrelling in drink. ‘Taverns are the temples of working-class men.’ This only worsens the effects of poverty, unemployment and bad conditions:

She rails at him. He swears at her and hits her. And a woman has further crosses to bear, such as constant child-bearing, illness and unemployment. Misery is planted on her doorstep like Medusa’s head. Add to this the yells and romping of four to five children eddying round her in one small cramped room, and one would have to be an angel not to be brutalized by it all.
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She saw the need for the workers’ movement to create an alternative culture, and planned workers’ palaces in every town to act as a focal point for organizing and education. One of their tasks would be the ‘education, moral, intellectual and technical’
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of the women of the people. She hoped this would act as an improving influence on the men of the people.

Flora Tristan’s own life followed the dramatic and tragic course which seemed to be the inevitable fate of the feminist socialist. She worked as a colourist in a workshop. Her master, impressed by her beauty, married her. She was unhappy with him, and, becoming pregnant for the third time, ran away. Divorce was illegal. She
travelled to South America in a vain attempt to secure an inheritance from her father’s brother. After long struggles with her husband for custody of her daughter, he pursued her and shot her. Legally she was in a weak position, socially she was an outcast. But by this time, reading Fourier and Saint-Simonian literature and talking to workers interested in their ideas, she discovered that she was not alone in her unhappiness and helplessness. She visited England and met radicals and chartists including Anna Wheeler, Owen, O’Brien. She also met a madman in Bedlam whilst she was in England who disturbed her greatly. He told her he wanted to end all bondage, free the woman from slavery to the man, the poor from the power of the rich, and the soul from its bondage to sin. Flora wondered ‘Was the man mad? All he had said to me revealed a man in revolt against the corruption and the hypocrisy of those who ruled the world, and who found himself unable to control his anger.’
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The similarity to her own situation was inescapable. Just before she died in 1844, on a speaking tour to convince workers of the need to establish an International, Flora Tristan wrote to Considerant: ‘I have nearly the whole world against me. Men because I demand the emancipation of women, the owners because I demand the emancipation of wage-earners.’
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On her tour she encountered a mixed reception. In some cases workers listened and bought her
L’Union Ouvrière.
But in other towns she found apathy, sectional conflict between trades, and inter-union hostility. Amazingly she persisted trudging from town to town, meeting to meeting, selling her book. She was often attacked in the press and harassed by the police and local officials. She became feverish and ill, driving herself to speak in torrential rain regardless of exhaustion. When she finally collapsed she was cared for by her friend Eleanore Blanc, a laundress who shared her ideas, and by the Lemonniers, a middle-class couple who also supported her. At her funeral workmen carried her coffin because they did not want paid men to do the work, and a subscription was raised for a monument at her grave. Flora left an unfinished book,
L’Emancipation de la Femme ou le Testament de la Paria
– an appropriate title. She also left a memory in the revolutionary movement. On 23 October 1848 several thousand people gathered to pay tribute round her grave. Workers returned home singing ‘Flora Tristan needs a grave’, and the song persisted in the ateliers for many years.

Thus despite intense opposition and repression the connection
between the emancipation of women and the idea of a new, more just society for the poor continued to be discussed, argued and contested in the utopian underground in the first part of the century. Women influenced by Saint-Simonian theories worked in Owenite cooperatives and returned to France with ideas of association; Owen and his followers established communities in the U.S.A. and visited France to argue with the Fourierists; Fourier’s ideas were popularized in England by Hugh Doherty. Causes combined and borrowed arguments from one another. In America Frances Wright, struggling for the emancipation of the slaves, horrified everyone by taking up free love in a community in Tennessee. The transcendentalist feminist and republican Margaret Fuller shows, both in her life and writing, the manner in which radical ideas were being communicated, not only across national boundaries but across boundaries of colour, class and sex. She had links with the community based on plain living and high thinking at Brook Farm, which was converted into a Fouriertist ‘phalanx’ in 1844. She visited France in 1847, meeting George Sand, was swept away with enthusiasm for the revolution of 1848, and took an active part in the movement for Italian liberation. Her
Woman in the Nineteenth Century
is a remarkably perceptive account of the psychological and cultural effects of women’s oppression. She was really primarily concerned with consciousness which she expresses in religious terms, rather like the Saint-Simonian women. But she had different arguments. Margaret Fuller strikes straight at one of the most pervasive of anti-feminist notions. As women pressed their claims their opponents changed their tack. Instead of declaring them outright inferiors they granted them affairs relating to the heart. Women were allowed to occupy themselves with all matters that did not concern direct power. They could control, but only indirectly, through their men. Margaret Fuller recognized this as a small advance. If he was to be the head it was better to be his heart than his hand. But it only loosened the rope. She was still his creature:

I have urged on Woman independence of Man, not that I do not think the sexes mutually needed by one another, but because in Woman this fact has led to an excessive devotion which has cooled love, degraded marriage, and prevented either sex from being what it should be to itself.
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The struggle to find an independent self, rather than finding a
self through the activity of the man, was to be a crucial theme in feminism. Fuller conceived the problem in religious terms, of living for God’s sake. But she wanted the reform to be in this world. She looked at the arguments which used women’s physical weakness as a reason for keeping them from government and the professions and contrasted this ironically with complacency, which allowed ‘… Negresses to endure field work even during pregnancy, or for seamstresses to go through their killing labours’.
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She agreed with Fourier’s ideas on the education of little girls.

She is most specifically aware of the cultural manifestations of women’s inferior position. She noted amongst men a profound contempt for women. She mentions common phrases like ‘Tell that to women and children’.
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Submission was so deeply embedded, even in language. Energy and creation are synonymous with masculinity, and nobility with manliness. Whenever a woman appeared to be particularly gifted she was complimented by comparisons to men. If she claimed dignity for women, she was regarded with incredulity as making the best of it – Wollstonecraft’s Swede again.