The Raised Voices of Women in Mid-Nineteenth Century France

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				<title>The Raised Voices of Women in Mid-Nineteenth Century France</title>
				<author>Cäcilia Rentmister</author>
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				<pb n="52"
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				<head>The Raised Voices of Women in Mid-Nineteenth Century France</head>
				<byline>Cäcilia Rentmeister</byline>
				<byline>Translated by Judith Lee</byline>
				 * Excerpted from <title>Honoré Daumier und die ungelosten Probleme der bur
						gerlichen Gesellschaft: Katalog zur Ausstellung der Neuen Gesellschaft für
						bildende Kunst,</title> Berlin, Schloss Charlottenburg, 1974. 
				 These are the questions: With what weapons did women in the mid-nineteenth
					century actually fight? Did they have allies? Was their enemy simply the male?
					What goals did they fight for? How were women affected by the reactions to the
					first French Revolution in 1789, and what laws controlled them? Why did they
					seek to join the early socialist groups and why were they rejected or
					disciplined as soon as they asserted their own interests? Why did their hopes in
					such apostles as Saint-Simon, Fourier, Cabet, George Sand or in the workers'
					alliances turn out to be illusions? How is it that women of all classes were
					able to unite, so as to form an autonomous women's movement?...
				<div>
					<head>1789: The Pioneers</head>
					The women's movement of 1848 sought victory in a battle in which, since the
						Great Revolution of 1789, it had only experienced defeat. In 1789 women had
						left their homes, had climbed down from the allegorical pedestals of freedom
						and fatherland to fight for these values with weapons in their hands. The
						"amazon of freedom," Théroigne de Méricourt, and her sisters throughout
						France formed amazon corps. It was women who advanced on Versailles to bring
						the royal couple and the crown prince — "the baker, the baker's wife and the
						baker's little boy"— to Paris. <note>1. Cf. Simone de Beauvoir, <title>The
								Second Sex</title> (New York: Knopf, 1953); Léon Abensour,
								<title>Histoire Générale du Féminisme</title> (Paris, 1921); Clara
							Zetkin, <title>Zur Geschichte der proletarischen Frauenbewegung
								Deutschlands</title> (Berlin, DDR, 1958); Sheila Rowbotham,
								<title>Hidden from History</title> (London, 1973).</note> As long as
						they integrated themselves into the fighting lines and subordinated
						themselves to common goals, they were accepted. But when they followed the
						men's example and established clubs to demand civil rights and freedom of
						economic activity for themselves, then the amazons of freedom became hateful
						Megaeras. As a companion to the “Declaration of the Rights of Man, Olympe de
						Gouges proposed in 1789 a “Declaration of the Rights of Women": “A woman has
						the right to go to the gallows; she must also have the right to mount the
						speaker's platform."
					In the same declaration she concluded, "Oh women, women! When will you stop
						being blind? What advantages have you gained through the Revolution? Greater
						contempt, more flagrant disregard. In the centuries of corruption the only
						thing you controlled was men's weaknesses. Your empire has been destroyed.
						What is there left? The conviction that men are unjust...."
					<note>2. Quoted from Daniel Stern, <title>Histoire de la Révolution de
							1848</title> (Paris, 1878), II, pp. 378-379. Cf. also d'Agoult (Daniel
						Stern), <title>Mémoires 1833-1854</title> (Paris, 1877).</note>
					Even though in 1790 the Constituent Assembly introduced a law enabling
						daughters to inherit property and, in 1792, a divorce law, it was only the
						wives and daughters of wealthy men whose lot improved. Women's more basic
						demands for education, the free exercise of an occupation and political
						rights were rejected. Napoleon's “Civil Code” of 1804 stated outright: “A
						wife owes obedience to her husband" (Article 1). Although Article 488 of the
						code states that all unmarried women of legal age are“...absolute mistresses
						of their person and property” and are able to carry out all acts of civil
						life, <note>3. Cf. <title>Gazette des femmes</title>, no. 53, 10. 10.
							1846.</note> as long as a single adult woman was not able to support
						herself through her own work, she would hardly pass her twenty-first year
						unmarried. By 1826 the restoration government had rescinded the divorce law;
						the women's clubs had already been banned in 1793 by the revolutionary
						government's Committee of Public Safety. 
				</div>
				<div>
					<head>Women's Emancipation between Revolutions: The Apostles</head>
					In spite of the setbacks, women had perceived the possibilities for freedom.
						Soon after the turn of the century the social utopians appeared before the
						public with plans for a new social order. Searching for a new identity and
						lacking their own theories, women believed they had finally found their
						place in Saint Simon's Association universelle. Here man and woman would
						form the future “social unit" in a structure free of all enslavement.
						However, Saint-Simon himself provided only general formulations. The
						exegesis of his gospel was left to his apostle Père Enfantin. <note>4. Cf.
							Edith Thomas, <title>Les femmes en 1848</title> (Paris, 1948), pp.
							7ff.</note> And Enfantin again placed woman on the very throne that had
						always stood in the way of her liberation: she became an ideal figure to be
						worshipped. Enfantin and his numerous followers, men and women of all
						classes, awaited the appearance of the Mère—the female messiah who, with the
						Père, was supposed to form the Saint-Simonian papal couple, the “Divine
						Androgyne." This "Mother" was also supposed to break the "seal" on the
						shackles of women. But despite an intensive search, which included
						expeditions to the Orient, this worthy woman was never found. The seal on
						women's chains remained.
					Enfantin loosened one bond, however, with his réhabilitation de la chair—the
						"liberation of the flesh" from the bonds of Christianity's aversion to the
						carnal. This meant the moral relaxation of the bonds of marriage to the very
						boundaries of promiscuity and was first perceived by Saint-Simonian women as
						progressive. However, it proved to be neither a theoretical nor a practical
						step toward their liberation. The dualism of body and soul was maintained.
						Woman continued to be flesh, but her corporeality was elevated as a means of
						dignifying the male spirit. By making the body divine, woman could be
						sexually exploited that much more easily. In addition, no women sat in
						Enfantin's Conseil suprême, and in 1851 they were completely excluded from
						the hierarchy.
					A great many women learned a lesson from these disappointments. They began to
						search for a new apostle. Former supporters of Saint-Simon wrote in the
						first issue of their women's journal, Femme libre (1832):
					<quote>When everyone is concerned about freedom and the proletariat demands
						liberation, in the face of this great movement of social emancipation taking
						place before our very eyes, shall women remain inactive?...Is our lot so
						fortunate that we have no demands to make? Up to now woman has been
						exploited and tyrannized. This tyranny, this exploitation must cease. Like
						men we are born free; one half of the human race cannot be sujected to the
						other without injustice. <note>5. Ibid., p. 10.</note>
					</quote>
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					 Women saw themselves here not as a minority, but as one half of humanity. If
						the male proletariat, numerically a smaller group, could demand liberation,
						why not women?...
					Yet women were not in a position to create an autonomous emancipation
						movement. For too long they had been forceably prevented from gaining any
						insight into social relationships. Before 1848, no matter what family and
						social role the women's rightists envisioned for themselves, they always
						viewed their liberation in conjunction with that of the most oppressed
						classes. However, even these classes, which the women held to be their
						natural allies, rejected them as soon as they demanded the end of sexual
						domination.
					Flora Tristan, for example, led a lifelong battle for the cause of women and
						workers because of the dual oppression she had her self experienced. After
						the early death of her father she went to work as an illuminator. Her
						youthful marriage to her employer was unhappy; Tristan left her husband and
						took her children with her. According to the law at that time the marriage
						could not be dissolved and the husband was able to persecute his wife for
						many years without punishment. <note>6. For the following ef. Zetkin, pp.
							161ff. and Thomas, pp. 18ff.</note>
					Tristan's major work, The Union of Labor, appeared in 1843, shortly before
						her death. Long before Marx she proposed and expounded her idea that
						although the emancipation of workers must be achieved by the workers
						themselves, it would only remain an illusion without the emancipation of
						women. Tristan also suggested to the workers the text for a declaration
						which ends, “We, the French proletariat...recognize...that the neglect and
						disregard which men have shown for the natural rights of women is the sole
						reason for unhappiness in the world....Sons of 1789, this is the task that
						your fathers have given you to do!"
					Because of this declaration and especially because of her portrayal of the
						misery of proletarian marriages, Tristan did not meet with sympathy from her
						public. Marriage and family were the last reserves where the worker could
						exercise control on account of his sex. Thus labor and trade associations
						recognized Tristan's work belatedly, if at all. In a letter to Considérant
						she writes with disappointment, “Almost everyone is against me. The men,
						because I demand the emancipation of women, the property owners, because I
						demand the emancipation of wage earners." <note>7. Thomas, p. 29.</note>
					
				</div>
				<div>
					<head>The Bluestockings Corrupt the Moral Tradition of Marriage</head>
					The Bluestockings (Les Bas-bleus) were not a specific organization.
						Originally the term referred to a group of female scholars and writers who
						owed their nickname to a certain blue-stockinged Mrs. Stillingfleet, a
						literary lady prominent in London around 1780.<note>8. Brockhaus, <title>Kl.
								[eines] Konversationslex.[ikon]</title> (Leipzig, 1886).</note> By
						the mid-nineteenth century, Daumier and his contemporaries used the term to
						mean any emancipated woman from the bourgeois class, which, being their own
						class, posed the greatest threat and inspired the strongest defenses.
					Since bourgeois married women revolted naturally not against employers, but
						against their husbands (who were not recognized as employers since housework
						was unpaid), marriage was the focal point of the emancipation efforts of the
						caricaturists' Bluestockings. In Daumier's series Conjugal Mores (1839), the
						battle between the sexes took place in the parlor or bedroom, the target the
						flaws of a lower- or middle-class marriage. The sixth plate of the series
						points clearly to the Bluestockings. A husband in his underwear holds out
						his torn pants to his wife, who is reading, and complains that George Sand
						keeps wives from mending their husbands' trousers: "Either we should make
						divorce legal again or outlaw this lady writer!" <note>9. Charivari, 6. 30.
							1839; [Loys] Delteil, [<title>Honoré Daumier</title>, 10 vols. (Paris,
							1925-1930)], no. 629.</note> This print evokes the three chief
						complaints against the Bas-bleus: wives refuse to mend trousers and even
						want to dress themselves in this symbol of their husbands' power; marriage
						and family are neglected in favor of the woman's own interests; and George
						Sand—"that woman writer who has inspired literary ambitions in the heads of
						faithful wives -is the source of all evil.
					What did George Sand really want and what kind of views did Daumier credit to
						her blue-stockinged followers? <note>10. Cf. G. Sand, <title>Gefahrten von
								der Frankreichwanderschaft [Compagnon du tour de France]</title>
							(Berlin, DDR, 1954), with an afterword by Rita Schober; Edith Thomas,
							George Sand (Paris, 1959); Jean Larnac, <title>G.[eorge] S.[and] als
								Revolutionarin [George Sand as a Revolutionary)</title>.</note> In
						1831 the Baroness Dudevant had left her husband and experienced her first
						success as a feuilletonist for Le Figaro under the pseudonym George Sand.
						Soon after that, in her novels Indiana and Lelia, she created heroines who
						protested the tyranny of marriage. The subsequent development of Sand's
						political consciousness was similar to that of countless other women. She
						moved from the Saint-Simonians, who wanted her to be their “Mother," to the
						social utopians and Lamennais and eventually, at the end of the 1830s, she
						converted to the views of Pierre Leroux, who fought capitalism through
						forced development of new methods of agricultural production. George Sand
						took Leroux's position in her so-called social novels written after 1840.
						She made farmers and workmen her protagonists and declared them to be the
						determining social force, paralleling the actual historical role of these
						classes from 1830 to 1850. Her opinions placed her in the left wing of the
						petit bourgeois democrats.
					As for the women's question, Sand—like Leroux—did not expect a solution until
						a new social order could be established. But it is not only because of this
						blind faith in automatic change that the women's question is peripheral in
						her “social” novels. From her extensive work with society and politics she
						could have come to a clearer analysis of the present and future role of
						women in society. But Sand was no longer concerned with the women's
						question. Having been accepted as one of their own by the most influential
						men of her time, she believed she had attained emancipation and was, indeed,
						already beyond it. She had become a man out of conviction and had nothing
						but contempt for her former sex. Thus even in 1848 she disassociated herself
						very clearly from the women's rightists.
					The George Sand who is the central figure in Daumier's Bluestocking series is
						still the early Sand, opposing marriage, although by the time the series
						appeared in 1844 she had already begun the development described above. Sand
						was the perfect model even for Daumier's travesty of emancipation—portrayed
						simply as the imitation and exchange of sexual roles. She dressed like a
						man, smoked, used male gestures...Daumier's Bluestockings have only first
						names, which makes them anonymous and insignificant. Among the precursors of
						these Eudoxies, Ismenes and Arsinoes are the French précieuses of the
						seventeenth century, whose legacy is visible today in the petites
						bourgeoises who imagine themselves to be leading intellectuals..
					When intellect and creativity, considered to be masculine qualities, are
						appropriated by daring women, they supposedly be come—if not men—then at
						least sexless creatures. Thus, in the first plate of Daumier's series, an
						unattractive Bluestocking gazing at her own likeness in a mirror takes
						comfort in Madame de Stael's words, “Genius has no sex." <note>11.
								<title>Charivari</title>, 1. 30. 1844. Delteil, nos.
							1221-1260.</note> Nevertheless, Daumier's Bluestockings still have
						families and still assume the duties of production and reproduction of
						manpower, although because of their intellectual predilections, they are
						unwilling to do housework. Indeed the very existence of the family is in
						danger, when the children are always falling into the bathwater or when the
						husband must care for them while his wife writes an “Ode to Motherhood." It
						escaped Daumier's notice that the traditional division of roles gives far
						more occasion for comedy when the husband is writing an ode praising the
						joys of motherhood while the wife keeps the children out of his way.
					In contrast to the women in Conjugal Mores, whose activities were limited to
						the domestic sphere, ambition drives Daumier's <pb n="54"
							facs="https://leaf.bucknell.edu/sites/default/files/2025-02/heresies02_054.jpg"
						/> Bluestockings to take the first steps out of the house and found
						organizations limited only to their own sex. They are either gaped at or
						hooted at as salon socialists; they change the function of the ladies' tea
						party and meet as a circle of drinking companions who parrot revolutionary
						ideologies. Daumier deals with the real, and more threatening, women's
						newspapers and clubs only twice. At a meeting to found their journal The
						Women's Literary Sans Culotte, Bluestocking journalists discuss the contents
						of their first issue: "What do we want to wreck first? For a beginning,
						let's smash everything!" And in the second print— the chaotic meeting of a
						women's club—it is typical of Daumier that once again the ironic caption
						speaks only of women's incapability of working as an organization. The
						observer learns nothing about the reason for the meeting or the topic of
						discussion. These sheets do not give the vaguest notion of the explosive
						power that the women's movement was about to develop in the February
						Revolution of 1848.
				</div>
				<div>
					<head>The Women's Movement in 1848: Goals and Organization</head>
					The February Revolution again called women to the battlefield. Again the
						overthrow of an old social order loosened their bonds, and for a short time
						in the anarchy of law and morals they escaped the control of their masters.
						Since 1789 they had expanded their demands and made them more precise:
						without the complete abolition of the domination of one sex by the other,
						the revolution could not be victorious. Their common goals were the right to
						work, the autonomous organization of wage-earning women, abolition of
						educational privileges, and the procurement of political and civil rights
						(suffrage, divorce).
					So that men could hear them, these working and bourgeois women gained the
						right to speak in democratic and socialist men's clubs like the Club
						Lyonnais or the Club de l'émancipation des peuples. At best the men
						tolerated or smiled at the women's presentations. Once again women learned
						from these experiences; they organized themselves autonomously. They came
						together from homes and factories to form their own clubs and editorial
						boards. “The natural agent for your liberation is woman," points out one of
						the women's papers. <note>12. <title>Voix [desfemmes]</title>, 4. 20.
							1848.</note> The two largest women's clubs in Paris were the Club de
						l'émancipation des femmes, founded by Jeanne Deroin and Dr. Malatier, and
						the Club des femmes, founded by Eugénie Niboyet. Clubs founded newspapers,
						newspapers founded clubs. Thus Jeanne Deroin published the Opinion des
						femmes <note>13. The successor to the paper <title>Politique des
								femmes</title>.</note> and Niboyet the Voix des femmes. To properly
						evaluate the achievements and significance of the women's newspapers, it
						must be kept in mind that they appeared daily and that newspapers were the
						only form of mass communication.
					<note>14. There were countless other journals for women, but often only a few
						issues appeared because of the special difficulties involved (financing,
						organization, marketing and distribution, quality).</note>
					Among the editors of the Voix, Niboyet had worked for a long time on women's
						newspapers, <note>15. She was editor from 1833 to 1834 in Lyon of the
							pro-Fourier <title>Conseiller des femmes</title>.</note> and Deroin was
						a teacher who wrote for the Opinion des femmes as well. Désirée Gay was a
						worker and later founder of a women laundry workers' union. A large number
						of other writers for the paper signed their articles with first name and
						occupation only. With its first issue on March 20, 1840, the Voix called for
						support of the aforementioned demands of the women's organizations.
					The battle dealt primarily with the right to vote and the right to work. On
						March 5, 1848, the provisional government had proclaimed “universal
						suffrage." The next day it specified exactly who was allowed to vote — all
						men over twenty-one years of age who enjoyed the rights of citizenship.
						Mentally retarded people and minors were not permitted to vote. The women
						belonged to this group.
					Women rose up in arms. In an address to the provisional government on March
						16, women artists, workers, writers and teachers demanded equal political
						rights for both sexes. Delegations from the “Committee for Women's Rights"
						went to Marrast at City Hall and insisted on the right to vote because the
						voting law failed to specifically exclude women. The Jacobin Club released a
						trial balloon with the nomination of George Sand as a candidate for the
						National Assembly. The women's clubs enthusiastically endorsed the
						nomination. The Voix des femmes of April 16 proclaimed, “We have nominated
						George Sand!" A woman in the National Assembly, one whom men had declared to
						be a genius, would have to be heard! But in the newspaper La Réforme Sand
						clearly disassociated herself from the movement. She admitted that freedom
						of opinion was the right of both sexes, but protested the unsolicited
						support of women whom she did not know and with whom she did not wish to
						associate.
					Eugénie Niboyet had realized that Sand was no women's rightist. In the Voix
						on April 10, 1848, she returned the affront. The candidacy of Madame George
						Sand was decided by men in clubs where women are not permitted.... The
						republic has not done away with the privileges of the talented, but it has
						limited them by imposing responsibilities." In the election on April 23
						George Sand was defeated. One half of the French people still had no
						voice.
				</div>
				<div>
					<head>Organizing by Women</head>
					The right to work meant economic independence, a fundamental step towards
						women's liberation. Finding work for women had nothing to do with charity.
						“Under a republican government privilege is replaced by equality, just as
						charity becomes fraternity...." (commentary in the Voix on April 3, 1848).
						The <pb n="55"
							facs="https://leaf.bucknell.edu/sites/default/files/2025-02/heresies02_055.jpg"
						/> women's demands were presented before the Commission du travail of the
						provisional government in a very general and rather feeble form. An address
						directed to Louis Blanc, the commission chairman, read:
					<quote>Many women are in a desperate situation.... Good morals build republics
						and it is the women who are responsible for good morals! Let the nation
						praise wom en's labor through your voice. We hope that through our will work
						done by women will have a status in the present reorganization of labor and
						that you will urge that the fundamental principle of association be applied
						to the kinds of work that are carried out by women.</quote>
					<note>16. Stern, II, p. 161.</note>
					In a postscript the woman writing this appeal demanded auxiliary protective
						measures to make it possible for women to work and to make their work
						easier, such as the establishment of "national restaurants, state laundries,
						day-care centers and so forth.
					<note>17. <title>Voix des femmes</title>, 3.2. 1848.</note>
					The women's movement sought to organize female workers in two ways. First,
						through the creation of associations at existing places of work. Second, by
						demanding that the state set up national workshops for women to reduce
						unemployment.
					Workers' associations already existed under the July Monarchy in embryonic
						forms, but they were constantly exposed to persecution by Louis-Philippe's
						government. However, with the February Revolution of 1848, the concept of an
						"association' took on an almost magical significance, for it represented
						both an end to all exploitation and a "brotherliness” which would be real
						ized in all social realms. <note>18. Edith Thomas, <title>Pauline
								Roland</title> (Paris, 1956), p. 127.</note> Women also formed
						associations. Pauline Roland founded an association for socialist teachers.
						The alliance of midwives, Sages femmes unies, demanded medical training,
						better care for the working classes and state wages. The Voix des femmes
						added that women should reclaim gynecology and no longer surrender their
						bodies to profit-seeking, incompetent doctors.
					<note>19. <title>Voix des femmes</title>, 4.20. 1848.</note>
					The Voix also founded an association for domestic workers, Association des
						femmes à gages, to eliminate the isolation inherent in domestic work. In
						October, 1848, Jeanne Deroin launched the Association des ouvrières
						lingères. The female laundry workers organized their businesses themselves,
						from soliciting orders to delivery. One quarter of the profit was paid out
						in wages, one quarter went into a relief fund for the workers and the other
						half went back into production. <note>20. Thomas, <title>Les femmes en
								1848</title>, pp. 71ff.</note> Finally, in August 1848, Deroin
						founded a central French labor union movement. In answer to her call
						delegates from a large number of associations met in Paris to discuss
						suggestions for a federation — 140 associations formed the alliance. In 1850
						Deroin was imprisoned for half a year as an enemy of property, individualism
						and male domination in the state and in the family.
					In March 1848, the suggestion was first made, in the Voix des femmes, that
						the government's National Workshops also be established for women. In the
						course of their campaign, delegates of female workers finally established
						Ateliers des femmes (work shops for women) through the Commission du
						travail. Désirée Gay, a worker and editorial writer for the Voix, was chosen
						as a delegate by the female workers of the second arrondissement of Paris.
						She gave regular reports in the Voix about the organization and development
						of the newly opened workshops in the second district, and from her reports
						we get an idea of what was happen ing in other ateliers.
					Every 100 female workers were under the command of a division leader (daily
						wage: 3 francs). Every ten women were in turn assigned to a brigade leader
						(daily wage: 1.50 francs). On March 20, 1848, the Voix published figures on
						the average earnings of seamstresses: for a twelve-hour day they could earn
						at the most 1 franc in the city, in the country no more than 60 centimes. In
						general, women earned only about one-third of what men earned. Female
						workers sewed national guard shirts for the government and received
						piece-wages. Since most of them were un trained, many barely received 30
						centimes a day, far below the subsistence minimum. The substantial wage
						differences within the ateliers also made women unhappy. The complaints
						multiplied. An editorial in the Voix on April 14, 1848, declared:
					<quote>Why do women revolt? Because women's workshops are controlled by men,
						because favoritism brings higher wages than work accomplished, finally,
						because some have too much and others too little. What the female worker
						wants is not an organized hand-out, but rather a just reward for work
						done.... We want all people to be able to make a living from their
						labor....</quote>
					On April 18 Désirée Gay wrote:
					<quote>Female workers are dying of hunger. The work that they are given to do is
						only bait. The organization of women's work is only despotism under a new
						name The appointment of women's delegates is a false pretense thought up by
						men who want to get women off their backs.</quote>
					Because of her energetic advocation of women's rights, Désirée Gay was fired
						as division leader several days later. The government threatened to imprison
						her and close the ateliers, if there was an uprising among women
						workers.
					In the government decree of June 23, 1848, on the closing of the National
						Workshops, the ateliers des femmes did not even need to be mentioned. They
						had already become ineffectual due to the participation of women in the June
						insurrection.
					<note>21. Ibid., p. 56.</note>
					The most infamous society of female workers formed for the liberation of
						women was a paramilitary group, a feminist “militia," called the
						Vesuviennes. The members adopted this nick name, mockingly applied by the
						public, and gave it their own interpretation. Actually it described their
						situation superbly: like long dammed-up lava, they would cause social
						upheaval. With weapons clashing, the Vésuviennes marched in front of the
						City Hall and at the Place Vendôme under the command of Josephine
						Frenouillet. This was grist for the mill of Charivari. From the end of March
						onwards, the house caricaturist Cham was already lashing out at the
						“Vesuvian marriage” under the weekly heading Revue comique de la semaine. He
						had the husband of a Vésuvienne sigh while minding the children, “Since
						early morning my wife has been in front of City Hall at a proclamation
						ceremony and here little Gugusse has been proclaiming for two hours that she
						wants to be fed!"
					<note>22. <title>Charivari</title>, 4.2. 1848.</note>
					The ideal “Vesuvian marriage" is presented in the “constitution" of the
						Vésuviennes. <note>23. Thomas, <title>Les femmes en 1848</title>, pp.
							59-60.</note> Divorce is permitted—but every woman over twenty-one and
						every man over twenty-six is obliged to marry. If a woman should refuse to
						marry, or if it is proved that she is adopting her husband's political
						views, she will lose all her rights as a female citizen, rights which she
						otherwise enjoys without restriction from the age of fifteen. In a Vesuvian
						marriage”...the spouses are partners, united by interest and feelings.
						Neither one is allowed to dominate." Both marriage partners are to be
						gainfully employed; housework is shared. If the husband refuses to do
						housework, he must then serve in his wife's place in the Civil Guard as well
						as his own in the National Guard. It is a program of equality consistent to
						the last degree: even sex-related clothing was gradually to disappear.
					<pb n="56"
						facs="https://leaf.bucknell.edu/sites/default/files/2025-02/heresies02_056.jpg"/>
					In the face of such goals, it is no wonder that the Vésuviennes were the
						favorite butt of satirical attacks. While Daumier's Divorce Rightists"
						series did not appear until August 1848, Charivari had already been printing
						the twenty-plate series Les Vésuviennes by E. de Beaumont since the first of
						May. Beaumont pictured the Vésuviennes almost exclusively as capricious
						young girls, as ballet pupils upon the drill field, their rifles held, as if
						by accident, in delicate hands.
					The relationship between the Vésuviennes and other women's organizations was
						probably strained due to methods rather than goals. Except for a few stones
						thrown through the Charivari windows, the socialist women rejected violence
						as a political instrument.
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				<div>
					<head>The "Socialist Women"</head>
					After the June (1848) insurrection, all political activities, above all the
						organization of clubs, were forbidden to women. The Voix des femmes had to
						cease publication. These measures were based on a decree by the Assemblée,
						which was initially worded: "Women and minors may not be members of a club
						nor attend club meetings." After protests against the defamatory way in
						which women and minors were put in the same category, minors were eliminated
						from the decree, but the ban against women remained.
					<note>24. Ibid., pp. 57ff.</note>
					As a consequence, women turned to political banquets (bankettes), which
						because of their inflammatory nature, partially replaced the clubs. At the
						beginning of 1849 Proudhon protested against the participation of women in a
						banquet presided over by Pierre Leroux. Daumier referred to this on January
						25, 1849, in Charivari. A woman in one of his caricatures complains, "And
						Proudhon does not want us to go to socialist banquets...the unfortunate man
						has never been in love...otherwise he would realize that a woman graces any
						occasion by her very presence!”
					<note>25. Delteil, no. 1794.</note>
					The conspiracy against husbands, the resistance to obedience and the neglect
						of the home are once again presented as the chief goals of Daumier's Femmes
						Socialistes. <note>26. Delteil, nos. 1916-1927.</note> In this series,
						however, he also addresses himself for the first time to contemporary
						events: the closing of the clubs, the banquets, and the election campaign of
						Jeanne Deroin, who had intended to capitalize on the fact that there was no
						law which made women ineligible for public office. At the meetings of the
						Democrat-Socialists she took the floor and demanded that she be nominated,
						explaining, “They are Democrat-Socialists, they desire the end of
						exploitation of one man by another and of women by men, they want a complete
						and radical abolition of all privileges of sex, race, birth, class and
						property.... It is in the name of these principles that I present myself as
						a candidate for the legislative assembly and request the support of the
						party...."
					<note>27. Thomas, <title>Les femmes en 1848</title>, pp. 63ff. on the candidacy
						of Deroin.</note>
					As a political candidate she went directly to the voters of the Seine
						district: “A legislative assembly which is made up only of men is just as
						incapable of making laws to govern a society of men and women as an assembly
						of privileged persons would be to decide on the interests of the workers,
						just as an assembly of capitalists would be incapable of upholding the honor
						of the father land." When the Democrat-Socialists tried to prevent her from
						speaking at a meeting, she took the floor anyway and asked what had happened
						to the principles of those “... who demand the abolition of privilege' but
						still try to keep that privilege which they hold in common with the
						privileged, that privilege which is the source of all privilege and of all
						social injustice: the domination of man over woman?" Although she was
						finally suggested as a candidate for the Democrat-Socialists, Deroin
						received only a few votes.
					George Sand was also suggested and rejected as a candidate. Again she
						demonstrated that she did not think of herself as a woman, for she
						disapproved of both active and passive suffrage for members of her own sex.
						In Sand's view women were political minors, incapable of making decisions
						because of their fundamental disenfranchisement. The women's movement could
						only cause promiscuity and put the home in danger. Only in the distant
						future, under changed social conditions, would women be able to participate
						in politics and share in the decision-making process.
					On the subject of Deroin's candidacy, Proudhon again spoke out, in the
						journal Le Peuple, taking a strong position against women's emancipation:
						“What woman must free herself from is not man. In our modern society there
						is little progress to be made in this respect. As with the proletariat, it
						is capitalist despotism which tyrannizes her heart and throws her into the
						milieu of the workshop where slowly her morale and her body are
						destroyed.
					And Jeanne Deroin replied in her paper, L'Opinion des femmes: "Pardon me,
						Monsieur, women are trying to free them selves from men.... it is not so
						much a question of getting women out of the workshop as a need to change the
						workshop itself and to ennoble it both for women and for the proletarian
						worker, since it is the source of work and independence."
					<note>28. Ibid., pp. 68-69.</note>
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			 Cäcilia Rentmeister is an art historian from Berlin. She teaches at the Hochschule
				für Bildende Kunst and is completing her doctoral disserta tion, “Woman as Sphinx,”
				on nineteenth-century painting. 
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The Raised Voices of Women in Mid-Nineteenth Century...