1789: The Pioneers

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. 1. Cf. Simone de Beauvoir, (New York: Knopf, 1953); Léon Abensour, (Paris, 1921); Clara Zetkin, (Berlin, DDR, 1958); Sheila Rowbotham, (London, 1973). 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...."

2. Quoted from Daniel Stern, (Paris, 1878), II, pp. 378-379. Cf. also d'Agoult (Daniel Stern), (Paris, 1877).

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, 3. Cf. , no. 53, 10. 10. 1846. 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.

Women's Emancipation between Revolutions: The Apostles

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. 4. Cf. Edith Thomas, (Paris, 1948), pp. 7ff. 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):

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. 5. Ibid., p. 10.

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. 6. For the following ef. Zetkin, pp. 161ff. and Thomas, pp. 18ff.

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." 7. Thomas, p. 29.

The Bluestockings Corrupt the Moral Tradition of Marriage

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 1780.8. Brockhaus, (Leipzig, 1886). 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!" 9. Charivari, 6. 30. 1839; [Loys] Delteil, [, 10 vols. (Paris, 1925-1930)], no. 629. 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? 10. Cf. G. Sand, (Berlin, DDR, 1954), with an afterword by Rita Schober; Edith Thomas, George Sand (Paris, 1959); Jean Larnac, . 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." 11. , 1. 30. 1844. Delteil, nos. 1221-1260. 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 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.

The Women's Movement in 1848: Goals and Organization

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. 12. , 4. 20. 1848. 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 13. The successor to the paper . 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.

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).

Among the editors of the Voix, Niboyet had worked for a long time on women's newspapers, 15. She was editor from 1833 to 1834 in Lyon of the pro-Fourier . 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.

Organizing by Women

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 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:

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. 16. Stern, II, p. 161.

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.

17. , 3.2. 1848.

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. 18. Edith Thomas, (Paris, 1956), p. 127. 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.

19. , 4.20. 1848.

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. 20. Thomas, , pp. 71ff. 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:

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....

On April 18 Désirée Gay wrote:

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.

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.

21. Ibid., p. 56.

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!"

22. , 4.2. 1848.

The ideal “Vesuvian marriage" is presented in the “constitution" of the Vésuviennes. 23. Thomas, , pp. 59-60. 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.

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.

The "Socialist Women"

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.

24. Ibid., pp. 57ff.

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!”

25. Delteil, no. 1794.

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. 26. Delteil, nos. 1916-1927. 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...."

27. Thomas, , pp. 63ff. on the candidacy of Deroin.

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."

28. Ibid., pp. 68-69.