The Second Sex (25 page)

Yet these obstinate examples of resistance cannot stop the march of history; the advent of the machine ruins landed property and brings about working-class emancipation and concomitantly that of woman. All forms of socialism, wresting woman from the family, favor her liberation: Plato, aspiring to a communal regime, promised women a similar autonomy to that enjoyed in Sparta. With the utopian socialism of Saint-Simon, Fourier, and Cabet is born the utopia of the “free woman.” The Saint-Simonian idea of universal association demands the abolition of all slavery: that of the worker and that of the woman; and it is because women like men are human beings that Saint-Simon, and Leroux, Pecqueur, and Carnot after him, demand their freedom. Unfortunately, this reasonable theory has no credibility in the Saint-Simonian school. Instead, woman is exalted in the name of femininity, the surest way to disserve her. Under the pretext of considering the couple as the basis of social unity, Père Enfantin tries to introduce a woman into each “director-couple” called the priest-couple; he awaits a better world from a woman messiah, and the Compagnons de la Femme embark for the East in search of this female savior. He is influenced by Fourier, who confuses the liberation of woman with the restoration of the flesh; Fourier demands the right of all individuals to follow their passionate attractions; he wants to replace marriage with love; he considers the woman not as a person but only in her amorous functions. And Cabet promises that Icarian communism will bring about complete equality of the sexes, though he accords women a limited participation in politics. In fact, women hold second place in the Saint-Simonian movement: only Claire Bazard, founder and main support for a brief period of the magazine
La Femme Nouvelle
(The New Woman), plays a relatively important role. Many other minor publications appear later, but their claims are timid; they demand education
rather than emancipation for women; Carnot, and later Legouvé, is committed to raising the level of education for women. The idea of the woman partner or the woman as a regenerating force persists throughout the nineteenth century in Victor Hugo. But woman’s cause is discredited by these doctrines that, instead of assimilating her, oppose her to man, emphasizing intuition and emotion instead of reason. The cause is also discredited by some of its partisans’ mistakes. In 1848 women founded clubs and journals; Eugénie Niboyet published
La Voix des Femmes
(Women’s Voice), a magazine that Cabet worked on. A female delegation went to the city hall to demand “women’s rights” but obtained nothing. In 1849, Jeanne Deroin ran for deputy, and her campaign foundered in ridicule. Ridicule also killed the “Vesuvians” movement and the Bloomerists, who paraded in extravagant costumes. The most intelligent women of the period took no part in these movements: Mme de Staël fought for her own cause rather than her sisters’; George Sand demanded the right for free love but refused to collaborate on
La Voix des Femmes;
her claims are primarily sentimental. Flora Tristan believed in the people’s redemption through woman; but she is more interested in the emancipation of the working class than that of her own sex. Daniel Stern and Mme de Girardin, however, joined the feminist movement.

On the whole, the reform movement that develops in the nineteenth century seeks justice in equality, and is thus generally favorable to feminism. There is one notable exception: Proudhon. Undoubtedly because of his peasant roots, he reacts violently against Saint-Simonian mysticism; he supports small property owners and at the same time believes in confining woman to the home. “Housewife or courtesan” is the dilemma he locks her in. Until then, attacks against women had been led by conservatives, bitterly combating socialism as well:
Le Charivari
was one of the inexhaustible sources of jokes; it is Proudhon who breaks the alliance between feminism and socialism; he protests against the socialist women’s banquet presided over by Leroux, and he fulminates against Jeanne Deroin. In his work
Justice
, he posits that woman should be dependent on man; man alone counts as a social individual; a couple is not a partnership, which would suppose equality, but a union; woman is inferior to man first because her physical force is only two-thirds that of the male, then because she is intellectually and morally inferior to the same degree: she is worth 2 × 2 × 2 against 3 × 3 × 3 or
⁸
/
₂₇
 of the stronger sex. When two women, Mme Adam and Mme d’Héricourt, respond to him—one quite firmly, the other less effusively—Proudhon retorts with
La pornocratie, ou Les femmes dans les temps modernes
(Pornocracy, or Women in Modern Times). But, like all antifeminists, he addresses ardent litanies to the “real woman,” slave and mirror to the male;
in spite of this devotion, he has to recognize himself that the life he gave his own wife never made her happy: Mme Proudhon’s letters are one long lament.

But it is not these theoretical debates that influenced the course of events; they only timidly reflected them. Woman regains the economic importance lost since prehistoric times because she escapes the home and plays a new role in industrial production. The machine makes this upheaval possible because the difference in physical force between male and female workers is canceled out in a great number of cases. As this abrupt industrial expansion demands a bigger labor market than male workers can provide, women’s collaboration is necessary. This is the great nineteenth-century revolution that transforms the lot of woman and opens a new era to her. Marx and Engels understand the full impact this will have on women, promising them a liberation brought about by that of the proletariat. In fact, “women and workers both have oppression in common,” says Bebel. And both will escape oppression thanks to the importance their productive work will take on through technological development. Engels shows that woman’s lot is closely linked to the history of private property; a catastrophe substituted patriarchy for matriarchy and enslaved woman to the patrimony; but the Industrial Revolution is the counterpart of that loss and will lead to feminine emancipation. He writes: “Woman cannot be emancipated unless she takes part in production on a large social scale and is only incidentally bound to domestic work. And this has become possible only within a large modern industry that not only accepts women’s work on a grand scale but formally requires it.”

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, woman was more shamefully exploited than workers of the opposite sex. Domestic labor constituted what the English termed the “sweating system”; in spite of constant work, the worker did not earn enough to make ends meet. Jules Simon, in
L’ouvrière
(The Woman Worker), and even the conservative Leroy-Beaulieu, in
Le travail des femmes au XIXe siècle
(Women’s Work in the Nineteenth Century), published in 1873, denounce loathsome abuses; the latter declares that more than 200,000 French workers earn less than fifty centimes a day. It is clear why they hasten to migrate to the factories; in fact, it is not long before nothing is left outside workshops except needlework, laundering, and housework, all slave labor paying famine wages; even lace making, millinery, and such are taken over by the factories; in return, job offers are massive in the cotton, wool, and silk industries; women are mainly used in spinning and weaving mills. Employers often prefer them to men. “They do better work for less pay.” This cynical formula clearly shows the drama of feminine labor. It is through labor that
woman won her dignity as a human being; but it was a singularly difficult and slow conquest. Spinning and weaving are done under lamentable hygienic conditions. “In Lyon,” writes Blanqui, “in the trimmings workshops, some women are obliged to work almost hanging in a kind of harness in order to use both their feet and hands.” In 1831, silk workers work in the summer from as early as three o’clock in the morning to eleven at night, or seventeen hours a day,
^*
“in often unhealthy workshops where sunlight never enters,” says Norbert Truquin. “Half of the young girls develop consumption before the end of their apprenticeship. When they complain they are accused of dissimulating.”
¹
In addition, the male assistants take advantage of the young women workers. “To get what they wanted they used the most revolting means, hunger and want,” says the anonymous author of
La verité sur les événements de Lyon
(The Truth About the Events of Lyon). Some of the women work on farms as well as in factories. They are cynically exploited. Marx relates in a footnote of
Das Kapital:
“Mr. E., manufacturer, let me know that he employed only women on his mechanical weaving looms, and that he gave preference to married women, and among them, women who had a family to care for at home, because they were far more docile and attentive than unmarried women, and had to work until ready to drop from exhaustion to provide indispensable means of subsistence to support their families. This is how,” adds Marx, “the qualities proper to woman are misrepresented to her disadvantage, and all the delicate and moral elements of her nature become means to enslave her and make her suffer.” Summarizing
Das Kapital
and commenting on Bebel, G. Deville writes: “Beast of luxury or beast of burden, such is woman almost exclusively today. Kept by man when she does not work, she is still kept by him when she works herself to death.” The situation of the woman worker was so lamentable that Sismondi and Blanqui called for women to be denied access to workshops. The reason is in part that women did not at first know how to defend themselves and organize unions. Feminine “associations” date from 1848 and are originally production associations. The movement progressed extremely slowly, as the following figures show:

In 1920, out of 1,580,967 workers, 239,016 are women and unionized female employees, and among 1,083,957 farmworkers, only 36,193 women are unionized; in all, 292,000 women are unionized out of a total of 3,076,585 union workers. A tradition of resignation and submission as well as a lack of solidarity and collective consciousness leaves them disarmed in front of the new possibilities available to them.

The result of this attitude is that women’s work was regulated slowly and late. Legislation does not intervene until 1874, and in spite of the campaigns waged under the empire, only two provisions affect women: one banning minors from night work, requiring a day off on Sundays and holidays, and limiting the workday to twelve hours; as for women over twenty-one, all that is done is to prohibit underground mine and quarry work. The first feminine work charter, dated November 2, 1892, bans night work and limits the workday in factories; it leaves the door open for all kinds of fraud. In 1900 the workday is limited to ten hours; in 1905 a weekly day of rest becomes obligatory; in 1907 the woman worker is granted free disposal of her income; in 1909 maternity leave is granted; in 1911 the 1892 provisions are reinforced; in 1913 laws are passed for rest periods before and after childbirth, and dangerous and excessive work is prohibited. Little by little, social legislation takes shape, and health guarantees are set up for women’s work; seats are required for salesgirls, long shifts at outdoor display counters are prohibited, and so on. The International Labor Office succeeded in getting international agreements on sanitary conditions for women’s work, maternity leave, and such.

A second consequence of the resigned inertia of women workers was the salaries they were forced to accept. Various explanations with multiple factors have been given for the phenomenon of low female salaries. It is insufficient to say that women have fewer needs than men: that is only a subsequent justification. Rather, women, as we have seen, did not know how to defend themselves against exploitation; they had to compete with prisons that dumped products without labor costs on the market; they competed with each other. Besides, in a society based on the marital community, woman seeks emancipation through work: bound to her father’s or husband’s household, she is most often satisfied just to bring home some extra money; she works outside the family, but for it; and since the working woman does not have to support herself completely, she ends up accepting remuneration far inferior to that of which a man demands. With a significant number of women accepting bargain wages, the whole female salary scale is, of course, set up to the advantage of the employer.

In France, according to an 1889–93 survey, for a day of work equal to
a man’s, a woman worker received only half the male’s wages. A 1908 survey showed that the highest hourly rates for women working from home never rose above twenty centimes an hour and dropped as low as five centimes: it was impossible for a woman so exploited to live without charity or a protector. In America in 1918, women earned half men’s salary. Around this period, for the same amount of coal mined in Germany, a woman earned approximately 25 percent less than a man. Between 1911 and 1943 women’s salaries in France rose a bit more rapidly than men’s, but they nonetheless remained clearly inferior.

While employers warmly welcomed women because of the low wages they accepted, this provoked resistance on the part of male workers. Between the cause of the proletariat and that of women there was no such direct solidarity as Bebel and Engels claimed. The problem was similar to that of the black labor force in the United States. The most oppressed minorities in a society are readily used by the oppressors as a weapon against the class they belong to; thus they at first become enemies, and a deeper consciousness of the situation is necessary so that blacks and whites, women and male workers, form coalitions rather than opposition. It is understandable that male workers at first viewed this cheap competition as an alarming threat and became hostile. It is only when women were integrated into unions that they could defend their own interests and cease endangering those of the working class as a whole.