Women, Resistance and Revolution (19 page)

It is evident that these problems were by no means peculiar to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They remain living issues today and there seems little prospect of solving them from within a capitalist society.

Just as women revolutionaries encountered suspicion from their men when they seemed to be impinging on male prerogatives, women workers encountered an even more bitter resistance from their men, which was founded not only on the men’s jealousy for traditional masculine superiority, but on the economic fact of privilege within the working class. Thus just as the women’s revolt in political terms spoke for those who were silent within the revolutionary movement, the economic organization of women (and here the Bryant and May match girls’ strike is the obvious example) encouraged the organization of all workers who were low down even within the working class. Both carry the revolutionary possibility of breaking through established caste hierarchies which continually develop actually within those movements which attempt to resist and overthrow the capitalist class hierarchy.

The way in which things can be different emerges very slowly. Revolutionary feminism has been weaker both in theory and practice than the mainstream of the left. Leaders of revolutionary movements
have tended to be predominantly men and have seen the world from their point of view. But if the basis of a theory was laid in the nineteenth century, the first tentative steps were also made by women themselves towards an alternative in practice. This has been continued in the various revolutionary movements of the twentieth century. Thus an attempt to find what women asked for and what forms of organization they found most useful helps us to understand the particular oppression experienced by women.

Working women in the national workshops in the 1848 Revolution in France were moving towards the ideas of workers’ control. They complained about the differential in the supervisors’ pay and emphasized the inefficiency of these women. They also showed a lively class hostility to the role of middle-class women who came to ‘improve’ them on a philanthropic basis. Conditions were hard in these workshops set up by the government. The women worked twelve hours a day for very low wages in terrible conditions. They were also forced to compete with the women in prisons and religious communities who worked for even lower rates. The women were grouped in divisions of one hundred with delegates to the Provisional Government. Desirée Gay, a shirtmaker, was the delegate for the second arrondissement and used her position to try to change the way work was organized. She also wrote in the socialist feminist paper
La Voix des Femmes
criticizing conditions in the workshops.

Through the associations they were just forming, groups of women – glove-makers, washerwomen – pressed for more pay. But they also went beyond straightforward economic demands about pay at work. The midwives, for example, argued that socialized medicine was the answer to their bad conditions and low pay. Although some of the middle-class feminists tended to feel that improved education alone was the answer to all women’s economic problems, working women in the feminist movement were more inclined to seek collective social solutions when they became conscious of the need for change.

Nor did women confine themselves to the work situation. Again this indicated the interlocking nature of women’s oppression.
La Voix des Femmes
is full of all kinds of schemes for every aspect of life which affected women. In March 1848 women workers petitioned the Provisional Government for crèches.
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A plan for the organization of crèches appeared in the paper on 3 April 1848.
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The women
suggested large houses, built in large gardens, for the working population in the area. These would contain a reading-room, bathroom, communal dining-room as well as a crèche where the children would have ‘enlightened care’. There would also be a school. The training of young girls and a medical unit are emphasized as well. Evidently the women in Lyons were also discussing how to set up crèches. They wrote to the Paris women asking for news about the organization of work projects and offering information about their organization of crèches.

The ideas about crèches, which were very new in the 1840s, came directly from the needs of women who were working. But they also arose from the intense faith in the educability of human beings, common both in the socialist and feminist movements at the time. The interaction between the practical needs of working women and theories about children’s education produced schemes which were very important indications of alternative forms of social living. This concern for education reappears in the Commune. In 1871 delegates from the Society for New Education brought a plan forward which resembled an earlier scheme worked out by the feminist socialist Pauline Roland in 1869. The idea was to make ‘young people ready for self-government through a republican education’. This implied not merely a secular education without the old patriotic indoctrination; it also implied experimenting with completely new methods of teaching. There was particular interest in women’s technical education and various workshop schools were organized. In some cases these provided homes as well as schools for girls with no families. Maria Verdure and Félix and Elie Ducoudray, representing the Société des Amis de l’Enseignement, had a plan too for reorganizing day nurseries. They should not just be places to leave the children but educative and entertaining. They should have lots of gardens and painted or carved toys representing animals, trees and flowers. They wanted bright colours everywhere and young women to look after the children, ten to every 100 children. Again medical supervision was to be provided. The prominence of women in these educational projects was very noticeable in 1848 as well as in the Commune. It was to be a feature of subsequent revolutionary movements, and was in fact a kind of public extension of the private role of women in the family. It does not seem to have aroused the antagonism provoked by ideas which challenged the basis of the family or by the action in
which women broke out of the traditional confines which determined the scope of femininity.

Sexuality was probably the most explosive of issues. The derision which Francis Wright and the Saint-Simonians encountered in the 1820s and 1830s tended to make the women of the 1840s very defensive about the connection between socialism, feminism and free love. There is little about free unions in
La Voix des Femmes.
Divorce was supported but in the interests of public morality. However, there was general criticism about the superiority of the man in marriage. A letter to all women from Henriette D., a working woman, appeared. She demanded that the woman ‘should not stay any longer under the power of her husband, [she should] be able to act, sell, buy, contract like him’. She wanted the revision of the Civil Code which stated women must submit to their husbands. She felt this was the most tyrannical of abuses. ‘No more slavery, no more masters, equality between married couples, let’s destroy abuses, it’s time we defended our rights.’
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In the Commune various measures were passed which benefited women in the family situation. For example, wives, legal or not, received the pensions of National Guardsmen who had been killed. This was an implicit recognition of the structure of the working-class family and a blow against the authority of the Civil Code. This accorded with the kinds of demands women brought forward in the popular clubs and was justified by communards both on the grounds of justice to the women and on its effect of weakening the religious-monarchical institution of marriage and making a legal fact of the real living morality of workers.

This very important concept of the revolutionary group possessing a superior and more honest moral code which does not need the authority of the upper classes and the state, has always appeared amongst the oppressed in moments of revolutionary confidence. The sans-culottes in the 1789 Revolution were proud of their purity. In the case of the women the ideas of ‘free unions’, coming from the socialist feminist movement, encountered the rather different very practical facts of the working-class common marriages. From the outside, to the hostile bourgeois, they both appeared equally sinful and immoral. But the idea of a ‘
union libre
’ with its connotations of the rehabilitation of the flesh was very far from the working-class ‘their morals and ours’ position, which was concerned with security
and protection rather than sexual liberation. This contradiction has still not been successfully worked out.

1848 nevertheless was crucial as a time when the theories of socialist feminism interacted with the merging culture and institutions of the French working class. Journals like
La Voix des Femmes
provided a vehicle for women to express a wide range of ideas. The first issue announced proudly that it was a socialist paper. ‘We are not only publishing a paper, but we are creating for women a library of practical information.’ It was started by Eugénie Niboyet, who soon gathered a group of women around her. The socialists were from the start the liveliest and most decisive influence on the policy of the paper. There was Desirée Veret, a dressmaker and Owenite; Marie-Reine Guindorff, a Saint-Simonian; Desirée Gay, delegate for the women in National Workshops; Suzanne Voilquin, Fourierist, dressmaker turned midwife; Jeanne Marie, Saint-Simonian; Elisa Gremaille, Saint-Simonian, passionately involved in the cause of women’s education; and Jeanne Deroin. These women provided not only socialist ideas but considerable practical knowledge about industrial conditions. There was also a group of middle-class republican women who were more interested in literature and artistic questions. The paper came out daily, though sometimes rather irregularly, between 20 March and 10 June. It was circulated in the large provincial towns as well as Paris. The paper was committed to certain general ideas: the belief that work would emancipate women, as long as it was organized in a collective manner, internationalism, anti-racialism, and opposition to all forms of slavery; but there were various other tendencies among the women centrally involved. When Jeanne Deroin and Hortense Wild started
L’Opinion des Femmes
in 1849 Eugénie Niboyet was no longer involved and she started to move towards the right. After 1848 there is a clear division between the socialist and liberal feminist position. This shows in the subsequent feminist papers, some of which were very right-wing.

La Voix des Femmes
was most successful not only in bringing a diverse group of women together and enabling them to express themselves, but also in serving as a focus for organization, rather in the way Sylvia Pankhurst connected the Women’s (later Workers’) Dreadnought to the East London Federation of the suffragettes. The clubs also achieved the same result. Women’s clubs had arisen in the first French Revolution because women were not allowed to enter
some of the other revolutionary clubs. It was still considered rather shocking to have men and women together in the atmosphere of a political club. This situation continued in 1848.
La Voix des Femmes
mentions Cabet’s club as one of the few which admitted women. The women’s clubs were a means not only of political pressure but of popular education. They sprang up again in the Commune. The discussions were repeated in the revolutionary press and thus reached a wider audience. At a meeting of the Société de la Voix des Femmes in April 1848 questions about the organization of work were discussed. Wages, the role of middle-class women in the associations, the demand of a group of working women that the national workshops should be organized without supervisors, and information from Desirée Gay about the organization of cooperative workshops in the interests of working women in England, were discussed.

The clubs evoked the most extreme reactions. The men of the right could not decide which was the more monstrous, mixed clubs where there was infinite possibility of all kinds of horrors, from women smoking to women talking about their liberation with men, or a club full of women which was undoubtedly hatching a plot not only against property but against male superiority.

During the Commune a correspondent of
The Times
crept into a women’s club. The room was filled with women and children of ‘the lowest order of society’. The women were wearing ‘loose untidy jackets’ and ‘white frilled caps upon their heads’. At the end of the room there was a table covered with papers and books, with young citoyennes wearing red sashes behind it. A young woman spoke about the need to defend the Revolution. He was not concerned about what she said but notes she was ‘young and pretty’ – the inevitable sexual note. But he detected a look in her eye which made him feel he would ‘not like to have been her husband’. The following speaker was tolerably respectable, but ‘rambling and inconsistent’. She spoke of the role of women in the Commune and the Revolution of 1789. She was critical too of the clergy. Another woman attacked society’s exploitation of the poor.
The Times
reporter found her speech ‘vague and unnecessarily repetitious’.
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Innumerable cartoons appeared ridiculing the women in the clubs. Rather as the suggestion that women should fight for the revolution produced an outraged reaction, because it went so much against the traditional passive role of women, the fact that they should actively
discuss ideas proved repugnant to conservatives. Not all men shared this antagonism of course. An unsigned letter in
La Voix des Femmes
urged the women not to form a separate club and completely exclude men, especially those who had complete sympathy with the ideas of emancipation. The writer felt that the exchange of ideas between the two sexes seemed absolutely necessary if they wished to arrive at one truth. A compromise measure secured the education period, of women by women, which was felt to be very important, first, and then admitted men by invitation tickets. The women argued that they needed to develop their ideas together to give them confidence, and that fathers and husbands might be uneasy about their wives attending a mixed club. There was also an added problem of male hostility preventing the women from expressing themselves. La Société de la Voix des Femmes was literally brought to a close and the police came in because the men who were admitted caused such a rumpus that the women’s voices were completely drowned. Eugénie Niboyet’s quiet voice finally penetrated when there was order again. She said it was impossible for self-respecting women to accept the insults hurled at them. ‘We don’t want to act as playthings, or entertainment for anybody.… Behind your catcalls despotism is strengthened. You know very well that we don’t want to lower you in any way but you’re afraid to see us rise.’
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