I’m gathering material for a fairly major foray into the works of 19th century French feminists, including completing the translations of some of the responses to Proudhon. But every major foray has to start with some exploratory expeditions, and I’ve gathered up a first selection of work by Jeanne Deroin and Andre Leo to plug the project at the Bay Area Anarchist Bookfair this weekend. Most of the material has appeared on this blog before, but this is the first time I’ve collected the various pieces. Read and distribute. Print and sell if you like.
Contr'un
Feminism in Lyon before 1848: Eugénie Niboyet and Flora Tristan
FEMINISM IN LYON BEFORE 1848 I. —Feminist Tendencies before 1834. Mme Niboyet. When Fourier and, after him, the Saint-Simonians denounced the inequality of the sexes as a denial of justice, they revived a long-interrupted tradition. […]
Black and Red Feminism
André Léo, “Woman and Mores” (1869)
It is almost overnight that this question rejected at first as chimerical, then combated by ridicule, which however, today, in spite of so many prejudices and sarcasms, is agitated in the two worlds, and each day grows. It was born out of the French Revolution, which created or renewed all questions by the new principle that it proclaimed, in which the equality of woman, like all the others, is contained. […]
Black and Red Feminism
Adrien Ranvier — Jeanne Deroin, A Feminist of 1848 — I
A FEMINIST OF 1848: Jeanne DEROIN This study of Jeanne Deroin is the work left by Adrien Ranvier, who died September 18, 1905, at Asniéres (Seine). Adrien Ranvier, born in 1807, son of Gabriel Ramier, […]
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That looks very interesting. Thanks! I like this quote as regards Proudhon’s sexism. It was made by André Léo in 1869:
“These so-called lovers of liberty, if they are unable to take part in the direction of the state, at least they will be able to have a little monarchy for their personal use, each in his own home… Order in the family without hierarchy seems impossible to them – well then, what about in the state?” (quoted in Carolyn J. Eichner, “‘Vive La Commune!’ Feminism, Socialism, and Revolutionary Revival in the Aftermath of the 1871 Paris Commune”, Journal of Women’s History 15: 2 (2003): 75)
She was an anarcha-feminist and future Communard and summed up the contradiction extremely well!
Iain
An Anarchist FAQ
I’ve written quite a bit more about André Léo in my book, Surmounting the Barricades: Women in the Paris Commune (Indiana University Press, 2004).