THE SECOND CHAPTER. continued...
English translation copyrighted 2nd April 2023.
Part B.
The woman produces less than the man industrially, you say. Let us admit that this is true; do you count the great maternal function as nothing? The risks that the woman runs in accomplishing it?
Do you count as nothing the housework, the care lavished on you, and to which you owe cleanliness and health?
If the quantity of the product is the origin of equality of rights, why do those who produce little, those who produce nothing, and all of you who produce unequally have equal rights?
Why do so many women who produce, while their husbands or their sons have fun and dissipate, do not have rights, and do the latter have any?
You do not include the question of the product in that of the Law when it is a question of the man, why then do you include it there when it is a question of the woman?
You see, Gentlemen, always thoughtless, irrational, unjust.
The woman cannot be the equal of the man, because her temperament forbids her certain functions.
Well, gentlemen; then a legislator could, without unreason, decree that all men who, by temperament, are unfit for the profession of arms, for example, are outside the equality of rights? Temperament, source of Law!
If a woman had written such nonsense, she would be eardrums from one end of the world to the other.
Why, Gentlemen, do you not exclude from equality all weak men, all those who are incapable of fulfilling the functions which you prejudge women incapable of fulfilling?
When it comes to you, you admit that the right to perform any function does not imply either the ability or the will to use it; why don't you think the same when it comes to us? What would you think of women if, having your rights and your serfdom, they held you in an inferior position on the pretext that you could not perform the great function of gestation and nursing?
Man, they would say, not being able to be a mother and nurse, will not have the right to be educated like us, to have civil dignity like us. His rude temper makes him unable to be a witness in a birth and death record; it is obvious that his awkwardness legally excludes him from diplomatic functions; therefore we cannot recognize his right to run for them, etc.
Hey! Well, gentlemen, you reason in the same way, excluding women from equality on the pretext that in general, she is of a less strong temperament than yours: that is to say that your reason from an absurd way.
The woman cannot be the equal of the man in Law because he protects her and nourishes her.
If it is because you protect and feed us that we should not have our rights, gentlemen, then restore their rights to adult girls and widows whom you neither feed nor protect.
So, give back their rights to wives who have no need of your protection, since the law protects them, even against you; to the wives whom you do not feed since they bring you either a dowry or a profession, or services which you would be obliged to remunerate if any other rendered them to you.
And if being fed by someone is enough to see his right taken away, take it away from this crowd of men fed by the income or work of their wives.
The man, for the exercise of certain rights, is the agent of the woman.
Gentlemen, an agent is freely chosen and not imposed: I do not accept you as agents: I am intelligent enough to do my own business, and I beg you to give me, and all the women who think like me, a mandate which you abuse unworthily. If married women, to have peace, are willing to continue their mandate, that is their business, but none of you can legitimately retain that of widows and adult daughters.
Women don't need the same rights as men, because they don't have the time or the capacity to exercise them.
Does the woman have less time and capacity than your workmen nailed twelve hours a day to their piecemeal and mindless work? So, affirm, if you dare!
Does it take less time and capacity to testify in a criminal trial, as a woman does, than to witness a civil act or a notarized contract, a right that a woman does not have?
Does it require less time and ability to be the guardian of her sons and administer their fortune, as a wife does, than to be the guardian of a stranger and a nephew and administer theirs, a right which a wife does not have?
Does it take less time and capacity to manage a factory, a business house, and workers, as so many women do, than to be at the head of an office, of a public administration, and to direct its employees right that the woman does not have?
Is less time and ability required to devote oneself to teaching in a large boarding house, as so many women do, than in a faculty chair, as only a man has the right to do?
The woman proves, by her works, that she lacks capacity and time no more than you do. Facts strangle claims you should be ashamed of. No! I would not want to be a man, for fear of saying such things, and of being led to the claim that a teacher, a woman of letters, an artist, a skillful merchant, do not have the capacity of a porter or of a ragpicker, because they don't have beards on their chins.
The rights of women are in their beauty and in the Love of men.
Rights based on beauty, and on that fragile thing called a man's Love! What is that, please, gentlemen?
Then the woman will have rights if she is beautiful and as much as she will be; if she is loved and as much as she will be? Old, ugly, neglected, it will have to be put in the hood of the rag lifter to transport it to the goals?
If a woman said such things, what a universal outcry!
And men claim they are rational! We praise women for having too much common sense ever to be so.
After all these arguments that do not support the analysis, finally comes to the triumphant objection: women do not claim their rights: many of them are even scandalized by the claims made by some in the name of all.
Women do not claim, gentlemen?
We claim our Right, finally, because we are convinced that the general questions, whose lack of solution threatens to ruin our modern Civilization, can be solved only with the contest of the woman, delivered of her irons, and left free in his genius.
Is it not, Gentlemen, that it is a great proof of our insanity, of our impurity, that this immense desire felt by us, to stop the corruption of morals, to work for the triumph of Justice, to the advent of the reign of Duty and reason, the establishment of an order of things in which humanity, more worthy and happier, will pursue its glorious destinies without the accompaniment of cannon, without the shedding of spilled blood?
Aren't the women of the Emancipation impure people driven mad by sin, being’s incapable of understanding justice and the works of conscience?
Part C.
Let us conclude, gentlemen.
Even if it were true, which I deny, that woman is inferior to you; even if it were true, which the facts show to be false, that she cannot fulfill any of the functions that you fulfill, that she is fit only for maternity and the household, she would not be. less you're equal before the Law because the Law is based neither on the superiority of the faculties, nor on that of the functions which come out of it, but on the identity of the species.
A human creature like you, having like you an intelligence, a will, a free will, various aptitudes, the woman has the right, like you, to be free, autonomous, to freely develop her faculties, to freely exercise her activity: tracing her route, reducing her to serfdom, as you do, is, therefore, a violation of human rights in the person of a woman: it is an odious abuse of force.
From the point of view of facts, this violation of law takes the form of a deplorable inconsistency: for it happens that many women are very superior to most men; from which it follows that the Right is granted to those who should not have it, according to your doctrine, and refused to those who, according to the same doctrine, should possess it, since they justify the required qualities.
It happens that you recognize the Right to qualities and functions, because one is a man, and that you cease to recognize it in the same case because one is a woman.
And you boast of your high reason, and you boast of possessing a sense of Justice!
Take care, gentlemen! Our rights have the same basis as yours; by denying the former, you in principle deny the latter.
One more word to you, so-called followers of the doctrines of 1789, and we will be done.
Do you know why so many women took sides for our great Revolution, armed the men, and rocked their children to the song of the Marseillaise? It is because, under the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, they thought they saw the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Citizen.
When the Assembly took it upon itself to undeceive them, by lacking logic in their regard, by closing their meetings, they abandoned the Revolution, and you know what happened.
Do you know why, in 1848, so many women, especially among the people, declared themselves for the Revolution? They hoped that we would be more consistent with them than in the past.
When, in their foolish pride and lack of intelligence, the representatives not only forbade them to meet, but drove them out of the assemblies of men, the women abandoned the Revolution, detached their husbands and their sons from it, and you still know what happened.
Do you finally understand, messieurs are the inconsistent ones?
Truly I tell you, all your struggles are in vain if the woman does not walk with you.
An order of things can be established by a coup de main, but it is maintained only by the adhesion of the majorities; and these majorities, Gentlemen, it is we, women, who form them by the influence we have over men, by the education we give them with our milk.
We can inspire in them, from the cradle, Love, hatred, or indifference for certain principles: that is where our strength lies; and you are blind not to understand that if a woman is on one side and a man on the other, humanity is condemned to do Penelope's work.
Gentlemen, a woman is ripe for civil liberty, and we declare to you that we will henceforth consider as an enemy of Progress and of the Revolution whoever rises against our legitimate claim; while we will range among the friends of Progress and the Revolution those who will come out in favor of our civil emancipation, Whether it is your adversaries.
If you refuse to listen to our legitimate complaints, we will accuse you before posterity of the crime for which you reproach the owners of slaves.
We will accuse you before posterity of having denied the faculties of woman because you were afraid of her competition.
We will accuse you before posterity of having refused him justice, in order to make him your servant and your plaything.
We will accuse you before posterity of being the enemies of Right and Progress.
And our accusation will remain standing and living before future generations who, more enlightened, more just, more moral than you, will turn away with disdain, with contempt, their eyes from the tomb of their fathers.
English translation copyrighted 2nd April 2023.
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English translation copyrighted 2nd April 2023.
The Book of Women’s Rights. 1860.