THE THIRD CHAPTER. continued...
English translation copyrighted 2nd April 2023.
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Part H.
THE WOMAN MOTHER AND GUARDIAN.
THE AUTHOR. Let us now examine how the law understands the rights of the mother and the guardian.
Article 372 places the child under the authority of the parents until his majority or his emancipation; but as the wife is absorbed in the husband, article 373 reduces the word parents to signify the father, who alone exercises paternal authority during the marriage. The tutor's mother does not exercise, notice it, the maternal authority, the law does not recognize any.
Thus, the woman who, alone in reproduction, can say: I know, is erased before the man who can only say: I believe.
Why that? Because it is a way to make the wife more flexible, to ensure the husband's authority over her. A woman who is too unhappy may incur the scandal of a public separation to escape her executioner, but we know that she rarely resolves to leave her children: she will therefore stay, will exhaust the bitter chalice to the dregs to stay with them. She will even go so far as to suffer the outrage of seeing them brought up in her own house by her husband's unworthy favorite. Suffer, give in, humble yourself, sign this contract for the alienation of your property, or I will take your children away from you: this is what the husband has the right to say to his wife.
Does the exasperated woman resolve to ask for separation? During the trial, it is the husband who keeps the administration of the children, unless, at the request of the family, the judge finds serious grounds for awarding them to the mother.
That's not all: the child can give serious grounds for complaint to his parents. If he is not sixteen years old, the father can have him detained, without the president has the right to refuse: he has this right only when the child has personal property or is over sixteen years old.
Note that, in such a serious case, the mother is not even consulted.
Will the paternal power of the mother be equal, on this point, to that of the father, if she remains a widow and guardian? No, the mother, in order to lock up the child, is still required to submit a request to the president supported by two close relatives of the deceased.
The remarried father retains, by right, guardianship of his children; the mother loses it if she remarries without having previously had the guardianship continued by the family council.
THE YOUNG LADY. So then, Madam, in the eyes of the legislator, the child belongs more to its father than to its mother; it is less dear to the maternal family than to the paternal; the mother is reputed to be less tender, less wise than the father; the man is presumed to be so good, so just, so reasonable, that even a stepmother cannot influence him... In truth, all that is odious and absurd.
THE AUTHOR. I do not say no.
You know that the consent of the parents is necessary for the marriage of their minor children; you also know that in case of disagreement between the father and the mother or the grandfather and the grandmother, if the first are dead, articles 148 and 150 declare that the consent of the father or the grandfather is sufficient.
THE YOUNG LADY. I know that legal lesson in ingratitude is given to children. But back to guardianship, Madame.
THE AUTHOR. Gladly. The law clearly states that guardianship of children belongs by right to the surviving spouse; whether the father or the mother exercises paternal authority; that both have the right to administer the property of the ward and to appropriate the income therefrom until he is eighteen years old: but see the difference. You already know that the formalities for having the child locked up are not the same for the guardian mother as for the guardian father; you know that the father who remarries does not need to have the guardianship continued by the family council, while the mother loses it by the omission of this formality.
In addition, the father has the right to appoint his surviving wife a guardianship council for his minor children; the woman does not have this right.
The surviving spouse may appoint a guardian in anticipation of his death before the majority of the wards: the appointment made by the father is valid; that which is made by the mother is not made until it is confirmed by the family council.
The maternal family participates in the disdain of the law for women: thus the doubly orphaned child falls by right under the guardianship of his paternal grandfather and, in his absence, under that of the maternal, and so upwards, says article 402, so that the paternal ascendant is always preferred to the maternal ascendant of the same degree.
While we are talking about guardianship, let us add that the husband is the legal guardian of his forbidden wife, but that the wife of a forbidden person has only the faculty of being a guardian and, if she is appointed, the family council rules the form and conditions of its administration.
THE YOUNG LADY. Finally, Madam, I see that the law considers us and treats us as inferior beings; that it sacrifices to man not only our dignity as human creatures, our interests as workers and owners, but also our maternal dignity.
A son, sufficiently imbued with the religion of the Civil Code, must necessarily consider his father as more reasonable, wiser, and more capable than his mother. I don't really see what she would have to answer him if he said to her: it is true that you risked your life to bring me to light, that you spent many nights near my cradle, that you enveloped me in your tenderness, taught me what is good and helped me to practice it; it is true that I am your happiness and your joy; but my father is alive; he alone has authority over me; I, therefore, do not have to consult you; Besides, what good is it? Wise men, legislators who have studied your imperfect, weak nature, have passed laws that prove to me that you are fit only to bring children into the world, and to concern yourself with the care of the pot in the fire.
You have all been judged so unwise, so imprudent, so incompetent, that you are denied the right to govern anything; that you are submitted in everything to the will of the man and that, when the husband is not there, the judge and the family intervene.
Such a discourse, however revolting it may seem, would it not be in conformity with the feelings which the study of the Civil Code must inspire?
THE AUTHOR. Perfectly, Madam: and if, in general, the human heart were not worth more than this code, women, to be respected by their children, would have only one course to take: that of giving birth only to bastards. Isn't it surprising, tell me, that law made to moralize and restrain tend to produce just the opposite?
THE YOUNG LADY. And so much noise is made about our Civil Code! What then are those of other nations?
Part I.
TERMINATION OF THE CONJUGAL ASSOCIATION.
THE AUTHOR. It has always been recognized that there are cases where spouses must be separated. The revolution establishes divorce; the first empire maintained it by restricting it; the Restoration, determined by the Church that this did not concern, abolished it on May 8, 1816.
Experience proves superabundantly that the indissolubility of marriage is the permanent source of numberless disorders; the most active solvent of the family; and that separation from the body, far from remedying anything, contributes to the destruction of morals. All hollow phrases, all sonorous reasoning, cannot destroy the meaning of facts.
We will not repeat what the many writers have said who have asked for the reinstatement of the divorce; we content ourselves with joining them here, reserving the right to return later to this serious subject.
It is for us, at this moment, to note the difference made by the law between the husband and the wife who plead in separation.
Spouses can ask for separation if one of them is sentenced to an infamous sentence, for serious insults, abuse, and adultery of the wife. Let us dwell on this last offense.
You believe, no doubt, that adultery is the lack of fidelity of one spouse towards the other, and that the punishment is the same for a similar offense, in a man and in a woman? You are wrong.
The woman commits the crime of adultery everywhere; proof can be provided by letters and witnesses, and this offense is punishable by three months to two years imprisonment, which the husband can put an end to by taking his wife back.
In flagrante delicto, the husband is excusable for killing the adulterer and his accomplice.
The man is no adulterer anywhere. Let him rent an apartment in his house to his mistress; that he spends his days at her house; that numerous letters prove his infidelity; let a thousand witnesses attest these things, this honest husband is not an adulterer.
If he pushed his impudence so far as to maintain his mistress in the common domicile, would he be committing adultery? No: there would be a serious insult to his wife who could sue him, and he would be asked to pay a fine of a few hundred francs.
In reality, a man is only punished for adultery as an accomplice of a married woman.
To justify the difference that is established between the infidelity of the husband and that of the wife, more seriousness is attributed to the fault of the latter...
THE YOUNG LADY. Let me stop you here. It is easy to demonstrate that the infidelity of the husband is more serious than that of the wife.
The wife, not being able to dispose of her assets without the husband's authorization, can hardly compromise her fortune for a lover.
On the contrary, the husband can sell and dissipate everything he owns; even employing the assets of the community, the fruit of his life's work and good administration, to maintain his mistress: I know of several cases of this kind.
Therefore, the adultery of the husband is more harmful to the interests of the family than that of the wife.
The adulteress can introduce false heirs into the husband's family: this is bad, I agree; it is not I who will justify it; but ultimately, these adulterine children have a family, tenderness, and care.
If the husband has children outside the marriage, they are either from a married woman or from a free woman. In the first case, by introducing false heirs to his neighbor, he acts like an adulterous wife. In the second, he takes care of his children or abandons them. If he takes care of them, he harms the interests of the wife and of the legitimate children; if he leaves them in the care of the mother, he embarrasses a woman, and often ruins her life; the child placed in the hospice is without family, without tenderness and will swell the population of prisons, convicts, and brothels.
In all this, moreover, is there only a question of filiation and inheritance? And the heart of a woman, and her dignity, and her happiness, what do we do with it? Do we think of what we must suffer from the infidelity, the disdain, the abandonment of our husband?
Do we think that this abandonment, joined to the need to Love and to the fatal example given to us, pushes us to repay the Love shown to us; and that thus adultery tolerated in the husband produces adultery in the wife?
Adultery of both sexes is a great evil. From the moral point of view, the fault is the same; but from the social and family point of view, from the point of view of the position of the children, it is obviously much more serious committed by the man than by the woman, because the first has all the power to ruin the family, to put with impunity the trouble and the pain in his house and create an unhappy population, doomed to abandonment, most often to vice.
This is what we are thinking today, we young women who are thinking, and all the interested dithyrambs of men can no longer deceive us.
They say: but often it is not the husband of the adulteress who is an adulteress. We answer: society is not concerned with individualities; it is enough that the adultery of the man has more bitter fruits than that of the woman so that it is severely and not less severely punished than that of the latter.
They say: it is an unworthy and cruel thing to put pain in the heart of an honest man. We answer: it is an equally unworthy thing to put pain in the heart of an honest woman.
They say: it is theft to force a man to work for children who are not his. We answer: It is a robbery to employ the earnings or the fruit of his wife's labor to feed children who are strangers to her and to support the wife who distresses her; it is a robbery to divert one's own fortune or the fruit of one's own labor from the house they are to support, to carry them to a foreign wife.
And you are not only guiltier than we, Gentlemen because the result of your adultery is worse than the result of ours; but because, posing as leaders and models, you owe us the example.
And you are both iniquitous and stupid to demand from those whom you call your inferiors in reason, in wisdom, in prudence, in justice, that they are more reasonable, wiser, more prudent, and more just, than you.
This, Madame, is what we think and say.
THE AUTHOR. You talk about gold; it is not I who will contradict you; I like to see young people rise resolutely against prejudices, and protest against them in the name of moral unity.
But here we are, I believe, very far from our subject, the legal separation trial. Let's come back to that, please.
The request for separation being accepted, the judge authorizes the woman to leave the marital home, and she will reside in the house designated by this magistrate who fixes the provision of food that the husband will have to provide. Almost a prisoner on parole, she is required to prove her residence in the chosen house, under penalty of being deprived of her pension, and of being declared, even as a plaintiff, inadmissible to continue her prosecution.
THE YOUNG LADY. But why this slavery and this threat of a refusal of justice?
THE AUTHOR. Because the husband, reputed to be the father of the child she may conceive during the trial, must be able to watch over her. As M. de Girardin has so well said, legal paternity is the principal source of the serfdom of the married woman.
During the trial, the husband remains the holder of the wife's property, whether he is the plaintiff or defendant; he has the administration of the children unless the judge decides otherwise. If, in the case of community, the wife has made an inventory of the furniture, it is the husband who is the guardian.
Finally, the separation is pronounced; the woman enters as best she can, by dint of stamped paper, in what remains to her. Do you believe she is free for that? Not at all: the husband always has the right of supervision over her because of the children that may arise, and she cannot do without the authorization of the husband or of the court to dispose of her property, mortgage it, etc. There is broken only the obligation to live together and the community of interests.
THE YOUNG LADY. I understand today how the indissolubility of marriage, having only the sad remedy of separation as a palliative, honors concubinage and produces heinous crimes. Can't certain weak consciences be shipwrecked at the sight of a chain that must last as long as their life, and not be tempted to break it with iron and poison? It is probable that, if husbands did not leave their separated wives free, crimes against persons would multiply.
And if one separates young, is it human nature to remain in isolation? Should we be punished all our life for being wrong?
In such cases, what other resource than concubinage, and who would dare to blame it?
And separation is called a cure!
Earlier you gave me a glimpse that the husband can, in certain cases, disavow his wife's child. I thought there were no bastards in marriage.
THE AUTHOR. You are wrong. If the husband or his heirs prove that from the three hundredths to the one hundred and eightieth day, that is to say from the tenth or sixth month before the birth of the child, the husband was absent or prevented by some physical accident of to be the father; or if the birth has been concealed, the paternity may be disavowed. It may still be for a child born before the one hundred and eightieth day of the marriage unless the husband had knowledge of the pregnancy, was present at the birth certificate, signed, or if the child is declared non-viable.
THE YOUNG LADY. How does this disavowal come about?
THE AUTHOR. The husband or his heirs attack the legitimacy of the child within a determined period, and the court rules according to the evidence given.
THE YOUNG LADY. So the honor of the woman and the future of the child is offered in the holocaust to a question of inheritance?
THE AUTHOR. Perfectly. As for what you call the honor of the woman, the law hardly cares about it, it prohibits the search for paternity, except in the case of the kidnapping of the minor mother; she who allows the search for maternity provided that the child proves that he is the same as that of which the woman was born and that he brings a beginning of proof in writing.
THE YOUNG LADY. It seems unlikely to me that we can see motherhood after fifteen or twenty years. On the other hand, if written evidence suffices for the search for maternity, why would it not suffice for that of paternity?
Tell me, is it permissible for the child to search for his mother if she is married?
THE AUTHOR. Certainly: this research is forbidden only to adulterous and incestuous children.
THE YOUNG LADY. So, we can forever disturb the future of a woman by the search for motherhood?
THE AUTHOR. Yes: but you won't regret it when you think that a woman's honor is not to have children but to bring them up and guide them in life. Children born out of wedlock have a very unfortunate legal situation; the legislator imbued with the belief in original sin, makes them responsible for the fault of their parents. Now, Madam, before humanity and before conscience, there are no bastards; therefore, there should be none in front of society. When the woman will have her place there, she will pursue the reform of the laws which bear the imprint of superannuated dogmas; in the meantime, let us fight those who recall the anathema hurled at us because of the myth of Eve.
Part J.
SUMMARY AND TIPS.
THE YOUNG LADY. Before we go any further, let's recap what we've said so far.
Before the ideal of Rights, we must be free, and equal to men; therefore we have the right, like them, to all the means of development, the right, like them, to make use of our faculties which suit us, the right, like them, to all that constitutes the dignity of the citizen.
Now, in the present state, the woman is a servant, sacrificed to the man;
She has no political rights;
She is interiorized in the city, banished from the exercise of public functions;
She is paid less than the man for equal work;
In marriage, she is absorbed, humiliated, put at the mercy of her spouse, stripped of her maternal rights;
In the family, she is a minor; his guardianship rights are inferior to those of a man;
From the point of view of morals, she is almost abandoned to the passions of the other sex: she alone bears the consequences.
Judged weak, unintelligent, and incapable, when it comes to rights and functions, she is, by a flagrant contradiction, deemed strong, intelligent, capable, when it comes to morals, when it comes to be punished when, adult girl or widow, it is a question of governing oneself and governing one's fortune. And people, whose brains have become cretinized in the mud of the Middle Ages, in the face of our situation, dare to cry out: Women! But they are free! They are happy!
What, then, do the claims of the bravest among them signify?
These Gentlemen are masters of our fortune, of our dignity, of our children; they can deprive us of our nationality, dissipate our property, the product of our work and of our good administration with mistresses; torture us without witnesses, make us die of pain and shame; lead us under the cannon or on the edge of a swamp whose air will kill us; to compel us to submit to a thousand affronts, to deliver to them the goods that our contract had reserved for us, either by intimidating us, or by threatening us with removing our children; they leave us jobs only those which bore them or do not seem lucrative enough to them, and then, after that, they are astonished at our complaints, our protests, our revolt!
THE AUTHOR. Don't get angry with them: laugh at them, Madame; it is the same men who want to be free; these are the same men who blame the planters and find the complaints of the slaves legitimate; these are the same men who found it very just that their serf and bourgeois fathers should take the rights which the nobility and the clergy refused them. Pity their lack of intelligence, their lack of heart, their lack of justice: they do not understand that they are playing the role of planters, lords, and priests with regard to women.
When women want it badly, the law will be changed. Every mother must first inform her daughter of the position assigned to her in marriage; the terrible and numerous risks that she runs in Love.
THE YOUNG LADY. A certain number of us, frightened by the serfdom to which the married woman is subjected, not wanting to pass under the Caudine forks of marriage, introduce more and more into our mores a form of lasting and honest union which can be called marriage. free; a connection that it is not permissible to confuse with those fleeting connections so dishonorable for the two sexes.
THE AUTHOR. Many disadvantages are attached to free marriage. First, morals will not blame the man who abandons his partner, even after twenty years of union, even with children. There is better: this unworthy action will not prevent him from finding a mother who will not hesitate to accept him as a son-in-law. On the other hand, the woman, however, chastity of her conduct, will constantly encounter on her road snares or adulterous hypocrites who will show her disdain, who will close their doors to her, although they open them to her. joint. Often, she will see the man to whom she is sacrificing his reputation forget to make her respect him, agree to associate with people to whom she is not admitted.
However, the repugnance for legal marriage is so great among certain dignified and thoughtful women, that they prefer to incur every bad chance than to chain themselves. Let them then make their situation as less dangerous as possible: they can succeed in it by a contract of association which assures their rights in common work and guarantees the future of the children. The man will respect them more when he has obligations to fulfill towards them as partners: If he refused to sign such a contract, the woman would be a fool to accept his company, for it would be certain that he is not an egoist and retains an ulterior motive of exploitation and abandonment.
THE YOUNG LADY. Another class of women, having no less repugnance for the legal ceremony than the preceding ones, but who submit to it because they fear public opinion, dare not displease their family and have no faith in constancy. rights, worry about how they could reconcile their dignity with the situation that the law gives them.
THE AUTHOR. Two identical facts, which happened a few years ago in the United States, will tell these women what they must do.
Miss Lucy Stone and Miss Antoinette Brown, two Emancipation Party women who travel across North America reading, were wanted by two brothers, Messrs. Blackwell. In America, as everywhere, the law subordinates the married woman. The position was difficult for the emancipators: to marry under the law of inferiority was to violate their principles; to unite freely was to harm their consideration and to deprive oneself of the power to act. They pulled it off very skillfully. Each of them, in concert with her fiancé, drew up a protest of the law which governs marriage; a protest followed by agreements by which the future spouses recognized each other as equal and free, declaring that they would only marry before the magistrate out of respect for public opinion. Then, after the legal ceremony, the spouses published this reciprocal commitment in the newspapers.
Let women who have a sense of their dignity have and sign such an act. Before the law, he is void; but it will not be so before the conscience of the witnesses who will have attended it. If the wife is what she should be, honest and serious, and the husband breaks his promises, he will be deemed a dishonest man. Moreover, compliance with her signature will be facilitated if the woman marries, as we recommend, under the total regime with peripherals and partnership of acquests, or under that of separation of property.
THE YOUNG LADY. Thus in free marriage, contract of registered association; in legal marriage, protest before witnesses against the law which subordinates women, a contract under the total regime with paraphernalia or under that of separation of property, such are the means by which you judge that the French woman can protest against the law of current marriage while waiting for the legislator to reform it.
THE AUTHOR. Yes, Madam; if this form of protest is insufficient, it is not immoral like that which is produced today by adultery, the desecration of marriage which has become an ignoble market where one sells oneself to a woman for so much dowry. The measure we are proposing to women will make the legislator think; the form of protest that we allow ourselves today destroys the family, morals, and public health.
While waiting for legal reforms to be obtained, we would also do well to come to the aid of working women who are unhappy in the home and who cannot plead for separation because they have no money.
It is time to teach worker husbands that one is not a master, as they believe and say, to beat his wife, to put her on the straw with her children. Let us not forget, madam, that in all ranks there are detestable husbands, and that our job is to defend their wives against them, especially when they lack the necessary means to do so themselves. same suitably.
THIRD PART.
Nature and functions of women; Love, and marriage; Legal reforms.
FIRST CHAPTER.
NATURE AND FUNCTIONS OF WOMEN.
Part A.
For any conscience in good faith, we believe we have sufficiently established, although summarily established, that social law is identical for the two sexes because they are of the same species. The question of right put out of the discussion, we can now inquire what use the woman will make of her right; in other words, what functions it is fit to perform from the whole of its nature.
Let us first mark the profound difference which exists between law and function, then let us define and divide the latter.
Law is the sine qua non of the development and manifestations of the human being: it is absolute, and general for the whole species, because the individuals who compose it, must legitimately be able to develop and manifest themselves.
The function is the employment of the faculties of the individual with a view to a goal useful to himself and to others: function is therefore a production of utility and, in the last analysis, the manifestation of the predominant aptitudes in each of them. us, either naturally or as a result of education and habit.
Society, having needs of all kinds, has functions of all kinds and of diverse scopes: these functions could be classified as follows:
1 Scientific and philosophical functions;
2 Industrial functions;
3 Art functions;
4 Education functions;
5 Medical functions;
6 Safety functions;
7 Judicial functions;
8 Exchange and circulation functions;
9 Administrative and governmental functions;
10 Legislative functions;
11 Functions of solidarity or social benevolence and preventive institutions.
This very imperfect and insufficient classification, if we were to make a treatise on a social organism, being all that is necessary in relation to the use that we must make of it, we will stick to it here.
Men, and women after them, have hitherto thought fit to classify man and woman separately; to define each type, and to deduce from this ideal the functions peculiar to each sex. Neither one nor the other wanted to see that numerous facts belied their classification.
What! exclaim the classifiers, do you deny that the sexes do not differ?
Do you deny that, if they differ, they have different functions?
If our classification does not seem good to you, criticize it, nothing better; but replace it with a better one.
Criticize your classification, ladies and gentlemen, so shall I; but if I lack the elements to establish a better one, can you, should you even engage me to present one to you?
Do you believe me a man to demand from me the abuse of the a priori, and the procedures by splitting and saber blows?
Proudhon is right, murmur these Gentlemen: a woman is incapable of abstracting, of generalizing, of knowing herself...
Really, Gentlemen, you think that it is through incapacity that I do not want to present to you a classification of the sexes, a theory of the nature of woman?.... Let us, therefore, hurry to prove the contrary: instead of one theory, I'll give you four.
FIRST SKETCH. Man and woman form a series only in relation to the reproduction of the species; all the other characteristics by which we have tried to differentiate them are only generalities contradicted by a multitude of facts: now, as a generality is not a law, we can infer nothing from it, deduce nothing from it. absolute from the point of view of function.
On the other hand, zoological species have their greatest radical difference in the nervous system, especially in the greater or lesser mass and complexity of the encephalon: now, anatomy admits, after numerous experiments, that, relatively total mass of the body, the brain of the woman equals in volume that of the man; that the composition of both is the same and, according to Phrenology, that the organs of the brain are the same in both sexes.
Finally, it is a principle in Biology that the organs develop by exercise and atrophy by continuous rest: now, man and woman do not exercise their encephalic organs in the same way; educational gymnastics, mores, prejudices, imposed habits, tend to develop in the male head what is atrophied in the female head; whence it follows that the differences observed empirically are in no way the result of nature, but of the accidental causes which produced them.
Conclusion: therefore, the two sexes, raised in the same way, will develop in the same way and will be suitable for the same functions, except regarding the reproduction of the species.
Here, Gentlemen is a whole theory, very tenable from the Anatomo-Biological point of view, and which I defy you to prove false: for I will have an answer to all your objections.
Part B.
SECOND SKETCH. We recognize in principle that the sexes form a series in the physical, intellectual, moral, and consequently functional relation.
We believe that they should be subordinate to each other because of their relative excellence, and we take as the touchstone of their respective value the destiny of the species.
If we compare the sexes with each other, we find in a general way that the man is only a woman ugly in all respects; we note in the second place that it is much more animal than the woman since its hairy system is more developed and that it breathes from lower; so that he is very evidently an intermediary between a woman and the great species of apes.
A woman alone contains and develops the human germ; it is the creator and preserver of the race.
It is not of course that the help of man is necessary for the work of reproduction; it is a means chosen by nature; but human science will succeed, we hope, in delivering woman from this unbearable subjection.
The analogy authorizes us to believe that woman, the sole depositary of the human germ, is also the depository of all intellectual and moral germs: whence it follows that she is the inspiration of all science, of all discovery, of all righteousness; the mother of all virtue. Our analogical inductions are confirmed by the facts: the woman makes use of her intelligence in the concrete; she is a keen observer; man is fit only to construct paradoxes and to lose himself in the metaphysical abyss: science has only emerged from the limbo of the a priori without confirmation since the advent of the form of feminine spirit in this field: also we will say that the true scholars are feminized spirits.
From a moral point of view, man and woman differ greatly: the first is hard, brutal, without delicacy, devoid of sensitivity, of modesty: his usual relations with the other sex have great difficulty in modifying him; the woman is naturally gentle, loving, sensitive, equitable, modest; it is to her that man owes justice and his other virtues, when he has them: whence it follows that it is really to woman alone that social progress is due: that is why every step taken towards civilization is marked by a step of the woman towards freedom.
If we consider each of the sexes in their relationship with human destiny, we are forced to admit that, if the predominance of man had its raison d'être in the need to outline this destiny, the preeminence of women is assured under the future rule of law and peace.
It was necessary to struggle and fight to establish justice and subject nature to humanity; it was to be the role of the man who represents muscular strength, the spirit of struggle; but as we can already foresee in the near future the advent of peace, the substitution of peaceful work and negotiations for war, it is clear that woman will have to take the direction of human affairs to which her faculties will then call her better. adapted to the end henceforth pursued.
The woman had to develop socially and manifest themselves socially last, for the same reason that the human species is the last creation of our globe: the most perfect being always appears after those who served to prepare it.
As it is demonstrated on the other hand, that, in the scale of the various organisms, the organ which is superadded to the others to constitute a change of species, governs those which the individual takes from the lower species, so the woman, completely developed in a social body organized for peace and peaceful work, will be the new organ which will govern the social body.
Does this mean that the woman should oppress the man? Certainly not; she would ignore the services rendered and would fail in her gentle nature; but it will make him understand that his glory is to obey, to subordinate himself to the other sex, because he is less perfect, and his qualities are no longer necessary for the general good.
You laugh, Gentlemen, at this second theory; you find her absurd..... It's true: for she is the counterpart of M. Proudhon's thetic woman. So, let's move on to the third exercise.
Part C.
THIRD SKETCH. Any classification of the human species is a pure subjective creation, that is to say, which has no reason to exist except in the form given to perception by the intelligence; the very conception of humanity with the enumeration of the characteristics which are reputed to distinguish it from other species is puffed up with subjectivity.
The truth is that no one human being is alike; there are as many different men and women as there are men and women to compose the species.
Classifications, in all things, are errors of the mind because nature hates identity and never repeats itself: there are not two grains of sand, two drops of water, two leaves that look alike; and very probably the sun, since it has existed, has not appeared twice identically the same when it rises. And it is in spite of the evidence of these truths, in spite of the conviction in which we are of the illusions of the senses, of the debility of our intelligence which can know nothing of the intimate nature of beings; which captures only a few fleeting lines of their personal characters; and it is in spite of all these things that we dare to establish series, to attribute to them characteristics which come to contradict the facts, and to violate, to torture the only beings which exist, the individuals, in the name of this other thing which exists only in our sick brain: gender, class!
The bitter fruits produced by our mania for classification should, however, cure us of it. Is it not this disease that, pushing the theocrats, the legislators to divide humanity into castes, into classes, has caused most of the misfortunes of our species? Is it not thanks to these execrable divisions that we have a hideous past whose echoes send back to our terrified ears only sobs, cries of anger, revolt, curse, revenge, and sinister sounds of arms and chains?
Isn't it also thanks to them that, on the pages of our history, all stained with blood and tears, and which exhale an odor of mass grave, we read only tyranny, brutalization, demoralization?
Is it not still thanks to them that the king and the subject, the master and the serf, the white and the negro, the man and the woman are demoralized by oppression, injustice, the cruelty of a part; cunning, baseness, revenge on the other?
Are evil and unhappiness not everywhere, because inequality, the daughter of senseless classifications, is everywhere?
Ah! Who will deliver us from our unreason?
Let's classify animals, plants, and minerals if we want! our errors have no influence on them and cannot disturb them; but let us respect the human species, which would escape all classification, even if this procedure were reasonable because each human being is mobile, progressive, and differs much more from his fellows than the highest animal differs from his own.
Let each one, therefore, make his own law of autonomy, manifest himself according to his nature, and let us only ensure that the right is equal for all; that the strong do not oppress the weak; that every function be entrusted to him who proves to be the most suitable to fill it: that is all we can, all we must do, if we insist on being wise and just.
Harmony exists in nature, because each being there peacefully follows the laws which govern his individuality: it will be the same in humanity, when collective reason understands that the human order is pre-established in the concurrence of individual faculties. left free in their manifestations; and that it is delaying the advent of order, peace and happiness to establish a factitious order, all fantasy: that is to say a real disorder.
Let us therefore beware of any classification of the faculties and functions according to the sexes: apart from the fact that it would be false, it would lead us to cruelty; for we would oppress those men and women who were neither flexible enough to submit to it, nor hypocritical enough to appear so; and we would do so without benefit to human destiny, but, on the contrary, to its detriment.
This, Gentlemen, is a nominalist theory; and I defy you to overthrow it with sufficient reasons: for I should have, as for the first, an answer to all your objections.
Let's come to our last theory which is yours for majors and minors; but is the opposite for the conclusions.
Part D.
All the apparatuses of the same organism modify each other and, therefore, the functions mutually modify each other.
Now men and women differ from each other in an important apparatus.
Therefore each of the two sexes must differ from one another, not only by the apparatus which distinguishes them but by all the modifications which the presence of this apparatus brings about.
Here, gentlemen are my first syllogism: I know that we won't have a problem with this: it's classical biology.
Let us look anatomically for the organic differences that sexuality imposes on men and women.
The nervous system. The nerves said of feeling, are more developed in women than in man; those of the movement is less; the cerebellum is more developed in the head of the man than in that of the woman; in this one, the anteroposterior diameter of the brain prevails over the bilateral one which is relatively larger in the male sex: we also notice that the organs of observation, circumspection, cunning and primogeniture are more voluminous in the head of the woman than in that of the man, in whom the rational organs predominate, those of combat and destruction.
Locomotor system. The man is taller than the woman, has more compact bones, bigger and better-nourished muscles, and stronger tendons; his thorax has an opposite direction to that of the woman: in the woman's, the greatest width is between the shoulders, in the man, it is at the base; the pelvis is wider, more flared in the female sex than in the other.
Epidermal and cellular systems. The man has hairier skin than the woman; what is called fat is less abundant in the male organism than in the female; generally, the skin of the man is rougher and all its forms are less rounded; the woman has longer, silkier hair.
Splanchnic organs. The cerebral mass is relatively the same in both sexes, as well as the organs of the brain, except for the predominance which we have pointed out; the respiratory system differs a little: the woman breathes from higher than the man: in this one, the circulation is more active, more energetic.
These physical differences correspond to intellectual and moral differences.
Woman, having more developed emotional nerves, is more impressionable and more mobile than man.
Being weaker and just as strong-willed, she obtains by skill and cunning what she cannot obtain by force; her weakness gives her shyness, circumspection, and the need to feel protected.
Work that requires strength is repugnant to him.
Her maternal destination makes her an enemy of destruction, of war; and its more delicate organization makes it fear and avoid the struggle. This same maternal destination imprints a particular stamp on her intelligence: she loves the concrete, and always tends to translate the idea into facts, to embody them, to give it a fixed form; his reasoning is the intuition or rapid apperception of a general relationship, of a truth that man extracts only with great difficulty, with the aid of logical stilts.
The woman is a better observer than the man, and pushes the induction further than him; she is consequently more penetrating, and a much better judge of the moral and intellectual worth of those around her.
More than man, she has a feeling for beauty, delicacy of heart, Love of good, respect for modesty, and veneration for all that is superior.
More far-sighted than he, she has more order and economy and oversees administrative details with a conscience that often borders on childishness.
The woman is skillful and diligent: she excels in works of taste and possesses great artistic tendencies.
Softer, more tender, more patient than man, she loves all that is weak, protects all that suffers; all pain, all misery puts a tear in his eyes and draws a sigh from his chest.
This is indeed the woman, as you depict her, gentlemen.
Then all add:
The vocation of women is therefore Love, motherhood, housework, and sedentary occupations.
It is too weak for works that require strength and for those of war.
She is too impressionable and too sensitive, too good, and too gentle to be a legislator, judge, and juror.
Her taste for interior details, her retired life, and the serious duties of maternity sufficiently indicate that she is not made for public employment.
She is too mobile to cultivate science usefully; too weak and too busy elsewhere to follow sustained experiments.
Her kind of rationality makes her unsuitable for theorizing; and she loves the concrete and the details too much to take a serious interest in general ideas, which keeps her away from all the high professorial functions and from those which require serious studies.
Its place is therefore in the home to improve man, support him, care for him, provide him with the joys of fatherhood, and fulfill the office of a good housewife.
Here are your conclusions: here are mine, admitting, by hypothesis, what I affirm with you about women.
Part E.
1 The woman bringing to Philosophy and Science her sharpness of observation, and her Love of the concrete will correct the exaggerated tendency of man to abstraction and will demonstrate the falsity of the theories built on the a priori, on a few facts only. It is then that ontology will disappear; that it will be recognized that a hypothesis is only a question mark; that truth is always of an intelligible nature, however unknown it may be; we will only generalize known facts, we will carefully avoid erecting simple generalities into laws, and we will thus have a real philosophy, real human sciences because they will bear the imprint of both sexes.
2 The woman bringing her own faculties into the industry, will introduce there more and more art, and perfection in the details. Cultivated in the sense of her aptitudes, she will find ingenious means of applying scientific discoveries.
3 Patient, gentle, good, and more moral than man, she is an educator born from childhood, a moralizer of the grown man; most of the educational functions belong to him by right; and it has its marked place in special education.
4 Through her keen intuition, and her sharpness of observation, the woman alone can discover the therapy of neuroses; her skill will make her invaluable in all delicate surgical operations. It is to her that the care of treating the affections of women and children must devolve because she alone can understand them well; it has its marked place in hospitals, not only for the cure of illnesses but for the execution and supervision of the details of administration and of the care to be given to the sick.
6 The presence of women in judicial functions, as jurors and arbitrators, will be for everyone a guarantee of true human justice, that is to say of fairness.
The woman alone by her gentleness, her mercy, her sympathetic dispositions, and her sharpness of observation, can well understand that, in any fault committed, society has its share of guilt: because it must organize itself more to prevent an evil than to punish him. This point of view, especially for females, will transform the penitentiary system and will give rise to many institutions.
Only then will all understand that the punishment inflicted on the guilty must be a means of reparation and regeneration; society will no longer kill like someone weak who is afraid: it will amend the assassin instead of imitating him; it will force the thief to work to restore what he has taken; it will no longer believe it has the right, when it locks up a condemned man, to deprive him of his reason, to push him to despair, to suicide, by solitary confinement; to completely deprive him of marriage, to couple him with more corrupt than himself.
Knowing well its share of guilt, society will repair the wrongs of its negligence in the penitentiaries: it will be firm, but good and moralizing: it will do there the education it should have done outside, and will prepare houses of work for the liberated, so that the contempt and fear with which people often worse than them pursue them, do not push them to recidivism.
7 The woman, bringing into the social household her spirit of order and economy, her Love of details, and her horror of paperwork and excessive expenditure, will reform the administration: she will simplify everything; will eliminate sinecures, the cumulation of jobs, and will produce much with little, instead of producing, like man, little with much: the taxpayers' purse will not complain about it.
8 Under the direct influence of the woman legislator, we will have an overhaul of all the laws: first and foremost, we will have preventive means, compulsory education; then the procedural code will be simplified; from the revised civil code, all the laws concerning illegitimate children and the inequality of the sexes will disappear; the laws on mores will be more severe, the penal code more rational and more equitable.
By the administrative reforms born of the economic instinct of the woman, the taxes will be reduced; his horror of blood and war will greatly reduce the dreadful blood tax. Having a deliberative voice, and knowing, through her pains and her Love, what a man is worth, it will only be wise that she will vote levies of citizens for these butcheries that are called wars: she will not do it. only when the territory is threatened, or when it is necessary to protect the oppressed nationalities; in any other case, it will use the conciliation system.
9 The woman, who is much more economical and much better analyst than the man, seriously educated, will soon recognize that nations, like individuals, differ in aptitudes, and that the goal of these differences is union and fraternity through the exchange of products: she will therefore divert her country from cultivating certain branches of industry in which other peoples are superior and produce more cheaply; it will cure him of the mad pretension of being self-sufficient, and will divert him from sacrificing the interest of the mass of consumers to that of a few producers: thus, little by little, the barriers and customs separating the various organs of humanity: there will be exchange treaties, and everyone will gain by the cheapness, and the suppression of expenses made to support a customs administration, too often vexatious.
The qualities and faculties of a woman not only make her an educator, but ensure her preponderance in all the functions that relate to social solidarity: she alone knows how to console, encourage, moralize gently, and relieve with delicacy; she has the genius for charity; it is therefore to her that should fall the supervision and direction of hospitals, women's prisons, the administration of relief offices, the supervision of abandoned children, &c. It is to her that we will owe the institutions which will give work to unemployed workers and save the liberated from laziness and recidivism.
Here, Gentlemen, without departing from the date of your theory, the woman is placed everywhere besides the man, except in the hard work from which the machines will exempt you yourselves, and in the military institutions which will disappear one day in all probability.
Until now the institutions, the laws, the sciences, the philosophy bear above all the masculine imprint: all these things are only half human; for them to become completely so, the woman must ostensibly and legally join in them; consequently that it be cultivated like you: cultivation will not make it like you, do not fear it: the rose and the carnation growing in the same soil, under the same sky, under the same sun, with the care of the same gardener, remain rose and carnation: they are all the more beautiful as the elements which they transform are more abundant, and as they are better cultivated: if the man and the woman differ, similar education will only differentiate them more, because each of them will use it to develop what is particular to him.
In the interest of all things and of everyone, women must enter into all jobs; has its function in all functions: after the general interest of humanity, comes that of the family: it cannot come before.
Since the woman, at the present time, is, in general, a mother and housekeeper while fulfilling a host of other functions, she will be no less so by taking on a few more; and besides, the time when one enters certain important functions is when the woman has finished her maternal task. A few women's public functionaries will not prevent most of their companions from remaining in private life, any more than a few men in the same case prevent the mass of men from remaining there in general.
Part F.
You finally admit a classification, you tell me, gentlemen; and you agree, moreover, that there are masculine functions and feminine functions.
You have mistaken Gentlemen: you accused me of being incapable of giving you a complete theory, I gave you the outline of four; sketches that would be easy for me to extend and perfect. But I do not accept any of these theories as a whole.
"So, you are eclectic?"
Gods forbid: I have as much repugnance for eclecticism as for the number three and androgyny.
I do not accept the theory of the identity of the sexes, because I believe in Biology that an essential organic difference modifies the whole being; thus the woman must differ from the man.
I do not accept the theory of the superiority of one sex or the other, because it is absurd: humanity is man-woman or woman-man; we do not know what sex would be if it were not incessantly modified by its relations with the other, and we only know them thus modified: what is certain is that they are together the condition of being of humanity; that they are equally necessary, equally useful to each other and to society.
I do not accept my third theory because it is excessively nominal; if it is quite true that all the individuals of the two sexes differ from one to the other in a manner much more notable than those of the other species, it is no less true that a classification, founded on a constant anatomical character, is legitimate, and that the principle of classification is in the nature of things; for if things appear classified to us, it is because they are: the laws of the mind are the same as those of nature as far as knowledge is concerned: we must admit this unless we are skeptical or idealist, but I am neither; nor am I a realist in the philosophical sense of the word, for I do not believe that the species is something apart from the individuals in whom it manifests itself: it is in them and through them, which amounts to saying that there are individuals identical in one or more respects, although different in all the others.
Finally, I do not accept the fourth theory, although its principle is true, because the numerous facts which contradict the differential characteristics do not allow me to believe that these characteristics are laws established by sexuality.
Indeed, there are men's brains on women's heads and vice versa.
Mobile, impressionable men; firm and insensitive women.
Tall, strong, muscular women, lifting a man like a feather; small, frail men, of an extremely delicate constitution.
Women with stentorian voices, and rough manners; soft-spoken, graceful-mannered men.
Women who have short, straight hair, are bearded, and have rough skin, and angular shapes; men who have long, silky hair, are beardless, fat, and chubby.
Women have energetic circulation; men have weak and slow ones.
Frank, giddy, bold women; cunning, concealed, timid men.
Violent women, who Love struggle, war, and argument; who feel the need to rant about everything; gentle, patient men, who have a horror of struggle and are very cowardly.
Women who like abstraction, generalize, and synthesize a lot, who have no intuition of any kind; intuitive men, keen observers, good analysts, incapable of generalizing...... I know a good number of them.
Women are insensitive to works of art, and do not feel beautiful; men are full of enthusiasm for each other.
Immoral, immodest women, without respect for anything or anyone; moral, chaste, reverent men.
Dissipating, disorderly women; thrifty and parsimonious men to the point of avarice.
Women who are deeply selfish, dry, disposed to exploit the weakness, the goodness, the stupidity, or the misery of others; men full of generosity, and leniency, ready to sacrifice themselves.
What follows from these undeniable facts? It is because the law of sexual differences is not manifested by the general characteristics which have been established.
It is because these characteristics may very well be the result of education, of differences in prejudices, occupations, etc.
It is that, from these generalities which can be the fruit of a difference in gymnastics and environment, one cannot legitimately conclude anything as to the functions of women: would it not be absurd, in fact, to claim that a woman organized for philosophy and the sciences cannot, must not concern herself with them because she is a woman, whereas a man who is incapable, but stupid enough and vain enough to be unaware of his incapacity, can and must take care of him because he is a man?
Functions belong to those who prove their aptitude and not to an abstraction called sex: for ultimately every function is individual in its totality or in its elements.
Part G.
We have said why we reject the theories we have sketched; let's say why we neither give nor want to give a classification of the sexes.
We do not give a classification, because we neither have nor can have one; the elements are lacking to establish it. A biological induction allows us to affirm that it exists; but in the present environment, it is impossible to determine the law: the true feminine stamp will only be known after one or two centuries of similar education and equal rights: then there will be no need to make a classification because the function will naturally go to the civil servant under a system of equality where the social elements will classify themselves.
My beliefs and my hopes with regard to this future, I will not say them; for I may be wrong since I have no facts to check my intuitions, and all that is purely utopian always has a dangerous side. Besides, didn't I say that if I had a classification, I wouldn't give it? For what? Because we would, as always, make detestable use of it, if it were adopted.
Haven't we hitherto used classifications based on characters that we later recognized as purely transitory, to oppress, deform, and calumniate those who were relegated to the lower ranks? History is there to give us this salutary lesson.
The peddling city, the people who could be cut and worked at will, were only good for beating the water from the ponds and letting themselves be sheared to the quick: where is it today? it invents, governs, legislates and gradually transforms our globe, devastated by the only capable superior species, into a happy and peaceful abode.
On any classification of the human species either in castes, in classes, or in sexes, the rest three are inequities.
The first is to make a crime of the individual rejected in the lower series, of not resembling the type of convention that one has formed of it, while one very well allows the being, said to be superior, to not look like his type: this is how a weak, cowardly, unintelligent man, a milliner, an embroiderer, are none the fewer men, while a virago, a firm, courageous woman, a great sovereign, a philosopher are not women, but men whom one does, not Love, and who are delivered as food to the beasts and to the jealous women who tear them to pieces.
The second iniquity is to use the type of convention to deform the being classified in the lower series, to kill his energies, and to prevent his progress. So, to reach the goal, we organize education, and the social environment, we invent prejudices and we generally succeed so well that the oppressed, who is unaware of himself, really believes himself to be of an inferior nature, resigns himself to his irons and goes so far as to be indignant at the revolt of those in his series who are too energetic and personal not to have reacted against what social imbecility claimed to make of them.
The third iniquity is to use the state of abasement to which one has reduced the oppressed to slander him and deny his rights: one cries out: look: Here is the serf! Here comes the slave! Here comes the nigger! Here is the worker! Here is the woman! What rights do you want to recognize for these inferior and weak natures? They are incapable of knowing and governing themselves: we must therefore think, will, and govern for them.
Hey! No, gentlemen, these are not men and women: they are the sad products of your selfishness, of your frightful spirit of domination, of your imbecility... If there were infernal gods, I would devote myself to it without pity and with all my heart! Instead of calumniating your fellows to preserve your privileges, give them instruction, and freedom; only then will you have the right to decide on their nature: for the nature of a human creature can only be known when it develops in complete freedom inequality.
I have justified, I believe, my reluctance to give a classification of the sexes, both by the impossibility of establishing a reasonable one and by the very legitimate fear of the use that would be made of it.
But it will be objected to me, not without reason, that classification is necessary for social practice.
I agree with all my heart, since I have made all my reservations, and proved the insanity of current classifications.
As my principle is that the function should go to the functionary who proves his capacity, I say that at the present time, by the difference in education, the man and the woman have distinct functions; and that the latter must be given the place it generally deserves.
I add that it is a violation of the natural right of a woman to train her for the functions intended for her: she must, in all respects, be within the common law: no more than man, one cannot legitimately say to her: your sex cannot do that, cannot claim that: if she does it and claims it, it is because her sex can do it and claim it: if he could not, he wouldn't; the first right is freedom, the first duty the cultivation of one's aptitudes, the development of one's reason, of one's power of utility: a god says the opposite, it would not be conscience, but this god who would have lied.
Let woman, therefore, take the place that suits her present development, but let her constantly remember that this place is not fixed and that she must tend to rise always, until the day when her special nature is revealed. by equality of education, of instruction, of right and of duty, it will everywhere take its legitimate place beside the man and on the same line as him.
Let her laugh at all the mad utopias elaborated on her nature, her functions determined for eternity, and remember that she is, not what nature, but what slavery, prejudice, and ignorance, have made it: that it frees itself from all these chains and no longer allows itself to be intimidated and stupefied.
So gentlemen, all my thought on the nature and functions of women can be summed up in the following few propositions:
I believe, because a physiological induction authorizes me to do so, that on the general fund of humanity, common to both sexes, sexuality imprints a stamp.
In fact, I don't know; and you don't know any more than I do what are the true characteristics resulting from the distinction of the sexes, and I believe that they can only be revealed by freedom in equality, parity of instruction, and education.
In social practice, the functions must belong to whoever can fulfill them: therefore the woman must fulfill the functions for which she shows herself capable, and we must organize ourselves so that this takes place.
What are these functions relative to his present degree of development? I will tell you later, gentlemen.
English translation copyrighted 2nd April 2023.
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English translation copyrighted 2nd April 2023.
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The Book of Women’s Rights. 1860.