MIA > Archive > Draper > Draper > Women & Class
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The women’s liberation movement in the United States today has led to an important and useful interest in the historical roots of the issue and the movement. The desire to understand one’s past is a precondition for seriously facing the future; and when a movement matures to the point of asking also where it is coming from, it is more likely to figure out where it is going. In this respect the women’s movement, which in some ways arose as an offshoot of the “New Left” of the 1960s, has not only shown more staying power but also more basic seriousness, and maturity.
But the historical concerns which are gratifyingly evident in the literature of the women’s movement have been almost entirely limited to the American past. The keen interest of today’s militants in their national roots and forebears can hardly be faulted, and we would hesitate to raise the question at all if there were a danger of being understood as derogating it. On the contrary, even more historical exploration of the American scene is needed. But we would urge the following proposition: The American springs of the women’s liberation movement cannot be wholly understood without a knowledge of its international context, the European movements and struggles out of which it arose and alongside which it developed for over a century. In fact, it is only on this basis that the specifically American elements (for example, the influence of frontier life) can be detected.
While the spate of books, new and reprinted, on this question that have been published in this country in the last ten years is noteworthy, it is surely a rather extreme case that not a single one has paid any attention to the tremendous reservoir of ideas and lessons afforded by a couple of centuries of the women’s movement in the rest of the world. The outstanding English-language exception is by a British writer, Sheila Rowbotham’s Women, Resistance and Revolution. An outstanding exception from a previous decade, Ethel Mannin’s Women and Revolution (1939), cannot even be found in retrospective bibliographical lists published in the aforesaid spate of literature; and one wonders.
No doubt, one reason for this situation is the 100% American provincialism which shows up in all our movements; but we suspect there is another reason. The two books mentioned above, as it happens, have very similar titles; both couple “women” with “revolution.” To be sure, both authors are socialist revolutionaries in viewpoint, Marxists in fact. But does one have to be a Marxist, or any other kind of socialist, to inquire into the women’s movement outside our borders? Logically, no. In practice, the connection is not accidental (to coin a phrase). For it would be a little difficult to imagine a reasonably accurate historical article on the movement from an international perspective that would seem at home in (say) Ms. magazine; and even more difficult to draw reasonable lessons from the history of un-American humanity that might be adopted by the National Organization for Women as its guidelines. This most bourgeois of countries is likewise graced with the most class-ridden of bourgeois women’s movements; and it is an inconvenient fact that the lessons of over a century of the most advanced women’s movements are not calculated to paint the prospects of bourgeois feminism in glowing colors. One of the massive facts before us is the fact that the United States of America is the only advanced capitalist country in the world without a mass socialist movement of any kind (as distinct from a plethora of radical sects); and a women’s movement that arises in such an exceptional milieu is bound to be one-sided and distorted from the perspective of those outside its borders.
No the fact is that the women’s liberation movement arises in history with its roots entwined with the socialist movement. Although from a literary point of view, “precursors”and heralds of women’s rights can be found back through the ages, a conscious women’s movement arises not as a simply intellectual process but as the response to a shakeup in society. In an earthquake the hot lava rises up from below. Repressed from above , women enter on the stage when the mass of the people do, and along with them, for women constitute half of the mass. Like socialism, a women’s liberation movement can be dated from the French Revolution. But the first socialist movement, which issued directly out of the last stage of the French Revolution, viz. the “Conspiracy of Equals” led by Francois Noel (Gracchus) Babeuf, while it did not explicitly come out for women’s equality, included among its most prominent and active members militant women. In this respect, it was carrying on the tradition of the only organized expression of the enragés, the left wing of the French Revolution. That organization was La Société des Citoyennes Républicaines Révoltionnaires. Part one of this book is an attempt to resurrect that tradition; its predecessors and its successors in nineteenth century Europe.
In general there is nothing in English on the European or international origins of feminism — nothing that is adequate for our present purpose. Only one book purports to deal with the subject: Sheila Rowbotham’s Women, Resistance and Revolution (London, Lane/Penguin, 1972; N.Y., Pantheon, 1973; Vintage, 1974); its first sentence states correctly that “This is not a proper history of feminism and revolution.” There are two pop-historical booklets that are not worth recalling: Prof. Trevor Lloyd’s Suffragettes International (N.Y., American Heritage Press, 1971); and Rose Remain’s The Fight for Freedom for Women (N.Y., Ballantine, 1973).There are two compilations of writings supplemented by editorial material: Miriam Schneir, ed., Feminism: The Essential Historical Writings (N.Y., Random House/Vintage, 1972); and Julia O’Faolain , L. Martines, eds., Not in God’s Image (N.Y., Harper, 1973). All of these appeared in the 1970s; the most elementary interest in the history of international feminism is barely beginning.
The situation is different, of course, with respect to the history of the subject in the U.S. (See, for example, under Barbara Winslow’s article below.) With respect to England, which enters into Part I, there are two significant efforts: Sheila Rowbotham’s Hidden from History (London, Pluto, 1973); and Marian Ramelson’s The Petticoat Rebellion (London, Lawrence & Wishart, 1972). In addition there is a volume of selected writings: William L. O’Neill, ed., The Woman Movement; Feminism in the United States and England (London, Allen & Unwin, 1969; Chicago, Quadrangle, 1971); it has a historical introduction which mentions some European connections. Of older books, there is one that needs mentioning in this company: Ethel Mannin’s Women and the Revolution (N.Y., Dutton, 1939), a spotty collection of vignettes. None of the preceding titles contributed to the contents of this book; they will be mentioned below in other connections.
The main sources used in this section have been Daniel Guerin’s masterly work on La Lutte de Classes sous La Première République (2v., 6th ed., Gallimard, c1946), especially for the over-all politics of the intra-revolutionary struggle; Albert Soboul’s detailed history of the sansculotte movement, Les Sans-Culottes Parisiens en l’An II (2nd ed., Clavreuil, 1962); Marie Cerati’s Le Club des Citoyennes Républicaines et Révolutionnaires (Ed. Sociales, 1966).
Two older works are still worth reading: Leopold Lacour’s Trois Femmes de la Révolution (Plon, 1900), and the Baron Marc de Villiers’ Histoire des Clubs de Femmes et des Legions d’Amazones (Plon-Nourrit, 1910).
The best work devoted to Jacques Roux is Maurice Dommanget’s Jacques Roux (le Curé Rouge) et le Manifeste des “Enragés” (Spartacus, 1948), to be supplemented by the collection of his writings, Acta et Scripta. R.B. Rose’s The Enragés (Sydney Univ. Press, 1968, orig. 1965) is useful for stray facts, no more. Leon Abensour’s La Femme et le Féminisme avant La Révolution (Leroux, 1923) has been duly credited above; the same author’s Histoire Générale du Féminisme (Delagrave, 1921) is of little use for our purpose. Amedee Le Faure’s Le Socialisme pendant La Révolution Francaise (Paris, 1867) is good for early feminist tracts. Other sources have been used for some details, like Mathiez’s well-known history and Maxime Leroy’s Histoire des Idées Sociales en France (3v., Gallimard, 1946-62). Cerati’s book has a bibliography of French sources, for further exploration.
There is virtually nothing reliable on the subject in English, the least objectionable being an article by Elizabeth Racz on The Women’s Rights Movement in the French Revolution (Science & Society, Spring 1952). A later article by Jane Abray, Feminism in the French Revolution (American Historical Review, Feb. 1975), insofar as it purports to deal with matters covered here, is worth much less than the paper it is printed on. There are two rather peculiar books on the women of the French Revolution. One, by Mrs. Serebriakova, wife of the then Soviet ambassador to England, is a fictionalized account, very novelistic. Another, by Mrs. Whale, is a journalistic account that reads intentionally like a Sunday Supplement piece; it has its use.
As for mentions of this subject in general accounts of feminist history (in English), the remarks made in the introduction may stand. Prof. O’Neill’s statement on Wollstonecraft’s book is followed by the bare mention that it came “on the heels of Olympe de Gouges’ tract,” which he misdates. That is all. O’Neill’s book is an anthology (Chicago, 1971; orig. London, 1969), and in such works we have to deal with brief editorial matter. Two others of this type may be mentioned: J. O’Faolain and L. Martines’ Not in God’s Image (N.Y., 1973) represents the French Revolutionary period with two pages of excerpts from Olympe, while Claire Lacombe is not mentioned; this may be fortunate since their remark about the RW is a factual error. M. Schneir’s Feminism (N.Y., 1972) represents the “Eighteenth Century Rebels” with Abigail Adams and Wollstonecraft; her note mentions Olympe’s pamphlet but not the existence of Lacombe or the RW. Two pop-histories of feminism offer horrible examples: Prof. T. Lloyd’s Suffragettes International (N.Y., 1971) has a paragraph on “18th century beginnings” that skips from Rousseau to Wollstonecraft and, under France, highlights Mme. Roland (!), mentions Olympe (but not her pamphlet!) and thinks she was guillotined for her feminist views. Rose Tremain’s The Fight for Freedom for Women (N.Y., 1973) has a single reference to the French roots of feminism with a mistake in every clause, though only Rousseau and Wollstonecraft are mentioned. Two more serious books on feminist history are unfortunately no better. Most bitterly disappointing is Sheila Rowbotham’s Women, Resistance and Revolution (NY, 1972), which has an inexplicably empty passage on the French Revolution period. Not even Olympe is mentioned, and Lacombe is brought in (without an explanation of who she was and what she did) only for an attack on her alleged “optimism” about women’s rights! A much older book still worth reading in spots, Ethel Mannin’s Women and the Revolution (N.Y., 1939) has a chapter on the French Revolution, in which only Olympe and Theroigne are profiled as the feminists of the age.
Last updated on 12 September 2020