Whores and angels: Women and the family in the discourse of French Marxism 1882-1905

European History Quarterly

Volumn 27, Issue 3, 1997, Pages 339-369

  Stuart, Robert ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN AUSTRALIA   (Australia)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 0007301180     PISSN: 02656914     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/026569149702700302     Document Type: Article

References (125)

1. S. Alexander, 'Women, Class and Sexual Difference', in A. Phillips, ed., Feminism and Equality (Oxford 1987), 163-4
2. For a 'post-Marxism' based upon this premise, see C. Mouffe and E. Laclau, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London 1985), particularly 22-3
3. See, for instance, L. Vogel, Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Towards a Unitary Theory (New Brunswick 1983), Chaps 4-6
4. The unfortunate implications of this position were classically demonstrated by Juliet Mitchell in her path-breaking manifesto of second-wave socialist feminism: 'Women: The Longest Revolution', New Left Review, 40 (1966), 11-37
5. For more recent socialist-feminist analyses of this issue, see H. Hartmann, 'The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism', in L. Sargent, ed., Women and Revolution: A Discussion of the Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism (Boston 1981), 1-41
6. and L. Nicholson, 'Feminism and Marxism: Integrating Kinship with the Economic', in S. Benhabib and D. Cornell, eds, Feminism as Critique (Cambridge 1987), 25-6
7. For sophisticated examples of the interpenetration of Marxist and feminist theory that illustrate this blunting of polemical force, see P. Armstrong and H. Armstrong, 'Beyond Sexless Class and Classless Sex: Towards Feminist Marxism', in R. Hamilton and M. Barrett, eds, The Politics of Diversity: Feminism, Marxism, and Nationalism (London 1986), 208-37
8. See, above all, C. Sowerwine, Sisters or Citizens? Women and Socialism in France Since 1876 (Cambridge 1982)
9. See also M. Boxer, 'Socialism Faces Feminism: The Failure of Synthesis in France', in M. Boxer and J. Quataert, eds, Socialist Women: European Socialist Feminism in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (New York 1978)
10. and P. Hilden, 'Rewriting the History of Socialism: Working Women and the Parti Ouvrier Français', European History Quarterly, 17 (1987), 285-306
11. Patricia Hilden's otherwise illuminating Working Women and Socialist Politics in France 1880-1914: A Regional Study (Oxford 1986) essentially focuses on political practice rather than ideological discourse and is confined to one region of France. She has made no sustained effort to elucidate the 'women's question' as it was addressed in the national organs of French Marxism - L 'Égalité and Le Socialiste
12. For a critique of her work, see D. Reid, 'Histoire des Femmes ou Histoire de la Famille', Mouvement Social, 152 (1990), 61-76
13. Which does not mean that all members of the Party were recognizable Marxists, or that all French Marxists belonged to the POF
14. The definitive institutional history of the POF remains Claude Willard's magisterial Le Mouvement Socialiste en France (1893-1905): Les Guesdistes (Paris 1965). For a detailed study of the Guesdists' ideological paradigm, see R. Stuart, Marxism at Work: Ideology, Class, and French Socialism during the Third Republic (Cambridge 1992). Neither Willard's nor my own book devotes sufficient attention to issues of gender
15. Paul Lafargue - co-leader of the Parti Ouvrier, Marx's son-in-law, and (allegedly) the least feminist of Guesdists - none the less could write that 'women have more energy and will than men do. It is through women that we will arrive at Communism'. Report of a speech by Lafargue in Le Courrier de Fourmies, 19 April 1891, cited in J. Girault, 'Une Opération de Diversion: L'Instruction du Procès Lafargue-Culine en 1891', Mouvement Social, 66 (1969), 86. For the antifeminist characterization of Lafargue
16. see Hilden, 'Rewriting the History of Socialism', 285-306, and for a (rare) text that supports this interpretation
17. see P. Lafargue, 'La Journée Légale de Travail Réduite à Huit Heures', L'Égalité, 26 February 1882. In fact, Lafargue, like most Guesdists, never developed a stable approach to the women's question - vacillating unpredictably throughout his career between explicit feminism and implicit male chauvinism
18. His early feminism is emphasized in L. Derfler, Paul Lafargue and the Founding of French Marxism (Cambridge, MA 1991), 81. For Lafargue's most emphatic statement of feminist commitment, however
19. see his La Question de la Femme (Paris 1904), where he actually argues for women's physical and mental superiority over men, and derides his period's common arguments for female inferiority, having particular fun with Lombroso's argument that there were more male than female criminals! Hilden's erroneously categorical characterization of Lafargue is, unfortunately, being accepted into the historiography of Guesdism. See, for instance, Reid, op. cit., 65
20. Hilden, 'Rewriting the History of Socialism', op. cit. Hilden's analysis, however, has the inestimable advantage of recognizing that the Guesdists did indeed develop a powerful anti-misogynist discourse, however dubious her periodization of this phenomenon. For further discussion of the Guesdists' convoluted understanding of gender and its feminist manifestation, see my '"Calm, with a Grave and Serious Temperament, rather Male": French Marxism, Gender, and Feminism 1882-1905', International Review of Social History, 41 (1996), 57-82
21. For Marx's reproductive 'naturalism' see M. O'Brien, 'Reproducing Marxist Man', in L. Clark and L. Lange, eds, The Sexism of Social and Political Theory: Women and Reproduction from Plato to Nietzsche (Toronto 1979), 99-116
22. and for Marx's and Engels's lack of realism about working-class family relations, see W. Seccombe, 'Domestic Labor and the Working-Class Household', in B. Fox, ed., Hidden in the Household: Women's Domestic Labor under Capitalism (Toronto 1980), 64-5
23. and H. Benenson, 'Victorian Sexual Ideology and Marx's Theory of the Working Class', International Labor and Working Class History, 25 (1984), 1-23 (see also the critiques of Benenson in this and subsequent issues, with Benenson's reply)
24. For this vacillation, see P. Smith, 'Domestic Labour and Marx's Theory of Value', in A. Kuhn and A. Wolpe, eds, Feminism and Materialism: Women and Modes of Production (London 1978), 198-219
25. and W. Seccombe, 'The Housewife and Her Labour Under Capitalism', New Left Review, 83 (1974), 3-24 (and see subsequent critiques of Seccombe in the NLR). Jane Humphries has been the most rigorous advocate of the working-class family as a source of proletarian strength
26. See her 'Class Struggle and the Persistence of the Working Class Family', Cambridge Journal of Economics, 1 (1977), 241-58
27. and her 'The Working-Class Family: A Marxist Perspective', in J. Elshtain, ed., The Family in Political Thought (Brighton 1982), 197-222
28. For an argument similar to Humphries's in a French context, see M.-H. Zylberberg-Hocquard, Femmes et Féminisme dans le Mouvement Ouvrier Français (Paris 1981), 70-1
29. There are critiques of this position in M. Barrett, Women's Oppression Today: Problems in Marxist Feminist Analysis (London 1980), 217-19
30. and G. Sen, 'The Social Division of Labour and the Working-Class Family: Towards a Conceptual Synthesis of Class Relations and the Subordination of Women', Review of Radical Political Economics, 12 (1980), 78
31. There is an effective synthesis of the two positions in M. McIntosh, 'The Family in Socialist-Feminist Politics', in R. Brunt and C. Rowan, eds, Feminism, Culture, and Politics (London 1982), 109-29
32. There is a good critique of the way this belief has absolved Marxists from serious attention to the family in Humphries, "The Working-Class Family', op. cit., 197
33. The best expression of this argument may be found in Paul Lafargue's important Origine et Évolution de la Propriété (Paris 1895), which is almost as concerned with family forms as with the property question
34. Dr Z., 'Liberté du Travail', Le Socialiste, 12 August 1891
35. For the domestic labour debate, see Seccombe, "The Housewife and her Labour under Capitalism', op. cit. There is a useful collection of relevant material in B. Fox, ed., Hidden in the Household: Women's Domestic Labor under Capitalism (Toronto 1980)
36. For discussion of the Guesdists' gendered approach to the labour question, see my 'Gendered Labour in the Ideological Discourse of French Marxism: The Parti Ouvrier Français 1882-1905', Gender and History, 9 (1997), 107-29
37. J. Guesde, 'Première Le4cLon à un Professeur: Le Collectivisme et la Famille', L'Égalité, 1 January 1882
38. C. Vérecque, 'La Famille Ouvrière', Le Socialiste, 23-30 June 1901
39. Largely, although not exclusively, as transmitted by Engels's Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State, a text repeatedly excerpted and popularized in Le Socialiste, particularly by Lafargue
40. See, e.g., P. Lafargue, 'L'Évolution de la Propriété ', Le Socialiste, 7 December 1890
41. P. Lafargue, 'Le Matriarcat', Le Socialiste, 4 September 1886
42. See, e.g., Anonymous, 'Conférence sur l'Évolution de la Famille', Le Socialiste, 28 February 1892
43. Clara, 'Les Femmes commes Inventrices', Le Socialiste, 12 February 1887. Zetkin appeared frequently in Le Socialiste, not always as a commentator on women's issues. The Guesdists prided themselves on their cosmopolitanism, although it would be a mistake to search for the origins of their gender theory in foreign influences. They appropriated the ideas and examples of foreign comrades very much on the basis of their own principles and priorities
44. Report of a speech by Aline Valette, 'Le Parti Ouvrier en France - Calais', Le Socialiste, 14 April 1894
45. For incisive analysis of this thesis, see N. Hartsock, Money, Sex and Power: Towards a Feminist Historical Materialism (New York 1983)
46. Dr Z., 'Le Juif et la Femme', Le Socialiste, 10 July 1897
47. Hilden, 'Rewriting the History of Socialism', op. cit., 285-306. For the injustice of this characterization, see n. 10
48. For a description of the profound difference between the pre-modern family with its extensive economic, political and even religious functions and its attenuated modern equivalent, see A. Delon, 'Le Programme du Parti Ouvrier et la Famille', Le Socialiste, 8 December 1895
49. This radical-feminist strand in Guesdist rhetoric has received little recognition, and less analysis. But see J. Rabaut, '1900: Tournant du Féminisme Français', Bulletin de la Société d'Histoire Moderne, 82 (1983), 6. For an effective critique of the essential vacuity of this anti-familial radicalism in the Marxist tradition, see Mitchell, op. cit., 20
50. Reprinted in 'Variété', Le Socialiste, 2 December 1893, and repeated without attribution on many occasions
51. G. Bertrand, 'La Semaine', Le Socialiste, 28 August 1898
52. P. Myrens, 'Sélection Naturelle et Sélection Sociale', Le Socialiste, 18-25 August 1901
53. G. Deville, 'L'Amour Libre', L'Égalité, 22 October 1882
54. For a powerful instance of this theme, see Anonymous, 'Sapho', Le Socialiste, 2 January 1886. Guesdists loved to report bourgeois scandals, the more perverse the better, salaciously retailing rumours
55. Bracke, 'La Semaine - Quelle Famille!', Le Socialiste, 18-25 December 1904
56. Alain Corbin's otherwise invaluable Women for Sale: Prostitution and Sexuality in France after 1850 (Cambridge, MA 1990) assumes, incorrectly, that socialists were indifferent to the issue of prostitution (238). A similar error is made in my Marxism at Work, op. cit., 151-4
57. For widespread working-class hostility towards prostitutes, see J. McMillan, Housewife or Harlot: The Place of Women in French Society 1870-1940 (New York 1981), 43
58. An exemplary analysis of the political nature of prostitution, both as sexual practice and as cultural metaphor, may be found in C. Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Cambridge 1988), 195-9
59. For this anxiety, see M. Boxer, 'Foyer or Factory: Working Class Women in Nineteenth Century France', Second Annual Meeting of the Western Society for French History (1974), 193
60. and C. Dufrancatel, 'Les Amants de la Liberté? Stratégies de Femmes, Luttes Républicaines, Luttes Ouvrières', Révokes Logiques, 5(1977), 74
61. 'Parti Ouvrier', Le Socialiste, 19 September 1885
62. L. Tilquin, 'Soirée Familiale du 31 Juillet 1887', Le Socialiste, 13 August 1887
63. For a good descripiton of this alleged capitalist strategy, see C. Bonnier, La Question de la Femme (Paris 1897), 42-3
64. For the characterization of capitalists as pimps, see, among many instances, P. Lafargue, 'Prostitution, Morale, et Religion', Le Socialiste, 8 April 1891. Guesdists, however, never expanded this argument, as did some anarchists, to the analogy whereby all wage-labour became the equivalent of prostitution - a polemical strategy described in Corbin, op. cit., 242
65. Anonymous, untitled (columns 2 and 3, 2), Le Socialiste, 21 November 1885
66. Lafargue, La Question de la Femme, op. cit., 3
67. There is a useful Marxist critique of these issues in J. Gardiner, 'Political Economy of Domestic Labour in Capitalist Society', in D. Barker and S. Allen, eds, Dependence and Exploitation in Work and Marriage (London 1976), 109-20
68. The Guesdists, in fact, cited Fourier with explicit approval, including approving references to his notorious prediction that women, freed from the sordid constraints of modern morality, would settle 'like butterflies' on successive sexual partners. See P. Lafargue, 'Conjungo', Le Socialiste, 30 June-7 July 1901
69. For Deville's sexual adventures, see J. Hall, 'Gabriel Deville and the Development of French Socialism 1871-1905', PhD thesis (Auburn University 1983)
70. J. Guesde, 'Le Collectivisme et la Famille', Le Socialiste, 9 April 1893
71. P. Lafargue, La Question de la Femme, 3
72. C. Bonnier, 'La Stérilité', Le Socialiste, 21 February 1897
73. P. Lafargue, 'Le Programme Municipal', Le Socialiste, 9 April 1892
74. There is a useful discussion of the mentalities underpinning the new 'socializing' attitude towards children at risk in R. Fuchs, 'Morality and Poverty: Public Welfare for Mothers in Paris 1870-1900', French History, 2 (1988), 288-311
75. The Guesdists' carefully-crafted programmes of 'secours à la maternité', interestingly, were to pay family credits directly to the mother. C. Vérecque, 'L'Enfance Ouvrière et le Parti Ouvrier Français', Le Socialiste, 23 February-2 March 1902
76. Dr A. Delon, 'Le Programme du Parti Ouvrier et la Famille', Le Socialiste, 8 December 1895 (emphasis in original)
77. Jenny in a letter to her sister Laura Lafargue of March 1882, cited in S. Rowbotham, 'Introduction', to The Daughters of Karl Marx (New York 1982), xxiv. Rowbotham gives a moving description of the destruction of Jenny and Laura's very considerable intellectual and political abilities and commitments by child-care and domestic responsibilities - an experience neither woman interpreted as anything other than an individual affliction
78. 'Le Parti Ouvrier en France - Calais', Le Socialiste, 14 April 1894
79. For analysis of this anti-socialist strategy, see A. Nye, Feminist Theory and the Philosophies of Man (London 1988), 32 and 65 (n. 2)
80. For the impossibility of a socialist politics hostile t the family, with specific reference to the Guesdists, see M. Boxer, 'French Socialism, Feminism and the Family', Third Republic/Troisième République, 3-4 (1977), 132
81. It is worth noting that most French feminists, as well, flinched from challenging the family and, indeed, developed a family-orientated feminism to some extent in response to their critics' attacks. K. Offen, 'Aspects of the Woman Question during the Third Republic', Third Republic/Troisième République, 3-4 (1977), 5
82. See, for instance, Bonnier, 'La Caserne Collectiviste', Le Socialiste, 11 December 1898
83. Guesde's electoral defeat in his Roubaix constituency in 1898 was due to some extent to his conservative opponent's exploitation of this issue. See the poster identifying him as 'an enemy of the family' in the Fonds Guesde of the Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis, item 648/1. For an uncompromising radical feminism that demonstrates the utter unacceptability of hostility towards the traditional family during the period, see the tragic career of Madelaine Pelletier, as described in F. Gordon, The Integral Feminist: Madelaine Pelletier 1874-1939: Feminism, Socialism and Medicine (Minneapolis 1990)
84. The centrality of the family to working-class survival strategies is pointed out by Louise Tilly in her fascinating 'Rich and Poor in a French Textile City', in L. Moch and G. Stark, eds, Essays on the Family and Historical Change (College Station 1984), 65-90
85. and in her 'Individual Lives and Family Strategies in the French Proletariat', in R. Wheaton and T. Hareven, eds, Family and Sexuality in French History (Philadelphia 1980), 202-3
86. and is illuminated theoretically in G. Sen, op. cit., 81 and J. Humphries, 'The Working-Class Family', op. cit., 197-222
87. For the virtual deification of the housewife in the discourse of the French labour movement, see M. Perrot, 'L'Éoge de Ménagère dans le Discours des Ouvriers Français au XIXe Siècle', Romantisme, 13-14 (1976)
88. There is an interesting analysis of the long-term systematic inability of either workers or capitalists to conceive of any alternative to the traditional family in C. Creighton, 'The Family and Capitalism in Marxist Theory', in M. Shaw, ed., Marxist Sociology Revisited (London 1985), 201-6
89. One of the least satisfactory aspects of Patricia Hilden's work is her unlikely assumption that working women would have been alienated by the more traditionalist rhetoric of the POF, although she does fleetingly recognize that some w men might have been dubious about feminist reforms. P. Hilden, 'Rewriting the History of Socialism', op. cit., 291 and 303
90. M. Perrot, 'La Femme Populaire Rebelle', in C. Dufrancatel et al., eds, L'Histoire sans Qualites (Paris 1979), 131
91. M. Perrot, 'La Ménagère dans l'Espace Parisien au XIXe Siècle', in M.-C. Pasquier et al., Stratégies des Femmes (Paris 1984), 87
92. and M. Perrot, 'Women, Power and History: The Case of Nineteenth-Century France', in S. Reynolds, ed., Women, State and Revolution: Essays on Power and Gender in Europe since 1789 (Amherst 1987), 44-59
93. R. Jonas, 'Equality in Difference? Patterns of Feminine Labor Militancy in Nineteenth-Century France', Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Western Society for French History, 15 (1988), 293-4
94. L. Berlanstein, 'Illegitimacy, Concubinage, and the Proletarianization of a French Town 1760-1914, Journal of Family History (winter 1980), 360-74
95. Hilden, Working Women and Socialist Politics in France 1880-1914, 299
96. Fourth series of Le Socialiste, from 7 July 1895 to 16 February 1896
97. For these bourgeois self-doubts, see E. Kanipe, 'Working-Class Women and the Social Question in Late Nineteenth-Century France', Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Western Society for French History, 6 (1978), 298-306
98. Dr Z., 'Hygiène Capitaliste', Le Socialiste, 14 December 1890
99. Geva, 'La Famille dans les Grands Centres Industriels', Le Socialiste, 7 January 1888
100. Ch. Brunellière, 'De la Vrai Loi de Population', Le Socialiste, 29 December 1895
101. As in J. Guesde, 'Rappel à la Pudeur', Le Cri du Peuple, 26 August 1884. This theme was a favourite in the socialist press in general, according to McMillan, op. cit., 15-16
102. H.M. (Henri Millet), 'Le Parti Ouvrier en France - Romilly', Le Socialiste, 26 January 1896
103. A. Valette, Socialisme et Sexualisme (Paris 1893), 59-60
104. There is an excellent study of this aspect of Guesdist ideology in L. Grani, 'Jules Guesde, Paul Lafargue, et les Problèmes de Population', Population, 34 (1979), 1024-44
105. For the broader ideological context of demography as relevant to the Guesdists, see K. Offen, 'Depopulation, Nationalism, and Feminism in Fin-de-Siècle France', American Historical Review, 89 (1984), 660
106. and A. McLaren, 'Sex and Socialism: the Opposition of the French Left to Birth Control in the Nineteenth Century', Journal of the History of Ideas 37 (1976), 491
107. For the general issue of employment and demography during the period, see W. Reddy, 'Family and Factory: French Linen Weavers in the Belle Époque', Journal of Social History, 8 (1975), 106-7
108. The Guesdists were explicitly anti-Malthusian, arguing that 'at the moment, the globe could feed and clothe a population ten times larger than it is', and that deprivation was not a result of over-population but of an iniquitous social system. 'A Travers la Semaine', Le Socialiste, 20-7 December 1903
109. J. Guesde, 'La France se Meurt...', Le Socialiste, 10 September 1887 (emphasis in original)
110. J. Phalippou, 'Dépopulation et Socialisme', Le Socialiste, 18 December 1898
111. Br. (Bracke), 'La Semaine', Le Socialiste, 1 July 1900
112. H. Ghesquière, La Femme et le Socialisme (Lille 1898), 7
113. P. Grados, 'Plaies Sociales', Le Socialiste, 20-27 November 1904
114. Report of a speech by Aline Valette, 'Le Parti Ouvrier en France - Petit-Quevilly', Le Socialiste, 2 June 1895
115. 'Le Parti Ouvrier en France - Andeville', Le Socialiste, 3 November 1895
116. 'Dr Z' - Pierre Bonnier - played the predominant role in developing 'sexualisme' as a coherent doctrine. See Boxer, 'French Socialism, Feminism and the Family', 139
117. For a vitriolic critique of 'sexualisme', see L. Klejman and F. Rochefort, L'Égalité en Marche: Le Féminisme sous la Troisième République (Paris 1989), 91-3
118. There are only two references to working-class domestic violence in the entire Guesdist corpus, one of them reporting that wife-beating had not been the cause of a woman's suicide! H. Pécry, 'Pensées Bourgeoises', Le Socialiste, 22 September 1895. The other is interesting in that it demonstrates a feminist perceptiveness on the issue that might well have been elaborated and extended - thereby vividly illustrating the more common self-limitation of Guesdist discourse. Lafargue describes a young unmarried working woman who told him that her boyfriend had struck her 'as if I had been his wife!', an incident to which she had responded by walking out on 'the beast' - thereby demonstrating to Lafargue that 'a woman who respects herself, earns her own keep and doesn't have children... isn't likely to submit herself to the subjugation of marriage'
119. J. Guesde, 'La Femme et son Droit au Travail', Le Socialiste, 9 October 1898. For the general inability within the French working-class movement to conceive of men's integration into the domestic realm, see Zylberberg-Hocquard, op. cit., 185
120. Lafargue, La Question de la Femme, 22
121. For Lafargue's own thoroughly unliberated domestic life, see Derfler, op. cit. And, for the futility of integrating women into the public realm without integrating men into domesticity, see J. Matthews, 'Deconstructing the Masculine Universe: The Case of Women's Work', in All Her Labours (Sydney 1984), 15
122. M. Molyneux, 'Beyond the Domestic Labour Debate', New Left Review 116 (1979), 27
123. and particularly H. Hartmann, "The Family as the Locus of Gender, Class, and Political Struggle: The Example of Housework', Signs, 6 (1981), 366-94
124. A. Valette, 'Deux Poids et Deux Mesures', Le Socialiste, 6 December 1896
125. Stuart, Marxism at Work, 479-91. There is a good analysis of this Marxist occlusion of gender conflict within the working-class family in J. Gardiner, 'Women's Domestic Labour', New Left Review, 89 (1975), 7-8