The Second Sex (24 page)

The eighteenth century is also divided. In 1744, the author of the
Controverse sur l’âme de la femme (Controversy over Woman’s Soul
) declares that “woman created uniquely for man will cease to be at the end of the world because she will cease to be useful for the object for which she had been created, from which follows necessarily that her soul is not immortal.” In a slightly less radical way, Rousseau is the spokesman of the bourgeoisie and dooms woman to her husband and motherhood. “All the education of women should be relative to men … Woman is made to yield to man and to bear his injustices,” he asserts. However, the democratic and individualist ideal of the eighteenth century is favorable to women; for most philosophers they are human beings equal to those of the strong sex. Voltaire denounces the injustice of their lot. Diderot considers their inferiority largely
made
by society. “Women, I pity thee!” he writes. He thinks that “in all customs the cruelty of civil laws makes common cause with the cruelty of nature against women. They have been treated as idiot beings.” Montesquieu, paradoxically, believes that women should be subordinate to man in the home but that everything predisposes them to political action. “It is against reason and against nature for women to be mistresses in the house … but not for them to govern an empire.” Helvétius shows that woman’s inferiority is created by the absurdity of her education; d’Alembert is of the same opinion. Economic feminism timidly makes its appearance through a woman, Mme de Ciray.
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But it is Mercier almost alone in his
Tableau de Paris
who rises up against the destitution of women workers and tackles the fundamental question of women’s work. Condorcet wants women to enter political life. He considers them man’s equals and defends them against classic attacks: “Women are said … not to have their own
feeling of justice, that they listen to their feelings more than to their conscience… [But] it is not nature, it is education, it is the social existence that causes this difference.” And elsewhere: “The more women have been enslaved by laws, the more dangerous their empire has been … It would lessen if women had less interest in keeping it, if it ceased being for them the sole means of defending themselves and escaping oppression.”

The Revolution might have been expected to change the fate of woman. It did nothing of the kind. This bourgeois revolution respected bourgeois institutions and values; and it was waged almost exclusively by men. It must be pointed out that during the entire ancien régime working-class women as a sex enjoyed the most independence. A woman had the right to run a business, and she possessed all the necessary capacities to exercise her trade autonomously. She shared in production as linen maid, laundress, burnisher, shopgirl, and so on; she worked either at home or in small businesses; her material independence allowed her great freedom of behavior: a woman of modest means could go out, go to taverns, and control her own body almost like a man; she is her husband’s partner and his equal. She is oppressed on an economic and not on a sexual level. In the countryside, the peasant woman plays a considerable role in rural labor; she is treated like a servant; often she does not eat at the same table as her husband and sons; she toils harder and the burdens of maternity add to her fatigue. But as in old farming societies, since she is necessary to man, he respects her for it; their goods, interests, and concerns are shared; she enjoys great authority in the home. From within their difficult lives, these women could have asserted themselves as individuals and demanded their rights; but a tradition of timidity and submission weighed on them: the Estates-General cahiers record an insignificant number of feminine claims, limited to “Men should not engage in trades that are the prerogative of women.” And it is true that women are found alongside their men in demonstrations and riots: they are the ones who go to Versailles to find “the baker, the baker’s wife, and the baker’s little boy.”
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But it is not the people who led the Revolution and
reaped its fruits. As for bourgeois women, a few rallied ardently to the cause of freedom: Mme Roland, Lucile Desmoulins, and Théroigne de Méricourt; one of them, Charlotte Corday, significantly influenced the outcome when she assassinated Marat. There were a few feminist movements. In 1791, Olympe de Gouges proposed a “Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen” equivalent to the “Declaration of the Rights of Man,” demanding that all masculine privileges be abolished. In 1790 the same ideas are found in
Motion de la pauvre Javotte
(Poor Javotte’s Motion) and in other similar lampoons; but in spite of Condorcet’s support, these efforts are abortive, and Olympe perishes on the scaffold. In addition to
L’Impatient
, the newspaper she founded, a few other short-lived papers appear. Women’s clubs merge for the most part with men’s and are taken over by them. On Brumaire 28, 1793, when the actress Rose Lacombe, president of the Society of Republican and Revolutionary Women, along with a delegation of women, forces the doors of the Conseil Général, the prosecutor Chaumette pronounces words in the assembly that could be inspired by Saint Paul and Saint Thomas: “Since when are women allowed to renounce their sex and become men?… [Nature] has told woman: Be a woman. Child care, household tasks, sundry motherhood cares, those are your tasks.” Women are banned from entering the Conseil and soon even from the clubs where they had learned their politics. In 1790, the right of the firstborn and masculine privilege were eliminated; girls and boys became equals regarding succession; in 1792 divorce law was established, relaxing strict marital ties; but these were feeble conquests. Bourgeois women were too integrated into the family to find concrete grounds for solidarity with each other; they did not constitute a separate caste capable of forcing their demands: on an economic level, they existed as parasites. Thus, while women could have participated in events in spite of their sex, they were prevented by their class, and those from the agitating class were condemned to stand aside because they were women. When economic power falls into the hands of the workers, it will then be possible for the working woman to gain the capacities that the parasitic woman, noble or bourgeois, never obtained.

During the liquidation of the Revolution woman enjoys an anarchic freedom. But when society is reorganized, she is rigidly enslaved again. From the feminist point of view, France was ahead of other countries; but for the unfortunate modern French woman, her status was determined during a military dictatorship; the Napoleonic Code, which sealed her fate for a century, greatly held back her emancipation. Like all military leaders, Napoleon wants to see woman solely as a mother; but, heir to a bourgeois revolution, he does not intend to demolish the social structure by giving
the mother priority over the wife: he prohibits the querying of paternity; he sets down harsh conditions for the unwed mother and the illegitimate child. Yet the married woman herself does not find recourse in her dignity as mother; the feudal paradox is perpetuated. Girls and wives are deprived of citizens’ rights, prohibiting them from functions such as the practice of law or wardship. But the unmarried woman enjoys her civil role fully while marriage preserves the
mundium
. Woman owes
obedience
to her husband; he can have her confined in cases of adultery and obtain a divorce from her; if he kills the guilty wife when caught in the act, he is excusable in the eyes of the law; the husband, on the other hand, receives an infraction only if he brings a concubine into the home, and this is the only ground that would allow his wife to divorce him. Man decides where they will live, and he has many more rights over the children than the mother; and—except in cases where the woman manages a business—his authorization is necessary for her contracts. Marital power is rigorously exercised, both over the wife herself as a person and over her possessions.

Throughout the nineteenth century, the legal system continues to reinforce the code’s severity, depriving, among other things, the woman of all rights of alienation. In 1826 the Restoration abolishes divorce,
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and the 1848 Constitutional Assembly refuses to reestablish it; it does not reappear until 1884, and then it is still difficult to obtain. The bourgeoisie was never more powerful, yet they recognize the dangers implicit in the Industrial Revolution; they assert themselves with nervous authority. The freedom of ideas inherited from the eighteenth century never makes inroads into family moral principles; these remain as they are defined by the early-nineteenth-century reactionary thinkers Joseph de Maistre and Bonald. They base the value of order on divine will and demand a strictly hierarchical society; the family, the indissoluble social cell, will be the microcosm of society. “Man is to woman what woman is to the child”; or “power is to the minister what the minister is to the people,” says Bonald. Thus the husband governs, the wife administers, and the children obey. Divorce is, of course, forbidden; and woman is confined to the home. “Women belong to the family and not to politics, and nature made them for housework and not for public service,” adds Bonald. These hierarchies were respected in the family as described by Le Play in the middle of the century.

In a slightly different way, Auguste Comte also demands a hierarchy of the sexes; between men and women there are “radical differences, both physical and moral, profoundly separating one from the other, in every
species of animal and
especially in the human race
.” Femininity is a kind of “prolonged childhood” that sets women apart from the “ideal type of the race.” This biological infantilism expresses an intellectual weakness; the role of this purely affective being is that of spouse and housewife, no match for man: “Neither instruction nor education is suitable for her.” As with Bonald, woman is confined to the family, and within this micro society the father governs because woman is “inept in all government even domestic”; she only administers and advises. Her instruction has to be limited. “Women and the proletariat cannot and must not become originators, nor do they wish to.” And Comte foresees society’s evolution as totally eliminating woman’s work outside the family. In the second part of his work, Comte, swayed by his love for Clotilde de Vaux, exalts woman to the point of almost making her a divinity, the emanation of the Great Being; in the temple of Humanity, positivist religion will propose her for the adoration of the people, but only for her morality; man acts, while she loves: she is more deeply altruistic than he. But according to the positivist system, she is still no less confined to the family; divorce is still forbidden for her, and it would even be preferable for her widowhood to last forever; she has no economic or political rights; she is only a wife and an educator.

Balzac expresses the same ideal in more cynical ways: woman’s destiny, and her only glory, is to make the hearts of men beat, he writes in
La physiologie du mariage (The Physiology of Marriage
). “Woman is a possession acquired by contract; she is personal property, and the possession of her is as good as a security—indeed, properly speaking, woman is only man’s annexe.” Here he is speaking for the bourgeoisie, which intensified its antifeminism in reaction to eighteenth-century license and threatening progressive ideas. Having brilliantly presented the idea at the beginning of
The Physiology of Marriage
that this loveless institution forcibly leads the wife to adultery, Balzac exhorts husbands to rein in wives to total subjugation if they want to avoid the ridicule of dishonor. They must be denied training and culture, forbidden to develop their individuality, forced to wear uncomfortable clothing, and encouraged to follow a debilitating dietary regime. The bourgeoisie follows this program exactly, confining women to the kitchen and to housework, jealously watching their behavior; they are enclosed in daily life rituals that hindered all attempts at independence. In return, they are honored and endowed with the most exquisite respect. “The married woman is a slave who must be seated on a throne,” says Balzac; of course men must give in to women in all irrelevant circumstances, yielding them first place; women must not carry heavy burdens as in primitive societies; they are readily spared all painful tasks and worries: at the same time this relieves them of all responsibility. It is hoped
that, thus duped, seduced by the ease of their condition, they will accept the role of mother and housewife to which they are being confined. And in fact, most bourgeois women capitulate. As their education and their parasitic situation make them dependent on men, they never dare to voice their claims: those who do are hardly heard. It is easier to put people in chains than to remove them if the chains bring prestige, said George Bernard Shaw. The bourgeois woman clings to the chains because she clings to her class privileges. It is drilled into her and she believes that women’s liberation would weaken bourgeois society; liberated from the male, she would be condemned to work; while she might regret having her rights to private property subordinated to her husband’s, she would deplore even more having this property abolished; she feels no solidarity with working-class women: she feels closer to her husband than to a woman textile worker. She makes his interests her own.