Women, Resistance and Revolution (17 page)

These actions were still from a quite customary definition of womanliness. Although revolutionary political ideas were impinging on these women and although they acted with conscious historical memory, they were not challenging in any way their role as women. However, very easily in such moments the new conception of commitment could upset what had been regarded as the woman’s sphere. A head-on clash could ensure between what the women felt to be their duty and what the men felt it to be, as wives, daughters, mothers. Thus in 1792 when the women’s battalions were formed in the
French Revolution there was opposition from the men. In challenging the men’s sole right to patriotism and glory the revolutionary women moved into a form of feminism. There was a similar development in 1871. One source of feminist consciousness here came from the attempt to equalize revolutionary struggle. A women’s battalion was not allowed but the women of the Commune accompanied their husbands or lovers and often fought with them.
La Sociale
reported on 5 April: ‘A band of women armed with chassepots today passed by the Place de la Concorde. They were going to join the Commune fighters.’
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Often the dividing lines between nursing at one of the first aid posts, serving as a ‘cantinière’ or being a soldier were not clear. On the battlefield Louise Michel, a schoolteacher prominent in the Commune, looked after the wounded and took part in the fighting. The accounts these women leave describe their complete commitment to the Commune. They lived only for the revolution in a way which is only possible in times of extreme crisis. But they were not always well regarded by the officers. André Leo, a revolutionary feminist who was a journalist, described how obstacles were put in their way by the officers and surgeons who were hostile even though the troops were in favour of them. She believed that this division was because the officers still retained the narrow consciousness of military men while the soldiers were equally revolutionary citizens. She felt this prejudice had had serious political consequences. In the first revolution women had been excluded from freedom and equality; they had returned to Catholicism and reaction. André Leo maintained that the republicans were inconsistent. They did not want women to be under the sway of the priests, but they were upset when women were free-thinkers and wanted to act like free human beings. Republican men were just replacing the authority of Emperor and God with their own. They still needed subjects, or at least subjected women. They did not want to admit any more than the revolutionaries of the 1790s that woman was responsible to herself. ‘She should remain neutral and passive, under the guidance of man. She will have done nothing to change her confessor.’
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Yet this was the very antithesis of all the claims of revolutionary ideas. It was evident that ‘The Revolution is the liberty and responsibility of every human being, limited only by the rights of all, without privilege of race or sex.’ Thus by taking the revolution seriously the
women of the Commune also found themselves forced to take up feminist positions in that they had to struggle not only against the enemy at Versailles but to confront the prejudice and suspicion of some of the men on their own side. The experience was one which was subsequently to be repeated in other revolutionary movements. It is at the point when the revolution starts to move women out of their passivity into the conscious and active role of militants that the mockery, the caricatures, the laughter with strong sexual undertones begin. It is one of the most effective weapons against women’s emergence. It is one thing to be the object of hatred and insults, and another to be the object of scorn and hilarity as well. It produces its own self-mocking defences and its own peculiar paralysis.

If there was some ambiguity in the attitude of the men of the left there was none in that of the men of the right. Here class hatred, political elitism and sexual authoritarianism united in hysterical denunciation and acts of atrocity. Listen to Maxime du Camp on the women:

Those who gave themselves to the Commune – and there were many – had but a single ambition: to raise themselves above the level of man by exaggerating his vices. There they found an ideal they could achieve. They were venomous and cowardly. They were all there agitating and squawking: inmates from Saint-Lazare out on the spree;… the vendors of modes à la tripe de Caen; the gentlemen’s seamstresses; the gentlemen’s shirtmakers; the teachers of grown-up schoolboys.… What was profoundly comic was that these absconders from the workhouse unfailingly invoked Joan of Arc, and were not above comparing themselves to her.… During the final days, all of these bellicose viragos held out longer than the men did behind the barricades. Many of them were arrested, with powder-blackened hands and shoulders bruised by the recoil of their rifles; they were still palpitating from the over-stimulation of battle.
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The penalties were severe. Beside the names which are well known, like Louise Michel, sentenced to transportation to a penal settlement, there were innumerable others. A concierge, Louise Noel; a parasol-maker, Jeanne Laymet; a cook, Eugenie Lhilly; the seamstress, Eulalie Papavoine; Elizabeth Retiffe, a cardboard maker; the rag-picker Marie Wolff – they were transported, given hard labour and executed. They had gone to join their lovers on the barricades or they had been moved by the sight of the wounded. They
loved the Republic, hated the rich, and rose against the years of humiliation they had experienced as workers and as women. Captain Jouenne began the indictment at their trial by calling them:

unworthy creatures who seem to have taken it on themselves to become an opprobrium to their sex, and to repudiate the great and magnificent role of woman in society … a legitimate wife, the object of our affection and respect, entirely devoted to her family.… But if, deserting this sacred mission, the nature of her influence changes, and serves none but the spirit of evil, she becomes a moral monstrosity; then woman is more dangerous than the most dangerous man.
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There was a change too in the way she was treated by the gentlemen of the ruling class. Elisée Reclus, the geographer taken prisoner, described one of the women canteen workers:

The poor woman was in the row in front of mine, at the side of her husband. She was not at all pretty, nor was she young: rather a poor, middle-aged proletarian, small, marching with difficulty. Insults rained down on her, all from officers prancing on horseback along the road. A very young hussar officer said, ‘You know what we’re going to do with her? We’re going to screw her with a red hot iron.’ A vast horrified silence fell among the soldiers.
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Here expressed in a particularly intense and repulsive form was the hypocrisy which the young Marx had exposed so vehemently. Here is the real nature of the sensibility and gallantry of the men of the upper classes towards femininity. The same issues appeared in other movements which were not specifically revolutionary. For example, in the anti-slavery agitation in the United States Sarah and Angelina Grimke – along with many other women – became convinced of the moral righteousness of the anti-slavery cause and started to write and speak for the movement. They were denounced in 1837 in a pastoral letter which was read from the pulpit and distributed by the General Association of the Congregational Clergy. This letter stated that the ‘appropriate duties and influences of women’ were clearly put in the New Testament:

The power of woman is in her dependence, flowing from the consciousness of that weakness which God has given her for her protection, and which keeps her in those departments of life that form the character of individuals and of the nation …

But when she assumes the place and tone of man as a public performer, our care and our protection of her seem unnecessary; we put ourselves in self-defense against her; she yields the power which God has given her for protection, and her character becomes unnatural.
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When the Grimke sisters decided to respond by defending the rights of women they met also with hostility from men in their own movement. The argument was that it would damage the anti-slavery cause to be connected with feminism. This argument appeared again and again in various contexts in radical labour and revolutionary struggles. Ultimately the result of this was women breaking from those movements not simply organizationally but politically. In 1881, after months of campaigning for women’s suffrage and losing partly because male abolitionists wouldn’t support them, the feminists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony wrote their ‘Message to Future Generations’:

Our liberal men counselled us to silence during the war, and we were silent in our own wrongs; they counselled us again to silence in Kansas and New York, lest we should defeat ‘Negroe Suffrage’, and threatened if we were not, we might fight the battle alone. We chose the latter, and were defeated. But standing alone we learned our power; we repudiated man’s counsels forevermore; and solemnly vowed that there should never be another season of silence until woman had the same rights everywhere on this green earth as man.
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They warned young women that they could not rely on men’s advice. They had to depend only on themselves for the transitional period before they were equal. ‘While regarded as his subject, his inferior, his slave, their interests must be antagonistic.’
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There is a difference between having your own movement and cutting yourself off politically from all other movements. This last form of feminist isolationism is attractive in its simplicity. It appears to offer an option which implies that you concentrate on your own struggle and wait for some absolute future when men and women have progressed towards equality. It is of course a profoundly liberal utopian notion. ‘Progress’ is seen as some kind of single linear advance towards a goal. There is no sense of a movement living and working in history, learning through a dialectical interaction of its own efforts in objective circumstances. It forgets that the consciousness of particular groups amongst the oppressed is only partial.
While this consciousness must be realized and expressed in their own movement, if the attempt is not made continually to extend and connect this partial consciousness to the experience of other oppressed groups, it cannot politicize itself in a revolutionary sense. It becomes locked within its own particularism. This is as true of women as of blacks or workers. The attempt to extend and connect is not one which can be made in some utopian static future, but is part of a continuous dialectical historical process in which all participate consciously. It is only when the feminist (or the black or the working-class militant) understands, perceives, feels themself as pitted against a total oppressive system rather than simply against the indignity which is done to them through the subordination of their own kind, that a revolutionary political consciousness can start to grow.

In practice these connections were grasped by women who by social and political circumstance were involved not simply as women. For a black woman in the Civil War in America, for a Frenchwoman in one of the revolutionary moments, for an English chartist or for an early woman trade unionist to confine their conception of the oppression they resisted simply to their gender was absurd. The isolationism of Stanton and Anthony appeared immediately as a false option because it did not relate to their everyday life or their immediate political practice. In fact it could lead to actions which were explicitly contradicting their experience. Emma Goldman showed how the Stanton-Anthony tendency within feminism remained deliberately blinkered about labour movement struggles even to the point of supporting strike-breaking by women. This earned them the antagonism not only of male but female workers.

The absence of any practical theory of revolutionary feminist action and organization which made explicit the necessity to fight on several fronts rather than isolating one aspect of oppression had serious consequences. The corollary of feminist isolationism was a tendency amongst some women revolutionaries and industrial militants to smooth over and camouflage the specific oppression experienced by women, either because it was felt to endanger movements and causes or because it was felt to be unresolvable in the immediate future. The tension which resulted from this voluntary containment of energy was corrosive and destructive. There was continual pressure on women to compromise in this way. They found themselves having to make choices with nothing but their own feelings to guide
them. Each choice appeared as an individual matter because there was no theory to which it could be more broadly referred.

In the 1840s, for example, Jeanne Deroin faced this dilemma in jail. She had worked out with a group of male trade unionists the idea of a federation of all existing workers’ associations, a more modest version of Flora Tristan’s proposals. She had argued fervently for this idea in her feminist socialist paper
L’Opinion des Femmes.
But the union meetings were stopped by the police and she was arrested on a conspiracy charge. While she was in prison and before she came up for trial the lawyer for her male colleagues came to visit her. He brought a request from them. They asked her not to disclose her part in the idea of a federation because knowledge that a woman who was an ardent feminist had been the initiator of the scheme would damage its chances of success. Jeanne Deroin was caught in a strange irony. She was being asked to step back, to confirm the passivity of women’s role, her inability to initiate and participate in a movement designed to benefit women as well as men workers. She spent a troubled night but finally decided to pretend ignorance of the plan for federation. Though she compromised on this occasion she continued to argue socialist feminist ideas.