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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 February 2009
This article argues that historians have underestimated the importance and complexity of Marxists' engagement with feminism during the introduction of their doctrine into the French socialist movement before the First World War. It examines the ideological discourse of the Parti Ouvrier Français, the embodiment of Marxism in France from 1882 to 1905, in order to reveal the ambiguities and contradictions of the French Marxists' approach to the “woman question” – seeking to explicate the puzzling coincidence in the movement's rhetoric of a firmly feminist commitment to women's rights with an equally intransigent hostility to organized feminism.
1 Our terminology of “feminist”, “socialist-feminist”, and “radical-feminist” is anachronistic for the period, but will be used in the same way that historians refer to Gracchus Babeuf as a socialist, although that neo-Jacobin revolutionary lived well before the term achieved currency.
2 For “sexualism”, see Valette, A. (with Dr Z), Socialisme et Sexualisme (Paris, 1893)Google Scholar. “Dr Z” – Pierre Bonnier – may have played the predominant role in developing “sexualisme” as a coherent doctrine. See Boxer, M., “French Socialism, Feminism and the Family”, Third Republic / Troistème République, 3–4 (1977), p. 139Google Scholar. For Valette's feminism, see also her Cahier des Doléances Féminines (Paris, 1893) and her short-lived (15 October 1892–8 July 1893) newspaper L'Harmonies Sociable: Organ des Adroit et des Dintérâits Féminims. For a vitriolic critique of “sexualisme”, see Legman, L. and Roquefort, F., L'Égalité en Marche: Le Féminisme sous la Troisiéme République (Paris, 1989), pp. 91–93Google Scholar. There are useful accounts of Valette's career and thought in Boxer, “French Socialism, Feminism and the Family”, pp. 145–148; Boxer, M., “Socialism Faces Feminism: The Failure of Synthesis in France”, in Boxer, M. and Quataert, J. (eds), Socialist Women: European Socialist Feminism in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (New York, 1978), pp. 87–91Google Scholar; and, above all, in Sowerwine, C., Les Femmes et le Socialisme (Paris, 1978), pp. 52–64Google Scholar. None the less, Valette's tragically shortened career undoubtedly deserves more extended treatment.
3 Loved in every sense, perhaps. Claude Willard alleges that Valette became the mistress of Jules Guesde – the leader of her party, although Willard provides no evidence or reference to a source (police reports of the time often made this allegation, but are malicious and inaccurate on such personal gossip). Willard, C., Jules Guesde: L'Apôtre et la Lot (Paris, 1991), p. 75Google Scholar.
4 That feminism's assertion of gender difference has been the most subversive force in the current conceptual crisis of Marxism is well argued in Alexander, S., “Women, Class and Sexual Difference”, in Phillips, A. (ed.), Feminism and Equality (Oxford, 1987), pp. 163–164Google Scholar.
5 Good criticisms of the neglect of reproductive issues in Marx's own thought and the consequences of this absence for Marxism may be found in Benenson, H., “Victorian Sexual Ideology and Marx's Theory of the Working Class”, International Labor and Working Class History', 25 (1984), pp. 1–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar (see also the critiques of Benenson in this and subsequent issues, with Benenson's reply); Vogel, L., Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Towards a Unitary Theory (New Brunswick, 1983), chs 4–Google Scholar; and McDonough, R. and Harrison, R., “Patriarchy and Relations of Production”, in Kuhn, A. and Wolpe, A. (eds), Feminism and Materialism: Women and Modes of Production (London, 1978), pp. 27–30Google Scholar.
6 For an influential instance of this “post-Marxism”, see Mouffe, C. and Laclau, E., Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London, 1985), particularly pp. 22–23Google Scholar.
7 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), pp. 11–37. For more recent socialist-feminist analyses of this issue, see Hartmann, H. and Robinson, B., “Women and Class Consciousness: A Proposal for the Dialectical Study of Class Consciousness”, Insurgent Sociologist, 8 (1979), pp. 44–51Google Scholar; O'Brien, M., “Reproducing Marxist Man”, in Clark, L. and Lange, L. (eds), Vie Sexism of Social and Political Theory: Women and Reproduction from Plato to Nietzsche (Toronto, 1979), pp. 99–116Google Scholar; and Seccombe, W., “Domestic Labor and the Working-Class Household”, in Fox, B. (ed.), Hidden in the Household: Women's Domestic Labor under Capitalism (Toronto, 1980), p. 37Google Scholar.
8 Hartmann, H., “The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism”, in Sargent, L. (ed.), Women and Revolution: A Discussion of the Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism (Boston, 1981), pp. 1–41Google Scholar (see also the other contributions to this collection) and A. Kuhn and A. Wolepe, “Feminism and Materialism”, in Kuhn and Wolpe, Feminism and Materialism, p. 8. For a particularly sophisticated integration of class and gender, see Nicholson, L., “Feminism and Marxism: Integrating Kinship with the Economic”, in Benhabib, S. and Cornell, D. (eds). Feminism as Critique (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 25–26Google Scholar. This issue is illuminated with specific reference to French Marxism in Hilden's, P. “Class and Gender: Conflicting Components of Women's Behaviour in the Textile Mills of Lille, Roubaix and Tourcoing 1880–1914”, Historical Journal, 27 (1984), p. 361CrossRefGoogle Scholar and in her considerably more problematic Working Women and Socialist Politics in France 1880–1914: A Regional Study (Oxford, 1986), p. 215. For a critique of this work see Reid, D., “Histories des Femmes ou Historie de la Famille”, Mouvement Social, 152 (1990), pp. 61–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
9 For sophisticated examples of the interpenetration of Marxist and feminist theory which illustrate this blunting of socialist polemical force, see Connelly, P., “On Marxism and Feminism”, Studies in Political Economy, 12 (1983), pp. 153–161CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Armstrong, P. and Armstrong, H., “Beyond Sexless Class and Classless Sex: Towards Feminist Marxism”, in Hamilton, R. and Barrett, M. (eds), The Politics of Diversity: Feminism, Marxism, and Nationalism (London, 1986), pp. 208–237Google Scholar; A. Ferguson and N. Folbre, “The Unhappy Marriage of Patriarchy and Capitalism”, in Sargent, Women and Revolution, pp. 311–329; and J. West, “Women, Sex, and Class”, in Kuhn and Wolpe, Feminism and Materialism, pp. 220–253.
10 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 Stuart, R., Marxism at Work: Ideology, Class, and French Socialism during the Third Republic (Cambridge, 1992). Neither work devotes sufficient attention to issues of genderCrossRefGoogle Scholar.
11 For this confrontation, see, above all, Sowerwine, C., Sisters or Citizens? Women and Socialism in France Since 1876 (Cambridge, 1982 – the translation of Les Femmes et le Socialisme), pp. 54–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Boxer, “Socialism Faces Feminism”, p. 80 and Hilden, P., “Rewriting the History of Socialism: Working Women and the Parti Ouvrier Français”, European History Quarterly, 17 (1987), pp. 285–306CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
12 The only significant attribution of diversity to the Parti Ouvrier's engagement with the women's question – Patricia Hilden's conviction in “Rewriting the History of Socialism” that the movement's feminist concerns of the 1880s virtually disappeared with the party's alleged conversion to electoralism in the 1890s – while plausible on the surface, is simply wrong. The electorate of the Third Republic may have been exclusively male, but the Parti Ouvrier believed that women exercised a decisive influence in electoral conflicts upon “their loved ones, fathers, husbands, and brothers”. Valette, A., “Les Travailleuses et le Suffrage Administratif”, Le Socialists 21 06 1895Google Scholar. The electoral fever of the 1890s, as the Parti Ouvrier revelled in its breakthrough into national prominence after the 1893 parliamentary elections, actually encouraged a Marxist interest in the female non-electorate. Certainly the Guesdists' national press during the mid-1890s was replete with references to women, many of them startlingly radical-feminist in tenor. Gender declined as an overt issue in Le Socialists not between 1893 and 1898, but during the Millerand Affair at the turn of the century, as the POF struggled for its ideological life against the electoralist “Ministerialism” associated with the great socialist tribune Jean Jaurés – an eclipse of the Marxist concern with gender which paradoxically coincided with the emergence of French feminism as a potent political presence in its own right, as described in Hause, C. and Kenney, A., Women's Suffrage and Social Politics in the French Third Republic (Princeton 1984), ch. 2Google Scholar.
13 This usage should not be taken to imply that every member of the Parti Ouvrier was unequivocally Marxist, or that all French Marxists were Guesdists.
14 For the Guesdists' gendered understanding of the working class, see R. Stuart, “Gendered Labour in the Ideological Discourse of French Marxism: The Parti Ouvrier Francais 1882–1905” (forthcoming in Gender and History), and for the movement's contorted approach to reproduction, R. Stuart, “Sexuality, Maternity, and Socialism: French Marxism and the Family 1882–1905” (forthcoming).
15 Lafargue, P., “Les Révolutionnaires”, Le Socialiste, 20 05 1891Google Scholar. For the conflicts which engendered this concern, see Tilly, L., “Structure de l'Emploi, Travail des Femmes et Changement Démographique dans Deux Villes Industrielles: Anzin et Roubaix 1872–1906”, Mouvement Social, 105 (1978), pp. 33–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar. There is a useful theoretical discussion of the ways in which capitalist development generates conflicts within working-class house-holds in Armstrong and Armstrong, “Beyond Sexless Class and Classless Sex”, p. 218.
16 “Bibliographic – La Femme dans le Passé le Présent et I'Avenir”, Le Socialiste, 20 May 1891.
17 For the impact of Bebel's book, see Vogel, Marxism and the Oppression of Women, pp. 96–103.
18 See the excellent discussion in Rebérioux, M. et al. , “Hubertine Auclert et la Question des Femmes á I'Immortel Congrès (1879)”, Romantisme, 13–14 (1976), pp. 123–142CrossRefGoogle Scholar. There was, none the less, a fundamental incompatibility between Guesdist socialism and Auclert's feminism, as described in Hause, S., Hubertine Auclert: The French Suffragette (London, 1987), pp. 112–119Google Scholar.
19 For the programme as amended at the founding congress of the Marxist Parti Ouvrier at its Roanne Congress, see L'égalité, 8 October 1882.
20 See, for instance, the indomitable Paule Minck's rueful account of her difficulties, as described in “L e Parti Ouvrier en France – Montpellier”, Le Socialiste, 14 February 1892, although in this case she attributes her problems to the particularly chauvinist regional mentalities of the “me'ridionaux”.
21 “Mouvement Social – Limoges”, Le Socialiste, 4 February 1888.
22 “Mouvement Social – Lormont”, Le Socialiste, 4 February 1888 – among many other laudatory references to the two women in other issues of the 1887–1888 series of the newspaper.
23 Minck's (often Mink in the literature on the period) role in the establishment of the POF is described in Dalotel, A., “Preface”, to Paule Minck: Communarde et Fiministe 1839–1901 (Paris, 1981), pp. 25–29Google Scholar. The more general role of women is discussed in Sowerwine, C., “Women and the Origins of the French Socialist Party: A Neglected Contribution”, Third Republic/Troisiéme République, 3–4 (1977), pp. 104–127Google Scholar.
24 Guesde, J., “La Femme et son Droit au Travail”, Le Socialists 9 10 1898Google Scholar. The Guesdists explicitly denounced Proudhon's misogyny for “declaring that the woman is the eternal servant of man” – citing his “housewife or harlot” alternative as particularly damning. Guesde, J., untitled (page 3), L'égalité, 19 02 1882Google Scholar. For the prevalence of Proudhonian misogyny within the non-Guesdist Left, see Zylberberg-Hocquard, M.-H., Femmes et Féminisme dans le Mouvement Ouvrier Français (Paris, 1981), pp. 170–174Google Scholar and McMillan, J., Housewife or Harlot: The Place of Women in French Society 1870–1940 (New York, 1981), p. 13Google Scholar; while for the generally misogynist discursive regime of the period, seeAngenot, M., “La Fin d'un Sexe: Le Discours sur les Femmes en 1889”, Romantisme, 63 (1989), pp. 5–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
25 “Le Parti Ouvrier en France – Amiens”, Le Socialiste, 5 March 1893.
26 Report of a speech by Guesde, , “Le Parti Ouvrier en France – Wattrelos”, Le Socialiste, 12 03 1893Google Scholar. Charles Sowerwine, in his splendid Sisters or Citizens?, asserts (p. 56) that Guesde more or less abandoned these feminist commitments after his conversion to Marxist “economism”. See also Sowerwine's linkage of this alleged abandonment of feminist commitment to Guesde's supposed Marxist rejection of any reformist strategy within capitalism. Sowerwine, “Women and the Origins of the French Socialist Party”, p. 112. Guesde's references to the issue certainly declined during his later years, although this decline does not date from his “conversion t o Marxism”. Indeed, the movement a; a whole devalued the issue in its final phase. There were twenty-seven major articles or women in Le Socialiste during 1893–1897, but only ten during 1898–1902.
27 Guesde, J., “La Femme et son Droit au Travail”, Le Socialiste, 9 10 1898Google Scholar – one instance, among many, demonstrating that Guesde's feminist radicalism had not declined in intensity during the 1890s, whatever the decline in the frequency of its expression.
28 Report of a speech by Lafarge, in Le Courier de Furies, 19 04 1891Google Scholar, cited in Gibraltar, J., “June Opération de Diversion: L'Instruction du Rocés Lafargue-Culine en 1891”, Mouvement Social, 66 (1969), p. 86Google Scholar. For the anti-feminist characterization of Lafargue, see Hilden, “Rewriting the History of Socialism”, pp. 285–306, and for a (rare) text which supports this interpretation, see Lafargue, P., “La Journée Légale de Travail Réduite á Huit Heures”, L'galité, 26 02 1882Google Scholar. In fact, Lafargue, like most Guesdists, never developed a stable approach to the women's question – vacillating unpredictably between explicit feminism and implicit male chauvinism. His early feminism is emphasized in Derfler, L., Paul Lafargue and the Founding of French Marxism (Cambridge, MA, 1991), p. 81Google Scholar. For his most emphatic statement of feminist commitment, however, see Lafargue, P., La Question de la Femme (Paris, 1904)Google Scholar, where he actually argues for women's physical and mental superiority to 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 erroneous characterization of Lafargue is, unfortunately, being accepted into the historiography of Guesdism. See, for instance, Reid, “Histoire des Femmes ou Histoire de la Famille”, p. 65. It is worth noting that Lafargue's attacks upon scientific misogyny were seconded by other Guesdists. See, for instance, Bonnier's critique of Le Bon's discussion of women's smaller average brain size, where the Parti Ouvrier militant asserts that women's brains are proportionally larger than those of men, given their smaller average body size. , P.B., “La Revanche de la Fécondité”, Le Socialists 5 06 1886Google Scholar. The POF even sought scientific proof of women's superiority over men, claiming that, “anatomically and physiologically, the female organic type is far more remote from inferior animality than is the masculine type”. Z., , “Á Propos de la Greve des Femmes”, Le Socialists 19 06 1892Google Scholar. For a critique of this trope, supposedly designed merely to shock males into greater militancy, see Hilden, P., “Women and the Labour Movement in France 1869–1914”, Historical Journal, 29 (1986), p. 824Google Scholar.
29 For intense female militancy during some strikes, see, Perrot, M., Les Owners en Greve: France 1870–1890 (Paris, 1974), vol. 2, pp. 505–507Google Scholar. It has been suggested that women appeared more radical because they retained a certain “preindustrial” éan due to their exclusion from the political process and their lesser subjection to industrialism. For this argument in a French context, see Jonas, R., “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), pp. 291–299, particularly p. 297Google Scholar; Perrot, M., “La Femme Populaire Rebelle”, in Dufrancatel, C. et al. L'Histoire sans Qualiteés (Paris, 1979), p. 129Google Scholar; and for a more general statement, Beck, G. and Duden, B., “Labor of Love – Love as Labor: On the Genesis of Housework in Capitalism”, in Altbach, E. (ed.). From Feminism to Liberation (Cambridge, MA, 1980), pp. 161–162Google Scholar. There was nothing new about revolutionary ferment among French women, of course. For a Guesdist description of the French tradition of female popular revolt, with particular reference to 1789 and 1871, see Ghesquiere, H., La Femme et le Socialisme (Lille, 1898), pp. 13–14Google Scholar. Perrot and Jonas's argument about the “preindustrial” and “prepolitical” nature of female militancy is unconvincing, however, as industrialized and enfranchised male workers actually-ally used all the supposedly “preindustrial” modes of protest allegedly specific to women, while women workers' industrial militancy usually paralleled that of their male relatives, according to Zylberberg-Hocquard, Femmes et Féminisme damns le Mouvement Ouvrier Françis, p. 116.
30 Anonymous, “La Question de la Femme”, Le Socialiste, 30 October 1886.
31 B., , “Mouvement Féminim”, Le Socialiste, 20 08 1893Google Scholar.
32 Dr, Z., “A Prè la Question Sociale”, Le Socialiste, 3 06 1891Google Scholar. The metaphor of sterility was repeatedly used by Bonnier, to considerable effect: “For centuries, men have lived only for themselves [ … ] What could be more sterile than our masculine past? What could be more repugnant, less truly human than the ‘masculinity’ which pervades our time, the infertility, the casuistry in art and thought, the unbelievable smugness of that half of humanity which claims so much and declaims so loudly, yet produces so little!” DrZ., , “Sexualisme”, Le Socialiste 17 06 1891Google Scholar.
33 Workers, however, were almost always portrayed as male. For the power of female imagery in nineteenth-century iconography, see Perrot, M., “Women, Power and History”, in Perrot, M. (ed.), Writing Women's History (Oxford, 1984), pp. 170–171Google Scholar
34 Anonymous, “Le Parti Ouvrier au Congrès Général des Organisations Socialistes”, Le Socialiste, 24–31 December 1899. Only 2 or 3 per cent of the Party's membership was female, according to Willard, Les Guesdistes, p. 362.
35 “Le Parti Ouvrier en France – Nantes”, Le Socialiste, 26 March 1893.
36 “Le Parti Ouvrier en France – Beauvois”, Le Socialiste, 3 June 1891.
37 Anonymous, untitled obituary, Le Socialiste, 8 July 1900.
38 “La Semaine – Louise Michel”, Le Socialiste, 22–29 January 1905.
39 “La Semaine”, Le Socialiste, 16 October 1892.
40 Bousquet, A., untitled, Le Socialiste, 9–16 03 1902Google Scholar.
41 “Le Parti Ouvrier en France – Lille”, Le Socialiste, 30 December 1893.
42 “Le Parti Ouvrier – Paris”, Le Socialiste, 3 January 1897.
43 B., , “La Mere des Compagnons”, Le Socialiste, 18 03 1894Google Scholar.
44 “Le Parti Ouvrier en France – Dordogne”, Le Socialiste, 5–12 November 1899.
45 Bonnier, C., “Referendum”, Le Socialiste, 18 02 1900Google Scholar.
46 There is the danger of anachronistic critique – and of self-satisfied contemporary arrogance – when assessing nineteenth-century gender mentalities. For a superb statement of the inevitable limitations which inhibited early socialists from peceiving reproductive relations as a potential realm of freedom equivalent to productive relations, see O'Brien, M., “The Dialectic of Reproduction”, Women's Studies International Quarterly, 3 (1978), p. 235Google Scholar.
47 That Marxism cannot be excused from gender-awareness, given its coincidence with the rise of feminism, is argued in Barrett, M., “Marxist Feminism and the Work of Karl Marx”, in Phillips, A., Feminism and Equality (Oxford, 1987), p. 44Google Scholar.
48 For an argument that such a synthesis was the only way forward for French feminism of the period, see Albistur, M. and Armogathe, D., Histoire des Féminismes Français du Moyen Age á Nos Jours (Paris, 1978), p. 341Google Scholar, and, for the opposite perspective denouncing the socialist-feminist strand in France, seeFauré, C., Le Démocratie sans les Femmes: Essai sur le Libéralisme en France (Paris, 1985), pp. 10–21Google Scholar. There is a less vociferous discussion of this fraught relationship in Klejman and Rochefort, L'égaliteé en Marche, pp. 210–211.
49 “Le Parti Ouvrier en France”, Le Socialiste, 10–17 November 1901.
50 Unsigned and untitled (column 2, page 3), L'égalité”, 14 May 1882. For an incisive discussion of this conflict, see Charles Sowerwine's Sisters or Citizens?, pp. 36–41, as well as his “The Organisation of French Socialist Women 1880–1914: A European Perspective for Women's Movements”, Historical Reflections, 3 (1976), p. 7 and “Women and the Origins of the French Socialist Party”, pp. 117–127.
51 Anonymous, untitled (column 3, page 2), Le Socialiste, 26 August 1891 (stress in original).
52 Dr, Z., “Le Juif et la Femme”, Le Socialiste, 10 07 1892Google Scholar.
53 Bracke, , “La Semaine”, Le Socialiste, 19–26 03 1905Google Scholar.
54 Dr, Z., “L'Adoption Nationale”, Le Socialiste, 8 09 1895Google Scholar.
55 Lafargue, La Question de la Femme, p. 20.
56 Valette, Socialisme et Sexualisme, p. 20.
57 Valette, A., “La Réunion de l'Hippodrome à Lille”, Le Travailleur, 16 05 1894Google Scholar, cited in Hilden, Working Women and Socialist Politics in France, p. 199. The classic statement of “women as exploited class” is Delphy, C., The Main Enemy: A Materialist Analysis of Women's Oppression (London, 1977)Google Scholar. See the discussion in Barrett, M. and Mclntosh, M.,“Christine Delphy: Towards a Materialist Feminism?”, Feminist Review, 1 (1979), pp 95–106CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
58 Even as committed a socialist-feminist as Paule Minck initially opposed votes for women on such tactical grounds, although she later changed her mind. See A. Dalotel, “Préface”, pp. 23–24 and 30–31.
59 Anonymous, “Le Congrés de Bernon”, Le Socialiste, 15 August 1894.
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62 Anonymous, untitled (column 4, page 2), Le Socialiste, 15 February 1893 (stress in original). The piece continues, however, with an attack on the suffragette tactics of some Parisian feminists, with an explicit, critique of Maria Deraisme (sic) – the period's embodiment of French “bourgeois” feminism.
63 For the municipal electorate, see the argument in Valette, A., “Les Travailleuses et le Suffrage Administratif”, Le Socialiste, 21 07 1895Google Scholar – which contrasts France unfavourably to other nations which had already conferred the muncipal vote upon women. And, for the Conseils de Prud'hommes, see Anonymous, “L'Ouvriére à la Chambre”, Le Socialiste, 20 March 1892, which welcomes the belated granting of the vote to women for these bodies, but denounces their continued exclusion from the right to stand for office in the tribunals.
64 See, for instance, the report of a speech by the Guesdist leader Delory on “I'émancipation de la femme” in “Parti Ouvrier en France – Wattrelos”, Le Socialiste, 3 June 1893.
65 “Discours de Citoyen Lafargue – Le Congrès des Ouvrières et Ouvriers des Manufactures de Tabac”, Le Socialiste 18 December 1892.
66 “Fédération Girondine – XlVe Congrès Départemental à Bordeaux, le 9 mars 1902”, Le Socialiste, 23–30 March 1902.
67 “Le Parti Ouvrier en France – Lille”, Le Socialiste, 9 January 1893.
68 See, for instance, Anonymous, “Le Suffrage Universel”, Le Socialiste, 17 October 1885. There is an excellent discussion of this tendency to equate universal male suffrage with real universal suffrage in Reynolds, S., “Marianne's Citizens? Women, the Republic and Universal Suffrage in France”, in Reynolds, S. (ed.), Women, State and Revolution: Essays on Power and Gender in Europe since 1789 (Amherst, 1987), p. 104Google Scholar.
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77 For feminist hostility towards the Guesdists because of their instrumental view of the suffrage issue, see Hause, S., “Citizeness of the Republic: Class and Sex Identity in the Feminist Career of Hubertine Auclert 1848–1914”, Proceedings of the Western Society for French History, 12 (1984), pp. 235–242Google Scholar.
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87 Sowerwine, “The Organisation of French Socialist Women”, pp. 9–10. Proletarian women who attended feminist congresses were heard identifying their bourgeois “sisters” as “domestic servants of capital”, perhaps as an ironic comment on the wealthy women's refusal to contemplate improved rights for their actual servants. Albistur and Armogathe, Histoire du Féminisme Français, p. 358.
88 Some of the Parti Ouvrier's attempts to separate proletarian and bourgeois demands went astray, as with Valette's criticism of feminist demands for married women's control over their own incomes, a reform criticized with the total non sequitur that differences in income between bourgeois and worker and between men and women were grotesquely unfair. Valette, A., “Salaires de Famine”, Le Socialiste, 9 06 1895Google Scholar.
89 Report of a letter to a feminist organization by the Guesdist militant Duc-Quercy, “La Semaine”, Le Socialiste, 5 February 1893.
90 B., , “Mouvement Féminin”, Le Socialiste, 20 08 1893Google Scholar.
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93 For the Guesdists' long campaign against the Radicals and their Republican ideology, see Stuart, Marxism at Work, pp. 286–293.
94 Z., , “Liberté du Travail”, Le Socialiste 12 08 1891Google Scholar.
95 See, for instance, “Le Parti Ouvrier en France – Calais”, Le Socialiste, 14 April 1894.
96 “Le Parti Ouvrier en France – Deville-les-Rouen”, Le Socialiste, 7 April 1895. The weekly chronicle of party activities in the newspaper, “Le Parti Ouvrier en France”, is studded with such references, not least in the 1890s, despite Patricia Hilden's assertion that the Guesdists discouraged such independent women's organization after the 1880s – a central point in her Working Women and Socialist Politics in France.
97 , J.P., “La Misère à Paris”, Le Socialiste 15 01 1899Google Scholar.
98 DrZ., , “À Près la Question Sociale”, Le Socialiste, 3 06 1891Google Scholar.
99 Ghesquière, H. (quoting Aline Valette), “La Distribution Annuelle des Récompenses aux Indigents à Lille”, Bulletin Mensuel de la Fédération Nationale des Élus du Parti Ouvrier Français, Première Année, no. 9, 1 08 1900, p. 5Google Scholar. Louise Tilly argues that female workers during the Belle Époque were indeed subjected to greater proletarianization than their male counterparts. Tilly, L., “Three Faces of Capitalism: Women and Work in French Cities”, in Merriman, J. (ed.). French Cities in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1982), p. 192Google Scholar. For the same point from a theoretical perspective, see Shelton, B. and Agger, B., “Shotgun Wedding, Unhappy Marriage, No-Fault Divorce? Rethinking the Feminism-Marxism Relationship”, in England, P. (ed.), Theory on Gender/Feminism on Theory (New York, 1993), pp. 25–41, partarly p. 38Google Scholar.
100 The Guesdists, at least, are not vulnerable to the common accusation that Marxism ignores what Marx himself described as “the production of life […] of fresh life in procreation” (The German Ideology) in favour of the production of goods. For this accusation, see, for instance, Nicholson, “Feminism and Marxism”, pp. 16–30. Labour, the central Marxist category, for the Parti Ouvrier included “le travail de la maternité”. Valette, Socialisme et Sexualisme, p. 17.
101 Ibid., p. 57.
102 Le Socialiste (23 October 1892) welcomed Valette's fascinating L'Harmonie Sociale as the first effort to separate women's liberation from the cause of the bourgeoisie. For a superb description of the legacy potentially available to the POF, see Grogan, S., French Socialism and Sexual Difference: Women and the New Society 1803–1844 (Basingstoke, 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
103 Valette, Socialisme et Sexualisme, p. 15. For a critique of such approaches, see Young, I., “Beyond the Unhappy Marriage: A Critique of Dual Systems Theory”, in Sargent, L. (ed.), Women and Revolution (Boston, 1981), pp. 48–60Google Scholar.
104 For this cult, see McMillan, Housewife or Harlot, p. 11.
105 For the intricacies of this necessary but tortuous combination, see Scott, J., Gender and the Politics of History (New York 1988), particularly ch. 8Google Scholar.
106 Valette, Socialisme et Sexualisme, p. 15.
107 Guesde, J., “Ignorance Bourgeoise et Science Ouvrière”, Le Cri du Peuple, 18 10 1884Google Scholar.
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