Madeleine Pelletier 1912
Source: Madeleine Pelletier, L'emancipation sexuelle de la femme. Paris, M. Giard & E. Brière, 1912;
Translated: for Marxists.org by Mitch Abidor.
The adversaries of women’s emancipation reproach feminism for, among other things, destroying the family. In their eyes ,this is the gravest of reproaches, for without the family, they usually say, no society is possible and humanity will return to the savagery of the earliest ages.
This eventuality, the destruction of the family, ordinarily suffices to drive from feminism many people who might rally to it. Feminists have no other recourse than declaring these allegations baseless and dedicating all their efforts to establishing that the emancipation women, far from destroying the institution of the family, will actually reinforce it.
Social conventions claim that the family is an institution that is essentially good. Novelists, playwrights, and poets sing of the happiness of the family hearth and lament the distress of those who lack one. It’s true that deep down everyone knows the truth about this supposed family happiness, but when the family doesn’t provide all the satisfactions that is expected of it we think it’s only an unfortunate exception to an excellent rule. Also taken to be exceptions are scenes drawn by realist novelists and family tragedies that are resolved in the courtroom.
The family as it currently exists is established on authoritarian principles. It’s a mini absolutist monarchy in which the man, father and husband, exercises the power conferred upon him by laws and customs.
In practice, customs are far in advance of the law. When the woman is superior to her husband, or merely more determined, it is she who commands and the husband only acts on her advice. In enlightened circles, when the husband and wife have good characters, things are more or less equal between them. I say “more or less” because man’s idea of his superiority is such that there are very few husbands who consider his wife as an equal. Even when, through the superiority of her education, intelligence, and energy, the woman leads she must, in order to safeguard her husband’s pride, pretend to obey him.
The mother is thus below the father, and below the mother are the children. The children must respect the parents and obey them when they give orders. Ths obedience is necessary in most cases. Left to itself, a child won’t know how to conduct himself and, even more, educate himself. But it sometimes happens that the child is right and the parent’s reproaches are unfair. They have blamed him without any basis for things he had nothing to do with. Nevertheless, it is admitted that the child must submit. Being called a child who talks back is considered a defect. When the child is intelligent, parental authority understood in this way seems to him to be a despicable tyranny, a monstrous abuse of power. If he didn’t have the great advantage of a very agile mind this would suffice to darken the years that grown- ups tell him are the most beautiful of his life.
It’s mainly in the wealthy and middle-classes that parental and especially paternal authority makes itself felt. Among the lower classes it manifests itself in the many slaps dealt out for any reason whatsoever. But this only lasts a short while. As soon as the child reaches age fourteen he escapes the oversight of his parents. Busy all day long at the workshop, he returns to the paternal home only to sleep. A few years later he leaves it for good and lives on his own. In wealthy and comfortably-off families the family weighs on the individual’s entire life. “I have such and such an opinion, I think in such and such way, I work in such and such a profession,” they explain to you, “ because this is what my father wanted. I would have liked to do this, to be that, but my father was against it, so I couldn’t.”
Seeing all this, we can understand everything about the family that Is harmful to individual initiative. Essentially conservative, it turns the individual into someone stuck in a rut, petrified. Like a horse on a merry-go-round, he goes round and round in a circle of ideas.
“I was raised like this and so I can only act that way.” A wealthy man born to a fortune, if he has the misfortune to be ruined, becomes unhappy. Without the luxury in which he always lived life seems to have no value and he often prefers to renounce it. And yet, many people lacking any fortune continue to live.
The same immobilism exists when it comes to a profession. The functionary, the physician, the lawyer, the scientist, even the worker believe their sole aptitude is for the career they embraced in their youth. Just as we only live once, we only learn once, and once we’ve reached thirty, we’re only good at one kind of occupation. As a result, the loss of his profession leaves a man disoriented and death comes for him at the same time as retirement. Frozen in a stereotyped occupation it seems that this occupation has become a kind of physiological function whose cessation brings all others to a halt. Deprived of his post in his mature years, the functionary declares that his life has been smashed to bits. Firing him means destroying him. How can you live when you don’t have grammar to teach or memos to write?
The same applies to workers. Once you’re a carpenter you can’t become a bricklayer, and if there are no jobs for carpenters, they prefer to live in the grimmest poverty rather than sell newspapers on the streets or work as a day laborer. I’ll lose my craft, says the worker who in reality believes he would lose caste in doing something than what he learned once and for all.
Prejudice turns this fixity into a virtue. People are prejudiced against those who like change, even when they are famous. Literary ctiitcs who don’t like Jean-Jacque Rousseau complain of his many professions. How can you be deemed worthy of esteem when you’ve been, in succession, a watchmaker, a botanist, a musician, and a philosopher. You have a profession and to have to stick to it.
Stereotyped in space, most men are equally so in time. Every age has its way of being and acting. In a village in Brittany, when women reach forty they must a special cap that indicates they’ve passed the age for love. It seems that some coquettes try to cheat in order to keep the cap that allows for male seduction, but the old ladies keep an eye on this. They specify the date of marriage, the date of the first communion, and, figures in hand, the date of birth is irrefutably established. And so, whether they like it or not, the rebel must wear the fateful cap and take her place with the old ladies.
Peoples’ lives, even among the cultivated, is ruled the same way. It’s understood that at such an age we do such a thing and that once that age is passed the thing is impossible to do. Life is regulated from birth. If you’ve not completed your classical studies you think liberal careers are irrevocably closed to you. At sixteen there are already things that we think we can’t learn because we’re too old! This being so, how monotonously existence unfurls for most men. And the same goes for all of them. He received an education, he learned a profession, he got married, he raised his children, and then he died. Husband and wife quickly have nothing to learn from one another. At table conversation languishes. A woman I know spoke with admiration of the fact that her mother, after twenty years of marriage, still laughed at a pun her husband made about dates every time the fruit appeared for desert.
The brain falls asleep in this rhythmic life. Still young, the individual is already forever fixed in place, caught in a circle of ideas. His place is set; he’ll never change. This is the reason for the extreme slowness of social progress.
To a large extent this cerebral half-sleep in which most men live, the difficulty they feel in readapting themselves, at learning and unlearning, is part of their very nature. But family life only reinforces this natural disposition toward torpor by restricting the circle of relations. If the social cell were the individual and not the family; if everyone, certain of finding a minimum of assistance in the state, was less hesitant about moving his tent, life’s variety would make people more active and more intelligent, and society would be the better for it.
As we can see, the family harms both sexes. For all involved it is enslavement, immobilism, and boredom, but for women it is more harmful still.
Much more than a mind, the average man is a body, and he is very sensitive to the material comfort that the superior man disdains. And so the petit bourgeois, the office worker, and the blue-collar worker are happy to find the table set and a warm meal prepared when they get home. They find it pleasant in the morning to have their shoes shined, their clothing brushed, and a fire in the stove. They remember that when they were single they had to do all this themselves, and so they bless their marriage.
But the woman doesn’t bless it, since instead of being served it’s she who serves. All the good of the family falls to the man; the wife finds nothing but labor. As a result the statistical law that says that the unmarried die more often the married is only true for the male sex; for women it’s the opposite that is true: she has a greater chance of dying while married.
If the man is ill the woman devotedly takes care of him; she does without sleep to watch over him, consoles him. When the woman is ill, if there are no domestics or relatives to take care of her, she more often than not goes without. Filth reign around the sickbed and the bedbound woman. It’s not difficult to sweep a floor, to wash dishes, to dust the furniture, to put things in their proper place; anyone could do all this with greater or lesser success without having been taught how to do so. But the man feels his dignity is under attack if he does any of this. It’s not his business, he’ll say, and rather than violate the rules of his sex he’d rather just leave things as they are. And if the illness lasts too long it’s he who will complain. He no longer has a home, he’ll say; his clothing isn’t being mended, there’s no one to cook for him, he no longer has a woman to satisfy his senses: he’s very unhappy. And what’s more, his entourage is in total agreement on the subject of this unhappiness. “The poor man,” they say. “His wife is ill and he no longer has a home.” In many cases, he’ll just leave his family and go chasing after other loves, and everyone around him, if they don’t approve, at least excuse him.
The life of the husband is above all external, professional. Scientists, industrialists, artists, merchants all are constantly busy. His profession is his personality, it’s through it that he rises or falls in the social hierarchy. For him it is a source of agreeable and disagreeable emotions that have him entirely in their grip. This is why he so easily accepts the monotony of the family, which for him is a form of relaxation. But the wife doesn’t live; all she does is watch the husband live, and this only in the cases where he is kind enough to keep her up to date on his doings. From morning to evening the office worker’s spouse stays in her robe, in her tiny lodgings. She kills time as she can by chattering with her neighbors or in long sessions staring out the window, picking apart the clothing of the women passing by. To kill the boredom she sews little doodads that end up costing more to make than if she’d purchased them in a store. Like those prisoners who keep an eye out for the arrival of a spider the housewife’s mind desperately latches on to the tiniest details of the interior. Amidst this total lack of anything to do. the husband’s return home is a festival. It’s easy to understand why he feels flattered, but what an existence for the wife! Flaubert’s novel Madame Bovary truthfully depicts the moral distress of these feminine existences, a distress felt all the more because she is more intelligent. Among inferiors idleness embitters their character; they contract the nervous nastiness that makes some women unbearable.
In the upper classes the women’s lot is better, for the wealthy are more sociable than the poor, but feminine existence remains empty. To fill her life the society woman has a whole protocol of visits, dinners, and receptions that must be followed. It’s true that it’s better than looking out the window, but that doesn’t make it an interesting life. Our brain, created long ago in our ancestors in order to seek nourishment by hunting prey, needs to resolve problems, requires the emotions of the struggle. Without this there is nothing but boredom, even among great wealth.
“What a frightful misfortune,” said a biographer of the Chevalier d’Éon. “He was a man and he had to assume feminine garb, live the life of a woman. Lettered, an officer, and charged with diplomatic missions he had to abandon everything and become the Demoiselle d’Éon, confined to a sad dwelling.”
Until now we’ve only considered happy couples, those where the husband, gifted with a kind nature, doesn’t feel he needs to tyrannize his spouse. But what can we say in the contrary case? What a martyrdom it is, that of a woman of the people condemned to share the bed of a drunk, to suffer the ill-treatment of a brute. There are workers who, on the most minor pretexts, strike their wife, rip their dresses to shreds, smash the dishes and furniture in fits of rage. If she refuses sexual relations because she is ill or in an advanced stage of pregnancy, the wife is thrown out of the conjugal bed and dragged by the hair around the bedroom by the husband, frustrated in what he considers to be his right. These revolting acts are far less rare than is commonly believed. In general, women don’t dare complain of them.
In many ways a married woman’s life is like that of a child in its parents’ home. She can, it is true, position the furniture in her home as she will, which a young girl can’t, but when she goes out she has to say where she’s going, and if she wants to hide something she must lie, tell a tale. A man, for his part, doesn’t say where he’s going and if the woman is exceptionally suspicious he can always resort to invoking “business.”
To be sure, in couples the man is not always a tyrant and the woman the victim. There are ill-tempered wives who are happy to argue with their husband about the least thing, to be sarcastic with him, to annoy him in every way. But most often the sad personality of some women is a result of the idleness which man’s law has condemned her to live under. In any case, we can say that the one to feel sorry for is the woman, because he man is strong and the law is on his side.
In Femme d’Artistes [Artists’ Wives] Daudet recounts the misfortunes of superior men who married silly women, momentarily seduced be their beauty. These are well-deserved misfortunes. Men have always put up obstacles against the cultivation of the female mind. It’s only today that they have begun to understand its utility. If a woman was only a sex organ it would be possible to neglect to educate her and be happy with dressing her up, but she is also a brain, and the commerce of an inferior brain is not very pleasant.
Such as it is, people still seek a family, and those who lack one regret it. Why? Because currently there are no other bonds between individuals. Live en famille or live alone: these are the alternatives, and since it’s unpleasant to live alone, most prefer the family.
And yet, there’s a third solution. One could, for example, join forces with friends of the same sex or different sex and live together. This is what Russian students often do. They rent an apartment and establish what is in a way an artificial family more agreeable than many natural families, since they have the advantage of living among people of equal education and harmonious ideas. If there are many people involved, instead of an apartment a whole house can be rented. In this case material advantages are added to the moral advantages: there’s more comfort at less cost. Many well-to-do people of today have adopted a way of living similar to the one we are recommending. They don’t form associations of friends, but live in family pensions, changing location whenever they want. They rub shoulders with a relatively large number of people and their intelligence gains in the bargain.
What makes associations of friends difficult is the propensity felt by all of us to educate his neighbor. In a family this character flaw doesn’t cause a rupture because we feel obliged to live together. But people often detest each other, and the bitter things constantly said can turn the family home into a living hell. It’s especially in uneducated circles that things are thus. Educated people generally know how to respect the freedom of others, so it is they who are most likely to live communally.
Will the victory of feminism have as its corollary the destruction of the family as it currently exists? This is probable, but everything leads us to think that this destruction will occur extremely slowly.
It is often said that it’s not laws that make customs, but customs that make the laws. This is not exactly true, for there is an interdependence between laws and customs. Laws are often in advance of customs. They are the work of an elite animated by the noble desire to raise the masses to their own level. The elite achieves its goal, but slowly, with customs borrowing from laws just enough to allow for slight progress without great upset.
The current conditions of female life already allow poor women to earn enough, in many professions, to honestly ensure a modest lifestyle . This noticeably loosens the matrimonial bond and begins the work of the disintegration of the ancient family. Montaigne said that marriage is a market to which entrance alone is free of charge. Today, thanks to the work of married women, the exit becomes, if not free, at least relatively easy. The workshop, the shop, and the office free women of the routine of the stew and restaurant where she is often forced to have lunch. This, for her, is a first step towards emancipation.
In truth, in today’s conditions the woman often works a great deal, for in addition to her professional labors she is in charge of the housework which the husband, imbued with prejudices concerning male prerogatives, refuses to play his part. The same subordination of the wife to the husband still exists. Labor on its own cannot in one blow, through some magical virtue, uproot millennial prejudices. The wife sometimes suffers from male gloominess, but she puts up with it, believing it to be natural. She remains meek, she mistrusts herself, and what’s more, it often occurs that the man, more involved in life, is in fact superior. But even so, she is aware that her conjugal fate is less irrevocably fixed. Happy, or nearly so, she remains married, but if she becomes too unhappy she more easily divorces, knowing that thanks to her work she will be sheltered from need.
In the present state the political emancipation of women will change little. Anti-feminists have been happy to present the horror of households where the voting wife will oppose her opinions to those of the voting husband. This is a gratuitous assertion. In calm times, which are the rule, nine tenths of the French are pretty much indifferent to politics; Frenchwomen, even the voting ones, will all the more so remain thus for three long years. Far from harming the home, politics will add luster to it when women will take enough interest in it that they will be able to discuss it with the husband. It’s rare that one feels strongly enough about the best government to separate from someone with whom until now we’ve been on good terms. In any case, we can say that political questions will never have the importance of personal interest. It is the latter, and not opinions, that divides families. It must also be added that more often than not people who marry share, if not identical opinions, at least close ones. Wives are chosen, husbands are chosen, in the milieu we frequent. It’s rare for a male anarchist to seek a wife among monarchists, or for a Christian mother to take her daughter to a Freemason’s ball. It’s true that in bourgeois households disagreements occur on religious questions, but this is most often owed to the insincerity of the anticlerical opinions of the husband who, in espousing them, was more interested in the dowry than the opinions of the bride. The politically emancipated woman will end up losing the faith she is already in the process of losing; in place of belief in the beyond she will have political opinions, and political fanaticism is a rare thing. Politics will have its part in conversations between engaged couples, and it will be up to them not to wed if they judge the divergence in idea too great for them to live together.
Civic capacities will in no way distance women from the household tasks to which anti-feminists want to confine them. Reading a newspaper and attending a few political meetings at election time, these are the electorate’s obligations, though the mass of voters dispense with the meetings. Attending religious services certainly takes up more of believers’ time than will the exercising of political rights that of female citizens.
Female city council members and deputies will be very busy, but they will only constitute a tiny number. The illogic and bad faith of antifeminists are such that as soon as we speak of making women eligible for office they feign believing that the entire sex will have seats in parliament and they invoke the specter of the family in ruins. If the female deputies and council members think that their situation doesn’t allow them to contract marriages they won’t get married. This will not cause a noticeable drop in the birth rate, as is commonly believed. As for the husbands of those who will contract marriage, it’s probable that we will not feel sorry for them. We can even predict that it’s certain that female deputies will be sought in marriage for a large number of reasons there’s no need to insist on.
In reality, the sentiment that motivates the anti-feminists against women’s electability is male pride. They can’t bear the idea of one day seeing husbands placed below their wives in the social hierarchy. It’s perfectly fine if a man is chief of his office and the woman a clerk, but to see a wife considered more valuable than her husband, the horror! And yet, people must get used to this.
Viewed in this way, feminism’s progress will only slightly modify the family, for there’s no social situation, even in its current form, that makes marriage impossible for a woman. The transformation of the family will more than anything be the result of the slow evolution of ideas and customs.
What will disappear first is marital authority.
Equal to the man politically and economically, treated with consideration everywhere, woman will gradually become aware of her personality. She will gladly seek a companion, but will refuse to give herself a master. She will not think she has more obligations to her husband than he to her. Husband and wife will mutually render each other service, but there will no longer be a housewife, i.e., a servant woman.
The raising of children will be the work of both. The man can’t replace the woman in lactation, but we can very well see him doing the wash while the wife swaddles the little one, and this image should shock only those blinded by male pride.
Thanks to the economic emancipation of women, we nevertheless believe that workers’ families will prefer to shift to professionals those purely material chores demanded by early childhood. For centuries wealthy women freed themselves of these revolting necessities, passing them on to domestics. This doesn’t prevent them from loving their children every bit as much as poor mothers do. To the middle and working classes it can’t be question of having a nursery [in English in the original] as is the case in fortunate families. But what can’t be individual can be collective. In the poor neighborhoods of big cities public or private charity establishes nurseries where working women leave their children during working hours. Despite the insufficiency of what is done to help the poverty-stricken, at the nursery children are cared for far better than in their parents’ homes. This is why the children greet the moment they sense they’re being taken there with cries of joy. Who prevents the creation of similar institutions for wealthy parents? Today the life of office workers and functionaries who are mothers of infants is passed in worried races from the office to home, and from home to office. This is because nurseries are not made for their social rank and, what is more, they are full of the prejudices concerning a mother’s obligations to her children. The sole reasonable obligation is that of arranging matters so the infant is in good health. This achieved, the matters employed are of no importance. who cleans the child doesn’t matter; what does is that the child is clean. This kind of prejudice will disappear when married women’s work is expanded. In fact, industrialists will install comfortable, even luxurious establishments. Mothers will bring their children there, and since they’ll find this arrangement advantageous, what will have begun as an exception will quickly become the rule.
After the nursery, there’s school. Much ill has been spoken about boarding schools, but a boarding school is not necessarily a convent. Its doors can be opened as much as we like. Once the hours of study are over, nothing prevents allowing parents to come get their children as they wish. If the parents have to spend the evening away from home, the child sleeps at the school; if they have to stay home, they can go get them at day’s end.
Boarding schools have their defects, of this there’s no question, but they also have their advantages. Children there have the pleasure of shared lives, which is understandable. They prefer subjects appropriate for their age rather than those of grownups. We ordinarily consider the day on which the gates of the student’s school are flung open and the child returns to his family to be a joyful day. But what we have in mind is the wealthy child, for whom vacations are spent traveling and on diversions of all kinds. The poor scholarship student prefers the school to his family.
Boarding schools have been criticized for providing the child with an artificial life having nothing to do with the reality that awaits him. I will answer that the child has plenty of time to be initiated in these realities. A bit of idealism early in life does no one any harm.
Everything allows us to believe that marriage will be enormously modified by the liberation of the woman. Already, despite the moral depreciation reactionary prejudices impose upon divorcees, the number of divorces is increasing. Further along, marriages will be ended through the will of one of the partners, without any reasons being given. The only demand will be that when there are children both spouses contribute to their maintenance. There will be legitimate sexual relationships as well as love affairs and friendships. Some will last a lifetime, others will be fleeting. But in no case will they give men rights over women, or women rights over men.
If evolution occurs as we have described, it’s obvious that the family will cease being the tiny, closed society it is today. Our father, our mother, our children will continue to hold us closer to them than the rest of humanity, but they will be little more than friends. In contact with a greater number of minds, the minds of all will be more open. Having seen much, we will be able to judge more clearly.
Society can far better provide us with the services we expect of our family. Already the wealthy prefer the enlightened care of a hospital to that of their family when they are sick. Current laws concerning workers’ pensions and mandatory assistance, however imperfect they might be, demonstrate society’s growing tendencies regarding the individual and the charges for protections that formerly fell upon the family. This is part of the march to socialism, a very slow march, hindered as it is by the privileged of the current order of things, but a march that is certain; at least everything allows us to think so.
To be sure, the salvation of future generations must be assured, but it is iniquitous to immolate an entire sex, that is, half the present generation, to it. And in any case, in saying it is necessary to make sacrifices for children we have till now only sacrificed women to men. Society must be organized in such a way that the woman has to surrender nothing to achieve the total development of her individuality.