4.5 - Riot-Sarcey, Michèle & Varikas, Eleni - Feminist Consciousness in the Nineteenth Century. A Pariah Consciousness¿ (EN)

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Feminist Consciousness in the Nineteenth Century: A PariahConsciousness ?

Feminist Consciousness in the Nineteenth Century: A Pariah Consciousness ?

by Michle Riot-Sarcey Eleni Varikas

Source:

PRAXIS International (PRAXIS International), issue: 4 / 1985, pages: 443-465, on www.ceeol.com.
http://www.ceeol.com/http://www.ceeol.com/http://www.ceeol.com/http://www.dibido.eu/bookdetails.aspx?bookID=03554d8d-bd83-4e93-9862-8c5f16fb4d72http://www.ceeol.com/


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Praxis International 5:4 January 1986 0260-8448 $ 2.00

FEMINIST CONSCIOUSNESS IN THENINETEENTH CENTURY: A PARIAH

CONSCIOUSNESS?

Michle Riot-Sarcey and Eleni Varikas

Collective militant feminism is in crisis. Has it fulfilled its mission? Fromthe legal point of view, great gains have been made, but the facts belie thislegal equality.

Inequality persists, memories of the years from 1970 to 1980 blur, thefeminist counter-revolution gains strength. In Western countries the decliningbirthrate worries the powers that try to urge women to return to the hearth,using traditional incentives, but also facilitating diverse demonstrationsagainst abortion, legalized in the era of the growing feminist movement andsome feminists of the past are reaching their second stage.1 Why? Whymust feminism be merely a passing phase? Why is it constantly condemned tospring anew from its ashes? Must it be the eternal Sisyphus?

It is more important than ever to understand the reasons for this permanentstate of incompletion, in as much as we are not the first to ask ourselves aboutthese cycles of emergence and disappearance. Back in 1848, a feminist wrotethat history was to be redone2 because it was lies. She discovered that otherwomen before her had struggled for equality and was dismayed to learn thatmost women were left in ignorance of their own history. If we wish to avoidthe situation in which others coming after us are forced to rediscover feministsof long ago, we must try to shed some light on the conditions relating to theemergence of feminism, on its different expressions, on its revolutionarypotential as well as on its impasses.

The appeal to history is indispensable to us and to nineteenth centuryhistory in particular. In the nineteenth century one sees the growth of certainmovements rich in social upheaval. Such movements allowed women tocollectively express their desire for equality; but also, in a revealing paradox,the nineteenth century, a cornerstone of our own era, is the one in which theweb of imprisonment was slowly being woven to enclose women within thefamily cell, the glowing hearth, the haven of peace for the bourgeois citizen.

Until then, traditional history had not considered gender relations as asubject of study worthy of interest to researchers. Yet the status and the placeof women in the nineteenth century were the subject of conflicts, the object of

reflections, a constructed image before ending up as a separation of roles andsexes. Not that the nineteenth century is exceptional in this matter, but as inall fundamental historical periods in the course of which a new society is beingformed, gender relations were redefined and the significance of the nineteenthcentury is to have reinforced considerably the division between public-private


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Praxis International444

divisions: public space became the arena for masculine action, private spacelimited to the feminine garden.

That is why the history of relations between men and women, anantagonistic relationship, is essential if we wish to understand one of theunderpinnings of every society.

In this vibrant history, filled with revivals, periods of mollified tensions,mutual consent and daily compromise alternate with open gender conflict.Thus, to grasp the sense of emerging feminism, we must focus on theexplosive historical periods that allow us to examine it clearly, and therefore toapproach it more closely.

Organized collective feminism appears more frequently in times of socialinstability, in periods in which former social relationships are ineffective,because they are in conflict with new relationships of production that upsettraditional family relationships. Sometimes added to this conflict is the bufferof the political society in gestation, based upon an ideal universality butdominated in reality by a very real class and sex.

I. The Growing Awareness of Exclusion

Two parallel studies concerning countries as different as Greece and Franceallow us to discover similar structures from the point of view of the emergenceof feminism. Against a background of social crisis in France, of nationalist

turmoil in Greece, although several decades apart, gender relations are caughtin the same trap.In France, the aborted revolution of 1830, the unlimited exploitation of an

unprotected working class left to the mercy of the nouveaux riches, aided byromanticism, gives rise to ideal social structures in which woman appears as asocial actor if not a saviour. The more pragmatic revolution of 1848 discoveredthe virtues of universal republican values. For the revolutionaries of 1848, theRevolution seems to be made by and for the people. Why not for women?

In Greece, half a century after independence had produced a tiny statecomprising barely one-third of the population that had been under OttomanEmpire control,3 the fulfillment of the objectives of the national revolutionbecame the order of the day. Nationalist ideology that rallies irredentistaspirations to expansionist projects, in combination with a westernization ofculture in opposition to Ottoman barbarity gave women new visibility: asmothers of future soldiers, keepers of the oral tradition and glorious legends ofthe past, conveyers of the mother tongue among the Greeks of the OttomanEmpire, they are granted a form of symbolic citizenship. Nationalist strugglespromise to grant to all Greeks the title of free citizen. Wouldnt they do asmuch for women?

In these key periods, new gender roles are not yet fixed by this social orderthat is slowly being forged and in each instance sex roles are reworked by

those in power to curtail the social relations between the sexes thusreaffirming Natural Order. Certain women can then fill this relative void andplace themselves in a position that escapes masculine control. Surely, in pastcenturies, and the nineteenth century was no exception, there have beennumerous cases of those who individually became totally active participants.

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Praxis International 445

But in France in 1830 and 1848 and in Greece, from 1887 to the turn of thecentury, collective feminism appears. Taking advantage of circumstantialcontradictions, collective feminism is able not only to oppose the traditionalpassivity of women but also to project woman as a historical subject, a subjectcapable of bearing a vision of society, of achieving equality between the sexes.Thus, the study of feminist consciousness lets us grasp and analyze by wordand deed how women struggling for the liberation of their sex perceivethemselves.

Beginning on February 25, a thousand strange systems sprung up impetuouslyfrom the innovators minds and spread to the troubled spirit of the crowd.Everything was still in place except royalty and parliament, and it seemed thatsociety had been reduced to dust from the shock of the revolution, and that they

had set up a competition concerning the new form to give to the edifice theywould erect in its place; everyone proposed his plan, . . . . One proposed todestroy the inequality of wealth, another the inequality of knowledge, and thethird sought to strike down the most ancient of inequalities, between men andwomen.4

Now if the shock of 1848 in France, or the irredentist period in Greece, actsas a catalyst in the appearance of militant feminism, the emergence of feministconsciousness is the result of an underground process which, beginning withthe French Revolution and the Greek Nationalist Revolution, had under-

mined the foundations of traditional gender relations. We think that thisprocess originated in what it is fitting to call a constellation that we cansummarize in a schematic way:

a) First, the disintegration of traditional socio-economic structures and therelative voidthat resulted with respect to the place women would occupy in thenew society. This void is gradually filled with the construction of the ideologyof the two spheres, with the maternal ideal in France under the impact ofthe industrial revolution and the private/public division, and with thespreading of the market economy that follows urbanization and westernizationin Greece.

b) Second, the setting up of post-revolutionary societies that are supposedlyto be based on universal ideals and womens encounter with the philosophy of natural law.

c) Third, the relational decline in the position of women, in regard to theevolution of rights of men. As the historian Joan Kelly has shown, we find thisphenomenon at all great historical moments considered to be times ofprogress. This decline results from women being excluded from the rights andprivileges acquired by men.5 Indeed, several decades after 1789, Frenchwomen found themselves denied civil and political rights accorded to theirmasculine counterparts. Similarly in Greece, they kept all the traits of rayeas,

the ethnic minorities of the Ottoman Empire, in a society that had proclaimedto have made rayeas free citizens. Their movement in public places was stillcontrolled,6 they did not have control over their wealth, and they wereexcluded from the right to vote that had been granted to men by theconstitutions of 1844 and 1862.


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d) Fourth, the possibility of women to obtain an education and thus to enterthe new system of ideas and values and be on common groundwith men, a placewhere comparison becomes possible; but also in acquiring writing, to obtain theright to public speech.7 It is quite characteristic, in this respect, thateducation constitutes one of the primary demands of nineteenth centuryfeminist movements, from the proletarian Saint-Simonians, who go as far aspublishing grammar courses in their newspapers,8 to the Greek feministswhose first collective action is a petition, sent to parliament in 1888 in whichtwo thousand women lay claim on behalf of their sisters to a right that hadbeen granted long ago to the humblest sons of shepherds and peasants.9

These multiple factors, which converge on the eve of great social upheavalswhen contradictions sharpen, place women in a new position of lucidity,allowing them to articulate their grievances, to see their situation as one ofexclusion. Exclusion from the great humanist values: liberty, equality,fraternity, independence; but also from concrete economic, political, socialprivileges that men had acquired in their name.

Following a revolution made to benefit all, is it just to refuse the exercise ofsocial rights to a significant portion of society? No more monopolies, no moreexclusions, no more special castes! This was the cry of France free and renewed.Isnt the participation of women in political life the necessary consequence ofthe right that has just been proclaimed?10

Exclusion is only the result of an imposed power relationship that defines

them as a separate social category having common interests.What struggles, what difficulties have ex-slaves confronted before convincingtheir masters that they too, as human beings, had the right to Liberty andIndependence. These are the same struggles, the same sacrificies, we have toengage in today.11

Finally, exclusion constitutes a violation of the principles of natural law andreveals perfectly the duplicity and injustice of the existing social order. It isthrough this awareness of exclusion that women will be ready not only to fightto change their social position but to be indispensable agents of all radical

social change whether it be to establish the republic or the nation asagents of a radical project to transform society, radical because it is utopian inthe original sense of the word.

Whether it is through the condemnation of a society that excludes them orthrough womens desire to take part in society the perception of exclusion is abasic element in the process of forging the feminist consciousness and precedesthe quest for an independent identity. The first is a pronounced tendency ofwomen to identify with other excluded members, to think of themselves asserfs, slaves, pariahs. From the beginning, the link between the plight ofwomen and that of other excluded groups has been part of the womens

question. Throughout the nineteenth century, women in various parts of theWest, establish parallels in silence following the example of CharlotteBrontes heroine.12 France has its proletariat,13 America its black slaves,14

England has both,15 and Greece has its rayeas. Parallels that go beyondrhetoric and discourse to produce a collective commitment of women in favor


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of abolitionist, nationalist, workers movements out of which emerged asignificant number of independent feminist movements in the nineteenthcentury. These parallels travel via underground routes of awakened

consciousness to forge apariah identity this is often claimed explicitly byfeminist themselves. Flora Tristan was not the only feminist proudly toassume this identity. Scarcely a few years later, across the ocean, theAmerican feminist leader, Susan B. Anthony laid claim to this title while, acentury later in England, Virginia Woolf called for an independentorganization womens Conscious Outsiders.

This essential dimension of feminist consciousness, the pariah identity,seems to suggest a particular approach to the history of feminism from itsbeginnings, a research direction to grasp and articulate its complex ex-pressions, its inherent contradictions, the impasses it has continued tostruggle against, as well as its many moments of rebirth and its subversivepotential. Thus from a comparative study of the two historical examplesalready cited, we propose to study the emergence of feminist consciousnessfrom the viewpoint of its pariah nature, using existing theoretical tools toexamine the situation and consciousness of pariahs, in so far as they can shednew light on the historical experiences. We will begin with a brief outline ofthe objective position of women as pariahs, and then propose an idealclassification of the manifestations of independent and collective feministconsciousness, examining the specific relationship each type has with

exclusion. We have here in mind, of course, ideal Weberian types which, inreality, are combined and articulated in the living experience of one person orone feminist current. Both the suggested models and the hypotheses could, inour opinion, serve as point of departure for an inquiry not only into feminismof the past but also into certain aspects of the emergence and evolution ofpresent day feminism. But this method is certainly neither exhaustive norincompatible with other approaches to the study of feminist consciousness.

The pariah concept, originating in the caste system of India, has alreadybeen used to study other excluded groups, especially Jews. Max Weber andHannah Arendt have done so16 as have more recently feminist writers such as

Vivian Gomick, Carolyn Heilbrun, Elisabeth Lenk, although in a lesssystematic manner.17

There are important differences between women as a social group and theother excluded groups. If we tried mechanically to base an analysis of theoppression of women on a study of other pariahs, we would tread ondangerous ground. This has already been acknowledged with respect tocertain feminist currents in the U.S. and Europe.18 Women are present in allcategories of pariahs and often face more than one type of exclusion. They arealso members of privileged social groups and some women participate,

although in a specific way, in the domination of the oppressed. This serves toexplain their complex and varied relations with exclusion.

Nevertheless two essential elements of their objective position link them toother pariah groups:

1) they remain fundamentally exterior to the hierarchical social structure;


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2) their real difference is used as a keystone in the construction of a sociallyimposed otherness, otherness that legitimizes, maintains, and reproducestheir position as outsider.

Like other pariahs, women are a group deprived of independent organiz-ation and subjected to economic and social discrimination. They live in asegregated society built according to variations of cultures and historicalperiods, maintained by laws, conventions, and customs. This segregationlimits their relations with the world of men to a perimeter constantly redefinedbut always present.

As in the case of other pariah groups, the subjective perception of theirdifference determines their relations with society. The individual clearlydefined as other can do or be what he/she wishes, but in any case shefaces scorn or on the other hand, is superstitiously feared or worshipped.Worshipped or despised, superior or inferior, woman can only exist as theimage of the other, par excellencebeyond which she becomes an anomaly.

But, the segregation of women is never absolute. Excluded from the socialhierarchy, they nevertheless belong to society, even if on the fringe asnon-persons without a voice.19 Living in close proximity with the world ofmen (much closer than for instance in the case of Blacks and Whites, Jews andGentiles), they are in a certain way the pariahs most exposed to integratingconsciously and unconsciouslythe values of this world.

Internalizing self-deprecation which society foists on the pariah, marks

womens existencewhether through their active consent or through resignationto their fate, but it also marks, either positively or negatively, the moments oftheir revolt.

The woman pariah who wants to put an end to exclusion and claim herplace in society as a full-fledged individual, has two choices: to assimilate thedominant values, by rejecting her identity as pariah, thus hoping to attain thestatus Hannah Arendt calls the status of the parvenu20; or claim her deniedheterogeneity by turning a source of contempt into a source of dignity.21 In thesecond instance, the claim to heterogeneity can lead either to a radicalquestioning of social values that denigrate the otherness of the pariah and

divide human beings into privileged and non-privileged citizens or to aninversion of dominant valueswhich turns real or claimed otherness, biologicalor social otherness of woman into a mark of superiority.22

We think that these three types of responses that mark the growingawareness and struggles for the liberation of several categories of excludedgroups correspond to three models of feminist consciousness developedduring the nineteenth century, and which appear in both discourse andpractice:

a) the consciousness of exceptional womenor the path to assimilation;b) subversive feminism or the path to social disorder;

c)feminism as the art of the possible.These are not structured models construed beforehand by feminists but

they rather correspond to different attempts to break out of exclusion, toescape from the world of pariahs. They are ideal types which may overlap inindividuals trying to put an end to ages of partriarchal oppression.


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3. The Consciousness of Exceptional Women or the Path to Assimilation.

This way is only open to individuals and is accessible to a tiny minority.

The woman pariah rebels against exclusion by her fundamental claim to thecommunity of human beings. She rejects heterogeneity, the basis of so-calledinferiority and source of discrimination, and crosses the barriers imposedupon her gender by appropriating greatly valued masculine roles and activitiesthat legitimize her claims to equality and can assure her entry into theforbidden world. In doing so, she runs up against laws and conventions of theestablishment which she counters with the laws of her own consciousness as afree individual. Family, society institutions; I hate you all to death!24 Thisrevolt often (but not necessarily) leads the woman pariah to see her personalstruggle as part of the struggle waged by her pariah sisters.

Strip yourselves of your degrading superstitions, your futile tasks, yourself-centered devotion. Get away finally from the land of servitude.25

By affirming their presence as subjects, by imposing themselves throughtheir creative or political activity upon masculine society, some exceptionalwomen in the nineteenth century were able to break out of their exclusiongain important positions in the social hierarchy, win prestige and often evenconsiderable power. The most well-known examples are George Sand andDaniel Stern in France, for their literary activity; and in Greece, KalliopiPapalexopoulou for her political activity, and Sevasti Kallisperi and Alexandra

Papadopoulou for their educational and literary contributions.But since the society they entered was still based upon the exclusion of theirgroup, they could only be admitted as exceptions. This is one of the maintraits that characterized and still characterizes the exceptional woman. She canonly be an exception that confirms the rule, the rule of the inferiority and exclusionof the rest of women. This exceptional status, the price she pays to be admittedinto the society, places her in a dilemma which is the same for the Jewish orBlack pariah: either reject the dominant values that affirm inferiority andsubservience of her sex at the risk of remaining a pariah, or assimilate the valuesand become a parvenu.26

The well-known ambiguity that characterizes the position of the majority ofexceptional women with respect to womens liberation stems from this.27

Woman is not destined to leave private life. The role of each sex is defined . . .Why would society reverse this admirable order?28

How can we explain these declarations written by the same pen that severalyears earlier had written Indiana and Lelia? How do we explain thatAlexandra Papadopoulou, Greeces first prominent woman writer, who neverstopped working as a teacher and journalist, proclaimed publicly that she wasthe enemy of womens emancipation and right to work? Social pressure?

The need to build alliances? Certainly these were motivations. But in so far asthe exceptional woman agrees to dissociate her fate from that of the rest of hersisters, accepting her status as parvenu in the world of men, she is forced toaccept a false neutrality that masks the unequal relations between the sexes;she is forced to deny a fundamental dimension of her personality, she is forced


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to deny her feminine gender. To keep her status she submits to the social andpsychological travesty of which masculine pseudonyms are only a symbolicaspect. She becomes a kind ofman honoris causa.

But can one get rid of ones sex as easily as one can break with onescounterparts? We can change class and even nationality individually, but canwe stop being women? That is the dilemma for the woman pariah condemnedto acknowledge her origins. That is the problematic fate for the exceptionalwoman who, beyond her talent and virile qualities, is constantly called uponto pay lip service to the dominant feminine image, to pay for hernon-conformity, and to get rid of this smell of the whorehouse.29

When the hen crows like a rooster, kill her on the spot, advises G. Roidis,a founder of Greek literary criticism and a fervent admirer of the West, in hispolemic against some literary women who begin publishing their work at the

turn of the century. He finally concedes their right to express ideasappropriate to their sex concerning fashion and kitchen recipes butdenies their right to write about social or scientific matters.30 In order to beaccepted in violation of patriarchal norms, the exceptional woman is oftenforced to adopt behavior that neutralizesthe hostility and fear aroused by hertransgression. In one way or another, this behavior aims to reestablish in menseyes her conformity to the feminine image, to the perfect Other which, byencroaching on his territory, she had upset.

If some pages of this book incur the harsh reproach for a tendency towards newbeliefs, if rigid judges find their manner imprudent and dangerous, one must

respond to the critics that they pay too much attention to an unimportant work. . . inwhich the writer has barely created anything.31

The ritual denigration of the importance of ones work which we findpresent among a good number of famous women writers is one of the commonforms of this neutralization. Thus, when Daniel Stern begins to write hermemoires, she confesses to endless uncertainty.32

Participating actively in politics in nineteenth century Greece, during aperiod when the streets were off limits to women of the masses, constituted aviolation much more unacceptable than publishing new beliefs. The pricepaid by K. Papalexopoulou, mother of the revolution of 1862 fit the extentof her transgression.

The wife and mother of antimonarchist politicians, one of the first womento hold a salon and perhaps the most liberated woman of her time onequal footing with the most eminent political figures and intellectuals K.Papalexopoulou had to buy her way into the political sphere by submitting toone of the most traditional rituals of expiation found in Mediterraneancultures: in 1850, at the death of her husband and her son, she had all thefurniture, mirrors and windows of her house covered with black crepe andsecluded herself to reappear again on the eve of the Revolution of 1862 thattoppled King Othon. By submitting to this custom long abandoned by urban

women far less Westernized than she was, she could continue her politicalactivity as an independent individual who was no longer defined by her role aswife and mother. Moreover, she was the only woman in Greek history given apublic welcome organized by the provisional government following the fall ofthe Baviarian dynasty.33


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Far from considering the case of Papalexopoulou as an example thatconfirms the rule, Greek feminists seek to prove that feminine hands,revered for their weakness and tenderness, not only have the strength toestablish or lose homes but also to support or destroy very powerfulthrones.34 Similarly, Feminists of 1848 see in the exceptional admission ofGeorge Sand an argument to force patriarchal reign to give way, a breachwhich can be opened to grant all women legal rights.

To cross the threshold to our destiny let us call upon the one who is already inthe temple among the chosen . . . . Sand is powerful and frightens no one. Wemust call her to the National Assembly by unanimous appeal.35

La Voix des Femmes wrote this in its appeal for her candidacy.

I do not have the honor of knowing any of these women who form the clubs and

write in the magazines.36

The arrogance with which the admitted exception sends her sisters backto exclusion, the assimilation of dominant values that lead her to dissociateherself from her sisters; these are the dues the exceptional woman must pay topatriarchal society. This is the price she must pay for having inspired, throughher own personal struggle, the collective struggles of her pariah group. Thecase of Sevasti Kallisperi also fits this pattern. Her relentless struggle to gain ahigher education inspired the first Greek feminist campaigns for theadmission of women to the university. As the first doctoresse es lettres,

Kallisperi became a kind of sacred monster with the help of feministpropaganda, using the halo from her long studies at the Sorbonne to blastFeminists and assure a public eager for Western propriety that self-respecting French women who are respected dont mix in politics.37

But by having paid her dues to the masculine world that has accepted her,the exceptional woman risks losing, along with the quality of being a pariah,her ability to view the exclusion of her sex as a generalized reality and to takean interest in it in any way other than as an individual. She risks developinga view of the world similar to the one described by H. Arendt in her biographyof Rachel Varnhagen, where the parvenu thinks she is a kind of superman of

efficiency, a particularly successful, solid, and intelligent specimen ofhumanity,38 a model that her pariah sisters have only to follow individuallyin order to succeed. This view of the world is in conflict with feministconsciousness in so far as it denies the systematic character of the exclusion of woman as a social category. For that reason, the consciousness of exceptionalwomen, notably in the nineteenth century, is at the crossroads betweenfeminist consciousness and the consciousness of the parvenu.

But it would be anachronistic not to consider the fact that the spaceavailable in nineteenth century society for assimilating rebel pariahs was verylimited. Cultural, political, and civil barriers separating pariah women from

the society of men were such that the very existence of a woman within thissociety would suffice to unleash fear, hostility, aggressive mockery. Crossingthe barrier, the most assimilated exceptional woman could only feel hersuccess was superficial; that instead of belonging essentially to this society, asshe had dreamed, she was simply tolerated, and in spite of her many


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denigrations of her gender she could not escape from the position of beingintolerably exposed to insult.39 This problematic situation often kept theexceptional woman from becoming a satisfied parvenu and placed herbetween pariah and parvenu, to use H. Arendts phrase. The curse of despisedotherness, the smell of the whorehouse dogged her steps towards successand impeded her total assimilation to values of the establishment,preserving in the depth of her neutral conscience a small corner for her oldpariah identitys anger and indignation. This gives rise to bitter lucidity evenin moments of success. We are troublesome beings . . . They tolerate us byhabit like the rest of the pets40 writes Alexandra Papadopoulou during theperiod when she is the only woman whose work is accepted for the first Greekanthology of short stories.

But when one only conceives of . . . the existence of a woman in a totally relative,dependent, impersonal, subordinate manner what spirit can govern theeducation of young girls? . . . when intelligence can become a difficulty, reasonan obstacle, conscience an occasion to struggle or rebel . . . 41

Conversely, as the twentieth century moves on, the space for assimilation ofthe exceptional woman grows and the distance between parvenu and pariahbecomes an insurmountable abyss. Modernization and rationalization of thepartriarchal order, formal legal equality, at least in the West, the extension ofthe oppression of women in the new salary system obscured by seductivemyths of equal opportunity neutralize the potential tensions of the

parvenus position. The much greater number of exceptional women feedswomens illusion of individual success and more easily hides the inevitable factof their gender from them.

In the old days, says Plutarch, the Leucothean temple was forbidden to womenslaves with the exception of one woman whom the Roman women let in whilestriking her on the cheek.42

The rare woman who attains a high position of power and authority todayhas more chances of perpetuating this infernal logic of the slap on the cheekthan identifying with the slaves excluded from the temple.

4. Subversive Feminism or the Path to Social Disorder.

As we have seen, women, the others, in some sense outcasts, are profoundlyintegrated in the world in which they are indispensable non-beings. Also,most of them, although they belong to the pariah caste, are not aware of beingexcluded from public society, particularly since the promoters of this societykeep granting them space, most often private but precious, and find themwonderful but inaccessible mythic sanctuaries.

Whether from an imbalance in the social structure or a flaw in the carefully

tended machinery, a breach opens to all kinds of conflicts. Through thisbreach some women can then perceive as clearly as their position as outsiderallows them to, the oppressive nature of this society in which the dominantforce is masculine. They are then aware of being deceived, reified,dispossessed of their identity, relegated to the world of inferior beings.


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The woman who chooses the path of subversive feminism uses herotherness, as well as her position as outsider, to create an approach throughwhich she perceives the whole picture of social reality. It is also a source of practical daily resistanceagainst the norms imposed upon her as a member of apariah people. For her, the achievement of feminist consciousness is notsimply the awareness of her oppression, but a radical transformation thatmakes her view the present and future in a qualitatively different way,shedding light on the world of daily activity, making it unbearable from thenon. Unjust and shameful subservience of women becomes a touchstone thatallows her to judge society in its entirety, and reject the laws and values thatgovern it.

Behind your codes and charters . . . your charters that declare men equal before

the law, when among these very members a small number in their lazinessaccumulate all the wealth and happiness wrested from the other . . . the otherwho is starving to death working for the wealthy . . . and if your laws are false formen, how much more so for women . . . for the women you bar from allpolitical activity and keep in your households as parade horses. . . .43

Using a utopian model, a project for a future society free of inequality, thisconsciousness is subversive to the established order. This consciousnessidentifies a revolutionary potential that can only stem from women.

It is up to women to tear down the screen behind which your parliamentaryillusions appear; it is up to women to cut the gilded strings of your diplomatic

puppets.44

This subversion always takes place on two levels. One must disassemble themasculine social order not only by proposing an ideal egalitarian society, butthis transgression must be also lived, put into daily practice, to show what itmeans for women to refuse the patriarchal order, to destroy from within thissocial framework cleverly policed by doctors of all disciplines.

At this point difficulties occur, for as long as these propositions remainutopian the ideal future can overlap with other projects, for example, thesubversion of class relations. But when this utopia becomes daily practice, it

confronts sexual traditions deeply rooted in social relationships; not only doordinary men and even revolutionary men become obstacles, but womenthemselves oppose those who project a degrading image of the traditionalfemale or who, worse yet, propose a way they perceive to be inaccessiblebecause it demands a total break, interior as well as exterior.

More than any other type of feminist consciousness, subversion involves anupheaval of the most intimate practices, of the most internal mental habits.From this position, facts as evident and natural as love, marriage,childbearing, are transformed into contradictions. As Sandra Lee Bartkyexplains, feminists are sensitive to a certain dimension of society the sexist

dimension that seems to specialize in duplicity.45 But the deceiving natureof this aspect of social reality makes the feminist experience of life difficult tocommunicate to the non-initiated. The woman who gains subversiveconsciousness finds herself constantly dividedbetween the certainty that life isdifferent from the way it appears, and the difficulty, if not impossibility, of


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communicating this message; there is a tension between the impulse thatforces her to act in accordance with this certainty and the lack ofcomprehension that her action will provoke. This division, this anguishedtension that haunts the person who intends to subvert the masculine order,can only be endured if the collective militant group supports this form ofaction and encourages new awareness on the part of women, but it alsodemands another relationship of powers which encourages men to take on theproject that would free them from this secular alienation based on power, andwould allow them to experience freely their complex nature. (The implemen-tation of this project implies a joint undertaking by both sexes.)

In the nineteenth century, these steps were taken only by isolatedindividuals. Their attachment to the collective movement was temporary.Torn between a too distant utopia and a too unbearable reality, between acollective project and a marginality even among pariah women, between theperception of the possibility of another existence and the lack of power toimpose it, these subversive feminists were doomed to live in the isolation andthe despair that usually led to complete marginalization, even to suicide.

This type of feminist consciousness is absent in nineteenth century Greece.The largely pre-capitalist economic structures, the delay in the industrialrevolution, the nonexistence of a significant proletariat during this period keptsocial relations from reaching the degree of contradictions that produce thesocial conflict that gives rise to subversive feminism. But in the 1830s in

France, emerged a radical feminist subversion that even violated the rules ofthe parent Saint-Simonian movement.After the July days, with all due respect to Mr. Guizot, the peoples rancor

was great:

In the last months of 1830, the era in which the people, taking vengeance uponthe disillusionment wrought by the quasi-legitimacy, chanted with its poetpoor sheep.46

The ghost of 1793 hovered over all these events; keep on with July; stop 1789;the fears and enthusiasm of the period were structured around this

alternative.47

The room for liberty opened by the 1830 revolution, with the goal ofbreaking the shackles of the preceding monarchy that stifled the entre-preneurs development, will both profit republican society and widen the fieldof participation for Saint-Simonism that then reaches the masses andinfluences women who are profoundly disappointed, aware of having beenmanipulated by the profit-hungry bourgeoisie. This period of free expressionwas short, barely four years, but sufficient for women to shed the weightycloak of the First Empire and experience some moments of utopian

enthusiasm that recalled the privileged moments of the womens clubsforbidden by Montagnards in 1793.

Claire Demar, like many other subversive feminists, embraces Saint-Simonism with fervor, with such a strong feeling that her contemporariescalled her ecstatic (today she would be considered hysterical). She believes


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in the liberation of humanity by women. Our intent here is not to evaluate theuse that Father Enfantin, the promoter of this doctrine, made of it, nor topoint out all its ambiguities. We wish to show why Claire Demar, more thanany other, took up these teachings and tried to put this new liberty intopractice. Beginning with the somewhat hypocritical utopia of Saint-Simonismshe transformed the doctrine into a revolutionary firebrand that upsets socialpower, enters public space and individual lives, and breaks down thesacrosanct barriers of the private domain. Masculine order is to betransformed, whatever its origins:

The revolution in marriage customs does not occur on the street corner or in thetown square in three days of glorious sunshine, but it occurs at every hour, inevery place . . . in the long cold dreary nights of which there are so many in the

nuptial chamber.48

That is why Claire Demar was a nuisance. Her critical spirit and her abilityto detect duplicity within the Saint-Simonian family were annoying. She was anuisance because she insisted on having the principles of the doctrinesapplied, on seeing liberty follow exigency, confidence follow mistrust, freelove follow slavery.49 Did she practice free love? She tried to. Her statementsare declarations of faith in favor of the true liberty that would encourage thedevelopment of all individuals, whatever their age or sex. A commitmentwhich meant making all power, including parental power, no longer sacred.

No more slavery, no more exploitation, no more tutelage. Emancipation for all,slaves, proletariat, minors, the big and the small.50

She was a nuisance because of her dissidence, her practical revolutionaryzeal that forced her to break with the pacificism of the doctrine and approachrepublican circles:

I am still the woman of the barricades; I am not yet religious enough to wishhappiness to those who make you suffer, to those who cause the people sufferingby the right ofmight. No, a thousand times no. To the barricades . . . cannonballsfor their castles! . . bullets for their brains!51

She was a nuisance because of her impatience, tenacity, and bitter despair asshe tried to tear down the walls of misunderstanding and indifference thatseparated her from those who, by their words, were seeking a woman-messiah.

She was separated from everyone. For even the Saint-Simonian dissidentswho regrouped around the Tribune des Femmes after being expelled from theMenilmontant family, distanced themselves from the one who demanded theright to use and abuse our independence . . . this right without limits, rules,authority.52 Women dont understand my ideas very well.53 Theirmoderation, their lack of individuality exasperated her and it became more

and more difficult for her to bow to the norms that link their collectivemovement to the boundaries and limitations set up where boundaries andlimitations are not possible.54 Refusing to replace old world morality withanother restrictive norm that would stifle the complex needs of eachindividual in one fixed law of movement and life, she claimed the right of


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every woman to express every need and suffering, to formulate her own lawfor the future.55 For her, if women carry with them a subversive andliberating potential, it is because

The word of the woman saviour will be supremely rebellious for it will be thewidest, and consequently the most satisfactory for all nature. . . 56

Her ideas about sexual morality, the completely physical experience of fleshby flesh57 that she did not hesitate to practice, nor publicize, made hermarginal even within this movement which was the only one struggling for theemancipation of women. Thus, even though her project was intended to becollective and her revolt is originally expressed in the first person plural,58 herradicalism leads inexorably to the solitary path of individual action. It isinevitable for her to slip from the first to the second person in order to expressmost profoundly her revolt as a woman, expressing the sacrilegious words thatabolish the law of blood:

Youwish to free women! Well, then take the newborn child from its biologicalmotherand place it in the arms of a state nursemaid and the child will be raisedbetter.59

Although Claire Demar proclaimed the need to live as a free woman andwanted to subvert the established masculine order theoretically as well aspractically, she was nevertheless prisoner of a doctrine that was not her own,

an ideology not constructed for womens interests. Her anguished letters to FatherEnfantin reveal her strong dependency, her desperate need for recognitionand support for the person who tried to make her understand how littleinvolved I am with womens projects . . .60 Her correspondence abounds withthis contradiction in which strength and weakness are entangled, herconscience strangely divided between the need for an organic community andthe refusal to comply with its norms. All the women have forsaken me, andmost of the men as well.61 A stranger to her society, to most of the peopleshe loved, to the non-emancipated aspects of her own personality,62 shecommited suicide on August 1833 at the age of thirty-two.

No, Claire Demar was not free. But how could she be in this world in whicheverything institutions, literature, religions, and even social protest concurred to disown the real women, women for-themselves, for the benefit ofthe mother figure who becomes publicly useful, whose availability harmo-nizes so well with the subordination of women.63 Doesnt she herselfreproduce the dominant structure of dual nature which reserves the functionsof social motherhood to women at the same time that she rejects the law ofblood?

In spite of these contradictions, Claire Demar made a break with thebiological determinism that was developing at the time and imprisoning

women. For contrary to the quasi-totality of Feminists of her time who basedtheir claim to equality on the reproductive function, she questioned theuniversal vocation of all women to raise children, and called for theiremancipation in their own right as independent human beings.64

This divided feminist conscience that subverts order, including morality,


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others will discover later. In the same period, Pauline Rolands tries to becomeindependent by assuming the freedom to love which causes a scandal whileshe struggles to end the exploitation of the oppressed.

Later, Madeleine Pelletier would write at the end of her life:

This is how they punish women who distinguish themselves intellectually.Arriaky committed suicide and I am locked up in an insane asylum.65

5. Feminism as the Art of the Possible.

This form of feminism is different because it develops out of a collectivemovement. It is not a question of drawing blue prints for a distant future. It isnot an exemplary individual demonstration nor a preview of future society.The time has come to build new social relationships based on Equality andIndependence and to lay the foundation for this long awaited new humanity.

In periods such as those of developing democracy in France, or irredentiststruggles in Greece, when certain social groups destroy the past structuresresponsible for their oppression, contradictions sharpen, oppositions occur, anew power balance of forces is formed. New exclusions stand out clearly.

Both objective and subjective possibilities of perceiving oneself, otherwisethan through the eyes of men, suggest a new mode of action beyond the rangeof institutionalized classifications: Collective Feminism becomes possible.

Womens Voice (la Voix des Femmes) entered the public stage, intent onmaking itself heard. That is why feminists set themselves two objectives:organize a majority of women and convince the men. For them feminism was onlypossible through collective action. In this way, new social relationships basedon gender equality would be established. Thus, they appropriated republicanand nationalist slogans concerninghuman-kindand expanded them to includethe demand of equality in gender relationships.

In this context, equality seemed possible. But even if the word pariah becameunacceptable, inequality remained. Individual men and women were not yetprepared to cast off centuries of established differences. Gender equality was

not the order of the day. For the majority of revolutionaries it was socialgroups which clashed and women were not seen as such.Each era creates its own set of gender differences. In the 19th century

biological determinism permeated all social relationships. Only as mothers orpotential mothers were women respected, only in this quality was theirotherness venerated. The only women who existed in public were prostitutes.

To make themselves heard, partisans of feminism as the art of the possiblehad to stress womens otherness as defined by the developing ideology. Fromthis point of view, their discourse is not original and their message is borrowedfrom the conceptual heritage of the past. Their language uses cultural

instruments made by others. Their writings are filled with words whose deepmeaning is rooted in the period that produced them the meaning giventhem by men.

Surely, this discourse is largely determined by tactical pre-occupations. Butaccepting the maternal role ascribed to women was not just a maneuver to


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persuade men. Glorification of motherhood, stressing the difference servedthem as a mediation in developing a collective identity. For these pragmaticfeminists, otherness constituted the most visible element that united women,that distinguished them as a group, that promoted the esteem of the pariahpeople.

But, instead of limiting feminine space to the home, they widened it toembrace society as a whole. The angel of the hearth became a missionary, aredeemer for the world in disorder. Picking up the old myth of the redeemingWoman, they constructed a world regenerated by the saving grace of women.

The coming of Woman is near and Humanity will abandon the fateful roads toprogress by pain, struggle, misery, to enter the providential paths of peacefuland harmonious progress, through the intervention of the mother of Humanity,

the woman restored by liberty.

Barely a century will pass before Woman, by her spiritual superiority . . . willmake the prejudices of unjust insitutions disappear, abolish the barbarity of warand carnage that civilized man has not known how to reject.67

Women form the very best social category to save the world since, keptfrom power, they cannot assume responsibility for disorder. Their secularlack of responsibility, opens new paths of redemption.

. . . until now man alone ruled Humanitys destiny and took the initial steps

along the fatal paths of injustice and tyranny, refusing solidarity, oppressingWoman, his mother, sister, companion. And women bowed down under theyolk or tried to escape by imitating man. And man alone organized society, andin so doing, based all institutions on privilege, with no solidarity, based on theprinciple that might makes right.68

Their project for the liberation of women implied a re-organization ofhumanity, one that for the first time includes the feminine element of thehuman being.

Dominant values were thus invertedin this specific way which characterizes

pariah people. Feminine nature gained importance. From an inferior beingwhose usefulness was limited to reproduction, she became essential, superiorto the virile male who until then had been capable only of inventing mansexploitation of man; naturally drawn towards a charitable pacifism, onlywoman could reestablish the original balance. Thus, fundamental equalitywould be restored.

Inverted, glorified, this womens vision of the female nature was none otherthan the distorted vision of a masculine construction. This strategy of diversioncould not lead to the end of exclusion. The image of woman put forward bythese feminists had been created to maximally limit their public intervention;

it could not help them enter a space that remained male monopoly.But in spite of their dependency, feminists hoped nevertheless to live in a

more egalitarian society. And if their discourse offended as little as possible, ifthe verbal transgression avoided alienating liberal support, their writings anddaily practice led them inevitably to confrontation. Confrontation with those


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who were willing to share power with women by providing them with theemancipation that fitted the norms of the period, in other words: the femalenature must be accompanied by its corollary, inferiority.

For Feminists, the principle of equality must apply to one and all. For theirallies it was merely a means to circumscribe the revolutionary potentialinherent in the project.

Practice reveals the conflict that emerges in spite of the required consensus.The partisans of freedom for women, most often the founders of feministtheory, only accepted equality within a functional, unbalanced, insurmount-able otherness. For Feminists, this theory was a means to perceive thepossibility of the struggle necessary to attain the egalitarian ideal; thenatural barriers are quickly overcome when there is agender confrontation.

The possible that feminists consciousness introduces reveals what isunacceptable to men. When the mother gives up her place to woman, to acomplete individual, the forbidden appears. Feminine practice that goesbeyond normative discourse soon confronts social taboo. The transgressorsare quickly rejected, cast out in solitude. To escape this insurmountableexclusion a good number of Feminists choose to flee to other struggles that aresocially acceptable, most often to the detriment of their feminism. They thusjoin the camp of the oppressed and let themselves be convinced that thestruggle for the liberation of other pariahs, recognized by masculine society,has priority over their own emancipation.

In France, the February Revolution opened the way to Feminism as the artof the possible. Within a general movement of liberation, the perspective of acoming liberation was no longer utopian for a large number of women. Therepublican victory had increased their hopes. For the first time, all men wouldbe given the vote. There were projects to end the exploitation of man by man.Discourse had the stamp of a new fraternity. The oppressor seemed to havebeen banished, the oppressed liberated. Did some inequality remain?

In Greece, the result of the Great Idea and the strategic importance ofspreading the Greek language (the mother tongue) among the dispersedpopulations of the Ottoman Empire, opened political opportunities to a great

number of middle-class women. Our road will be an obscure desert if womendo not follow it69 wrote one of the most fervent bards of the Great Idea.Overtures to the potential mothers of warriors of the irredentist struggles aswell as the prospect of freeing all the Greek rayeas offered possible pathtowards equality.

To convince the most sympathetic men revolutionaries and nationalists to end the oppression that was so ingrained in customs that it seemsnatural, required an infallible argument. The claim to equality must includethe participation of women in the construction of the Republic, theestablishment of the Nation. To do this and avoid all reservations, their rights,

so loudly proclaimed, would be based on their specific duties.

It is a national necessity that forces us to break our spiritual chains . . . . Thesurvival of our mother tongue, the dissemination of philohellenic feelingsamong the other populations depends upon the efforts of Greek women . . . .70


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It is in the name of our duties that we claim our rights . . . in the name of thetender servitude of mothers that we say: yes, we, like you, have the right toserve our country.71

Only women can fulfill these duties which are directly linked to female nature,to womens distinct qualities, to their difference from men: Man is the headand arm of humanity, woman is the heart.72

For the Feminists of 1848 as well as their Greek descendants at the turn ofthe century, this division of human nature no longer proved womensinferiority. Deprived of heart, mens virile capacities ended up in disorderand social injustice.

Opposing moral superiority of women based on maternal virtues of altruismand love to these virile vices, Feminists inverted the hierarchy of dominant

values and granted their sex a new dignity, a positive identity indispensable tothe creation of a struggling collective subject. Women became the mostimportant lever of the social machine, and as such did not have to envy menfor the privilege of killing their neighbor on the battlefield or engaging inmean economic transactions.73

Woman must not emancipate herself by becoming a man; she must emancipateman by making him a woman.74

This newly acquired dignity rested on the redeeming role that would betheirs in the future, their mission of peace, harmony, and love75 to which

they were destined, as much by their difference from men, as by their age oldoppression:

Constantly oppressed, woman in saintly fashion is united with the oppressed ofall nations and classes. Their suffering evokes her tender compassion.76

As the paradigm of oppression, women in their revolt must embrace theliberation of all the oppressed.

Drunkenness, conceit, tyranny, injustice, these are the enemies of humanityagainst which woman must fight . . . Her nation is the whole world, her family allof humanity.77

By linking their cause to the redemption of the world, and affirming thatequal rights had as its goal to restore humanity in the interest of the entiresociety,78 French and Greek Feminists strove to legitimize their strugglesand gain the support of republican, socialist, and irredentist movements.

Within this framework, the emphasis on the moral superiority of womanhad double importance. It called upon a large regrouping of women, based onbiological and social community a regrouping made possible because it didnot disturb the dominant sexual morality. They judged womens organizationindispensable for any substantial change in social relations between the sexes.

But at the same time, by placing themselves in a ground acceptable to men, bymagnifying the ideal feminine image created by men, they hoped to be heardmore easily.

The stakes were high. Feminists of 1848 still remembered how the liberatedwomen of 1830 were received. Pauline Roland, regreted her past errors, the


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mistakes of her youth for which she atoned in her mature years.79

Feminists of 1848 kept a distance from their predecessors who had not beenheeded. They wished to be heard.

In Greece, the rigidity of the sex segregation system and the crushingweight of patriarchal morality left much less room for deviation fromestablished norms. The very presence of Feminists, the very act of publicspeaking sufficed to evoke fantasies of a topsy-turvy world.

They must be exemplary figures, ward off any criticism of immorality,certain that they will be more persuasive by claiming specific functions linkedto feminine nature.

Since mother alone was acceptable, as mothers they would be in their rightto claim their place in the city.

Do you want women to be the serfs of your Republic? No, citizens . . . themothers of your sons cannot be slaves.80

In this way, they reaffirmed the discourse of their closest friends, potentialallies who seeked to establish an essential place for the woman that fitted inthe cultural and economic realities of the period. These philogynes, bothFrench and Greek, believed that feminine superiority could provideimportant services to the community, in the areas of education,81 medicine,philanthropy,82 thus foreshadowing the basic feminine activities of ourcentury that have widened the scope of maternal vocations to include societyas a whole.

The dialogue begins on this basis, the one that naturally divides the sexes.The partisans of Feminism as the art of the possible were the only partners indialoguewith nineteenth century men. However, the dialogue did not go veryfar. The place that men wanted to set up for their closest women allies did notmatch the Feminists dreams. For some, notably Legouv, womens missionwas to do what men do not do, to aspire to vacant places. Women wereaccepted in the struggle for the redemption of an asexual non genderedhumankind, not for the redemption of their own gender. As long as theyfought as mothers of the Republic, alongside men, they were heeded andvenerated. But when they formed independent clubs to claim their rights,

they became incomprehensible and unacceptable.83 Strange things were saidin these clubs; man was considered to be an enemy.84 Similarly, theirpresence in public shocked no one when it served the national cause andsupported nationalism in the disputed territories of the Balkans, but this samepresence was considered to be a serious blow to decency when women studiedat the university or claimed to right to work.

Many men would consider with dread the prospect of women improving theirminds by studies similar to theirs, of women taking an active part in affairswhich, until then, they have monopolized.85

Would it be an exaggeration to say that feminine ignorance is consciouslydesired and systematically organized? . . . T hey fear that by educating themselveswomen will claim political independence and will want to take an active part inthe nations politics . . . . And why should it be illegal for women to participate inpolitics?86


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Coming up against the refusal of the men who were most sympathetic totheir cause to share the power which men took to be naturally their own,Feminists were obliged to face the facts: glorification of their different

nature was a far cry from leading to emancipation.

Above the title of wife and mother, ephemeral and dependent upon chance,belonging to some but not to others, is the eternal priceless title that bows to noyoke, the title ofhuman being.87

However, pragmatic feminists had difficulty in claiming the title of humanbeing in a coherent manner. Their practice went way beyond the limits,prescribed to feminine nature, and their anger strikes out at the repressionimposed upon them by the patriarchal order:

In 1848, in the midst of a century of enlightenment and progress, a man dared tocall for the exclusion of women from all clubs and political meetings discussingsocial issues, in the National Assembly; (. . . ) this unjust degree was adoptedalmost unanimously and not one protest was heard.88

But in vain.

Prisoners of conceptual and ideological machinery that was not made fortheir liberation, with a self-definition that did not break with patriarchal logicthat excluded them, yielding to a balance of forces that was extremelyunfavorable, they faced the following dilemma; either to be isolated or tofollow a social movement that did not include womens liberation.

When Jeanne Deroin ran for office in the legislative elections of 1849, hersocialist friends treated her with reserve. They did not understand the actionsof the militant who dismissed her role as mother to claim the rights of womenin the name of gender equality. She no longer fitted the norm. The orderbetween the sexes was disturbed. Now, according to the mechanics of malepower, even though Socialist, choices were to be made following the days ofJune 1848. One of her closest socialist collaborators reminded her:

I told you that the emancipation of workers was more pressing than yours . . . .The privilege of sex which will be the last to remain on this earth will be farweaker when there will be not others to support.89

Thus, gender struggle must stop at the threshold of class struggle.This problem of priorities, of a hierarchy of oppressions, feminists would

also confront it in Greece, some decades later. Whether it be for the cause ofnationalism, or social reform, a large number of Greek Feminists foundthemselves forced to put feminism in second place. Once again, the questionposed by La Voix des Femmesin 1848 went unanswered:

Why is our free-will always surrendered to the will of a master, the domineeringdespot of our useless feelings . . . ? Why must we either blindly follow the currentthat drags us backwards or find ourselves tossed by the impetuous wave that

dashes us against dangerous shores. . . ?90

These models and hypotheses are the result of research on the nineteenthcentury. However, we believe it would be a point of departure for studyingcurrent Feminism. Indeed, approaching current feminist consciousness fromthe viewpoint of its pariah dimension, can shed light on the evolution of the


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strands in the feminist movement today, their problematic relationship withassimilation and exclusion, and their falling back on the qualityof difference.

(Translated by Mildred Mortimer)

NOTES

1 Betty Friedan, The Second Stage(New York: Summit, 1982).2 La Voix des Femmes, no. 28, April 20, 1848.3 N. Svoronos, Histoire de la Grce Moderne (Paris: PUF, 1972), and L.S. Stavrionos, The

Balkans Since 1453(New York, 1958), p. 292.4 Alexis de Tocqueville, Souvenirs(Paris, 1983), p. 108-109.

5 Joan Kelly, The Social Relation of the Sexes: Methodological implications of womenshistory, in Signs, 1976, no. 4, p. 81.

6 In the Ottoman Empire, women like rayeas are in the same boat concerning theirfreedom of movement in public which is controlled. See N. Seni, Ville Ottomane et

Representation du Corps Fminin, in Les Temps Modernes, no. 456-457, pp. 66-95.7 G. Fraisse, LHistoire du fminisme, in LHistoire des Femmes est-elle possible? (Paris,

1985).

8 The thesis of Ch. Plant, Les Saint-Simoniennes ou la qute dune identit impossible traverslcriture la premiere personne, 1983, Paris III.

9 Petition of Greek Women in Parliament, in Le Journal des Dames, 20-3-1888.

10 La Voix des Femmes, no. 22, Avril 13, 1848.11 Le Journal des Dames, 4-3-1890.12 Charlotte Bront, Jane Eyre(London, 1949), pp. 15-16.13 Like J. Deroin, D. Gay, and still others among 1848 Feminists.

14 M. Fuller, Women in America;H. Beecher Stowe, Uncle Toms Cabin.15 Harriet Talyor Mill, Elizabeth Barret Browning, etc.

16 Max Weber, Economie et Socit, (Paris, 1971); also, Essays in Sociology (London, 1967);Hannah Arendt, Rachel Varnhagen(London, 1974), and The Jew as a Pariah (New York,1978).

17 Vivian Gornick, Women as Outsider in Women in a Sexist Society (New York, 1971);

Carolyn Heilbrun, Re-inventing Womanhood (New York, 1979); Elisabeth LenkIndiscretions and the Literary Beast inNew German Critique.18 The tendency of contemporary Feminists to adapt the study of the oppression of women to

concepts and analyses that are different from it, notably those pertaining to Black

nationalism in America as well as its close links to the development of separatism within

the movement, is discussed in a pertinent although strongly polemical manner in the

article of Ti-Grace Atkinson, Le Nationalisme feminine in Nouvelles QuestionsFeministes, no. 6-7, 1984, pp. 35-54.

19 E. Lenk, op. cit., p. 106.20 H. Arendt, Between Pariah and Parvenu, pp. 199-215.

21 M. Weber, Economie et Societ, op. cit., pp. 511-512; also, Ancient Judaism (New York,

1975), pp. 375-376.22 M. Weber, Ibid.23 Resisting all forms of moral constraints became second nature to her, a principle of

conduct, a law of conscience, G. Sand, Indiana, Paris, Garnier, 1962, p. 69.24 G. Sand, Valentine, Paris, 1852, p. 140.


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25 D. Stern cited in l Almanack des Femmesin 1842, published by J. Deroin.26 For a study of the concept of parvenu as it developed within the context of Jewish

pariahs, see H. Arendt, Rachel Varnhagen, op. cit., pp. 199-215 and The Jew as a Pariah,

p. 76-79; and also B. Lazare, Le Fumier de Job.27 This ambiguous, if not hostile, attitude towards womens emancipation also characterized

most exceptional women in England and America in the Victorian Era. See C. Heilbrun,op. cit., p. 42-46.

28 G. Sand, Lettres Marcie(Paris, 1837).29 An expression of Lammenais concerning G. Sand and D. Stern, cited by H. Guillemin La

Comtesse et les quarante-huitards, Le Monde, February 15, 1985.30 E. Rodis, The Greek Literary Women, Athens, 1896.31 G. Sand, Indiana(Paris, 1962), p. 6.32 D. Stern.Mes souvenirs, 1806-1833(Paris, 1880), p. viii.33 For the life of K. Papalexopoulou, see K. Xiradaki, Kalliopi Papalexopoulou (1809-1898)

(Athens, 1898).34 Journal des Dames, September 13, 1898.35 La Voix des Femmes, no. 16, April 6, 1848.36 La Voix des Femmes, no. 19, April 10, 1848.37 Journal des Dames, October 15, 1895.38 H. Arendt,Rachel Varnhagen, p. 214.39 Ibid., p. 210.40 A. Papadopoulou,Nouvelles(Athens, 1954) p. 129.41 D. Stern,Mes souvenirs, 1806-1833(Paris, 1880), p. 180.42 B. Lazare, Papiers indits(unedited papers).

43 Valentin Pelosse, Claire Demar. Paris, 1978, pp. 16-17.44 Ibid., p. 21.45 Sandra Lee Bartky, Toward a Phenomenology of Feminist Consciousness inFeminism

and Philosophy(New Jersey, 1977), p. 28,46 Suzanne Voilquin, Souveniers dune fille du peuple, Paris (Maspero, 1978).47 Pierre Rosanvallon, Le Moment Guizot(Paris: Gallimard, 1985), p. 294.48 C. Deman, Appel dune femme, in Valentin Pelosse, Claire Demar: L affranchissment des

femmes, Payot, 1976, pp. 16-17.49 Ibid., p. 17.50 Ibid.51 Ibid., p. 45.

52 Ibid.,p. 165.53 Ibid., p. 26.54 Ibid., p. 68.55 Ibid., p. 63.56 Ibid., p. 67.57 Ibid., p. 75.58 Ibid., p. 14.59 Ibid., p. 94. In Saint-Simonian terminology, the state nurse-made designates individual

social competency. See Ch. Plant, op. cit.60 Pelosse, op. cit., p. 46.61 Ibid., p. 12.62 S. Lee Bartky, op. cit., pp. 32-33.63 K. Blunden, Le travail et la vertu, Paris, 1982, p. 68.64 Letter of the Saint-Simonian feminist Suzanne Voilquin, cited by V. Pelosse, op. cit., p.

164: . . . use your title as motherto demand equality from man . . ..65 Letter to H. Gosset, Bibl. M.D., cited by Cl. Maifrier, ed. Syros, p. 55.


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66 J. Deroin,Almanach des femmes, second year, 1853.67 Journal des Dames, April 4, 1893.68 Journal des Dames, May 7, 1895.

69 Lettre de Jean Psichari A. Papadopoulou, cited by T. Staurou, Les salons deConstantinople inNea Estia(Athens, 1956), p. 1485-1486.

70 Journal des Dames, January 2, 1888.71 Voix des Femmes, no. 20, April 11, 1848.72 Voix des Femmes, no. 3, March 23, 1848.73 Journal des Dames, February 10, 1888.74 La Voix des Femmes, no. 20, April 11, 1848.75 La Voix des Femmes, no. 18, April 20, 1848.76 LOpinion des Femmes, May 7, 1895.77 Idem.78 La Voix des Femmes, no. 27, April 19, 1848.

79 Letters of Pauline Roland from May 25, 1851 and June 9, 1851, cited by E. Thomas, P.Roland, Socialism et Feminisme, 1956, p. 172.

80 La Voix des Femmes, no. 7, March 27, 1848.81 G. Papadopoulos, Au sujet de linstruction publique en Grece, in Pandora, 1865-1866,

p. 165.82 E. Legouv, Histoire morale des femmes, 4 me edition, Paris, 1864, p. 395, and E.

Assopios, La femme en Grce et lOccident in Almanach Attique de 1883 (Athens,1882).

83 Maxime du Camp.84 Idem.

85 Opinion des Femmes, January 28, 1849.86 Le Journal des Dames, September 20, 1887.87 Le Journal des Dames, January 21, 1890.88 Opinion des Femmes, January 28, 1849.89 Opinion des Femmes, March 10, 1849.90 La Voix des Femmes, no. 32, April 24 and April 25, 1848.

Documents

4.5 - Riot-Sarcey, Michèle & Varikas, Eleni - Feminist Consciousness in the Nineteenth Century. A Pariah Consciousness¿ (EN)