In 1883 a new play, Around Marriage, opened in Paris. The heroine, Paulette d’Hautretan, aged twenty, is engaged to marry a thirty-six-year-old man, Monsieur d’Alaly. In the smoking room he tells his friends, ‘I will mould her as I wish and assert an influence over her from the beginning that I shall keep.’ Her mother warns Paulette that ‘from tomorrow, you will have to obey him… Your husband will have every right over you… He could ask anything of you.’ But in response to the question suggested by this, ‘Would you like to have children, Paulette?’, Paulette blithely replies, ‘Not right away. You see, mother, I will tell you frankly, I am getting married to have fun.’1
Paulette is at once naive and capricious, inclined less to flout convention than to see it as irrelevant to her. On honeymoon, she asks her husband to change his name – ‘Joseph is a ridiculous name’ – and tells him after their wedding night, ‘If I thought it was going to be worse, I also thought it would be more fun.’ When her husband reprimands her for reading Things of Love she ripostes, ‘I didn’t get married to read Walter Scott,’ and she antagonizes him by using slang, playing tennis, wearing swimming costumes that show off her legs, and going riding in male attire, all in the company of male admirers. ‘You are a terrible flirt [coquette],’ he complains, to which she replies,
But it’s unconscious – unconscious!!… God knows, they did everything to make me an accomplished little lady, eyes cast down, sweet, submissive, banal and insignificant, with simple desires and an imperious need to meet a guide (or several) in life, absolutely unable to do anything thoughtless. But it didn’t work, as you see, and I don’t think that you will succeed where others failed.2
At the end of the play Paulette decides to leave her husband and goes to find a lawyer who, taking her for a cocotte, or lady of easy virtue, makes a pass at her which, incredulous, she rejects. The sequel, Around Divorce, was staged in 1886, after divorce had become possible again in 1884. Paulette reads up on it herself in law books, conjures up a story of her husband’s shaking her arm at a ball in order to qualify for one of the conditions of divorce – brutality – and goes through with a theatrical trial. The life of a divorced woman, she finds, however, is not all fun. She is besieged by her former male companions who want to become her lovers but who now just annoy her, and she becomes jealous of her former husband flirting with other women. In the end she confesses, ‘perhaps I had happiness to hand and passed it by,’ and goes back to him.3
Reviewing Around Divorce, Jules Lemaître welcomed Paulette as ‘the most modern feminine type’, feminine in her prettiness, nervousness and illogicality, masculine in her boyish allure, dress and lack of sentimentality. She is irreverent, even ‘a revolutionary’ in her almost unconsidered defiance of ‘certain proprieties and certain prejudices which are still powerful’ in her society, but she never falls from grace in a way that would exclude her from it. She is a coquette without ever being a cocotte. ‘This immoral little creature’, concluded Lemaître, ‘remains virtuous.’4
Paulette was the creation of Gabrielle de Riqueti de Mirabeau, Comtesse de Martel de Janville, ‘the last of the Mirabeaus’, who wrote under the punchier pen-name Gyp. Like her heroine she too was the product of a highly conventional upbringing whose codes she dared to subvert. Her parents separated the year after she was born and she scarcely knew her father, Arundel-Joseph de Riqueti de Mirabeau, great-nephew of the orator Mirabeau, who died fighting in the Papal zouaves against Italian unification at Castelfidardo in 1860. She was brought up in Nancy by her mother, Marie Le Harivel de Gonneville, and by her grandfather, a colonel who had been a counter-revolutionary, then served in the imperial and royal armies till 1830, who interested Gabrielle in toy soldiers and riding. She married a Norman noble, Roger de Martel de Janville, at the age of twenty, in 1869, but disgraced herself by fraternizing with the Prussians both in Normandy and in Nancy. She came to Paris in 1879, living in the rich suburb of Neuilly, where she began to make a career as a writer, her first books being serialized in La Vie Parisienne and published by Calmann-Lévy. Her pen-name, Gyp, ‘is “gyno” gone wrong’, one historian has suggested, combining both feminine and masculine elements. Her true identity was not revealed until Around Marriage was staged, after which, she wrote, ‘the entire Faubourg [Saint-Germain] side of the family shunned me.’5
The mixed reception encountered by Paulette suggests that a ‘modern’ woman was emerging but that society was not yet fully ready to embrace her. Marriages were still family alliances centred on property for which under the Civil Code parental consent was needed, even if the intended were over twenty-one. This was relaxed in 1896 by a law sponsored by Abbé Lemire, which required the consent of one parent only, and parental consent for non-minors was no longer required after 1907. Love was much more a factor in marriage, although there was still great pressure at all levels of society to marry within one’s social class, and ‘expectations’ were influential. Thus in 1881 a textile worker of Crémieux (Loire) preferred to abort her pregnancy rather than marry an agricultural labourer ‘for fear of a mésalliance angering the bachelor uncles from whom we were hoping to inherit’.6
Virginity was a precondition for marriage, because a man had to be quite sure his inheritance was going to his own blood, and young women were brought up to be ignorant of sexual matters before they married.7 The catastrophe of premarital sex was highlighted by Paul Bourget’s novel of 1883, Irreparable, in which the rich and beautiful Noémie de Hurtrel, who has just come out into society, is raped by a playboy. This renders her unfit to marry the man of her dreams, Sir Richard Wadham. She agrees to marry a man who is ‘perfectly educated and perfectly insignificant’, but shoots herself immediately after the wedding.8 Twenty-five years later Léon Blum, who had made a mark for himself during the Dreyfus Affair, wrote a treatise On Marriage, in which he argued that the obligation on women to marry, as virgins, men who had been allowed to experiment sexually and had arrived at the ‘monogamous period’ of their lives was at the root of marital unhappiness and infidelity. Women were now marrying at the age of twenty-five rather than eighteen or twenty, as at the beginning of the nineteenth century, but he advised that they should marry at thirty, after a period of sexual experimentation, and that the double standard should cease.9 This view did not, naturally, command universal approval, and Blum conceded that his argument was aimed only at the rich or middle class. There is indeed evidence of a growth in premarital sex, particularly in the large cities, in northern France, and among the working class.10 The risk, however, was always that pregnancy would lead to the relationship being broken off, leaving the girl abandoned and under pressure to abort, kill or abandon the child. Prospects were, it is true, becoming gradually easier for women in this condition: after 1900 midwives accused of abortion were treated more leniently by the courts, half the women brought to trial for infanticide were acquitted, and shelters for poor and pregnant women or single mothers were set up in Paris by the Catholic Church (1866) and the municipal council (1886).11
Even within marriage, there were plenty of taboos against sexual pleasure, whether from the Church, from the medical profession or from the fear of unwanted pregnancy. Undressing before one’s partner was rare – when in Zola’s novel Nana the Comte de Muffat sees Nana in her dressing room Zola comments that ‘He, who had never even seen the countess put on her suspenders, was observing the intimate details of a woman’s toilette’ – and kissing on the mouth did not become accepted until the ‘American kiss’ became fashionable between the wars.12 Yet in some ways marriage was becoming eroticized. The Church fought a long war against what it called ‘conjugal fraud’, by which it meant contraception, since it admitted sex only in the service of procreation. The most common form of contraception, coitus interruptus, was denounced by a former naval doctor, J.-P. Dartigues, who argued in his 1887 Experimental Love or the Causes of Female Adultery that withdrawal left the woman dissatisfied and could drive her to nymphomania and infidelity. ‘The husband’, he warned, ‘must never forget that his wife has just as much right as he to the voluptuous sensations of love, and that it is in this way that the chastity of the home is preserved.’13 For Dartigues the guarantee of a happy marriage was the female orgasm. Contraception was promoted on a much wider front, although not only in the interest of sexual pleasure. The League for Human Regeneration founded by the socialist teacher Paul Robin in 1896 thought birth control the solution to working-class misery, although other socialist leaders argued that the workers needed to breed fighters for the future proletarian revolution. In 1898 the demographer Arsène Dumont registered the spread of birth control among the middle classes, although he linked it to the desire for social mobility – the need for ambitious families to travel light.14
The orthodoxy of the virginal bride and chaste wife was in part a defence against female sexuality, which was feared as a threat to marriage and the family. This was well illustrated in 1872 by the Dubourg affair. Convent-educated Denise MacLeod, aged nineteen, though in love with M. de Précorbin, a clerk at the Prefecture of the Seine, was obliged for family reasons to marry Arthur Dubourg, twenty-nine, whose father had a château in Normandy. Miserable and suicidal, she was briefly confined to a mental hospital. She then tried to instigate separation proceedings, which Dubourg resisted. She resumed her relationship with Précorbin until in April 1872 Dubourg followed her to the flat where they met and attacked her with a sword-cane and dagger; she died three days later. The court rejected the accusation of premeditated murder and Dubourg was sentenced to five years in prison, but there was much public feeling in favour of his acquittal. Alexandre Dumas fils sold 50,000 copies of a tract entitled The Man-Woman, in which he played on fears of the bestiality lying under the skin of women, as evidenced by the pétroleuses of the Paris Commune and the tribe of adulteresses.
Every day in the street we pass redskins tinted pink, negresses with plump, white hands, real cannibals who, unable to eat man raw, prepare to gnaw him alive, as civilized women should, with marriage or pleasure sauce, plates, serviettes, forks, mouth-washes, sacraments and legal protection.
If the law would not protect a man from his wife, Dumas concluded, he had only one piece of advice for husbands: ‘Kill her.’15
This fear of female sexuality was exploited by Zola in his Nana of 1880, in which the prostitute–actress, set up as a courtesan by a general’s son and practising Catholic the Comte de Muffat, takes her revenge on him and Paris high society, devouring inheritances, destroying reputations and spreading syphilis. Alongside the main plot, however, is the story of the count’s straitlaced wife Sabine. She was seventeen when he married her nineteen years previously, but was rejuvenated by an affair she had with one of the young bloods, Fauchery, before, ‘in a supreme fit of madness, she ran off with a manager of a great department store, a scandal which soon gripped Paris’.16 In the world of prostitution, in fact, the bogstandard brothel gave way to maisons de débauche offering all sorts of attractions to a male clientele in search of ever more refined erotic pleasures. Meanwhile inadequately kept married women made themselves available, alongside widows, divorcees, out-of-work actresses and shop assistants, in maisons de rendez-vous. Very popular after 1890, these were set up like bourgeois apartments, conveniently close to the department stores, and the hostesses were permitted to choose their own clients. When the Bazar de la Charité burned down in 1897 many husbands were delighted and yet bemused to see their wives, who they thought had been shopping there, return from the dead.17
In fact only 4 per cent of women who came before the courts as adulteresses were bourgeois ladies, while a quarter of male adulterers were bourgeois. This did not prevent a veritable obsession at the turn of the century with the question of female adultery.18 In his 1891 Physiology of Modern Love Paul Bourget, reworking Balzac, suggested that ‘out of every hundred virtuous women there are only five or six honest ones.’ He ventured a typology of three basic types of adulteress: first, women of ‘temperament’, who behaved with a masculine sensuality in love; second, women of the heart, for whom romantic love alone counted; and lastly, women of the head, the ‘true modern mistress’. These were driven by curiosity, by the desire to play a role, as in a novel, by vanity and social-climbing, by rivalry and the need for social domination.19 In novels and the theatre there appeared a new character, la déserteuse, the married woman who abandons the family home. Maman Colibri, in Henri Bataille’s play first staged at the Vaudeville in 1904, deals with the boredom of Irène, long ago subjected to the ‘Zulu ceremony’ of an arranged marriage with a Belgian industrialist, the Baron de Rysbergue, and falling at the age of forty for a friend of her son Richard, who talks to her about Balzac. ‘I have accomplished my duty to you,’ she tells her son, ‘my task as a mother is finished… life is so short. I am a spring late.’ Although de Rysbergue had had a few affairs of his own, he declares, with a nod to Dumas, ‘I am not the kind of husband who kills his wife,’ and simply says, ‘be gone, then!’ She goes with her lover to Algiers and the Côte d’Azur, until her money runs out. Then she wishes to come home but her husband will not have her, confessing that his ideas are simply not modern enough. ‘Our religious past, prejudices, old and much loved customs cannot erase from our memory this conception of the pure and chaste wife, of the one love, faithful to the family home.’20
Unhappy marriage might lead to adultery, but with or without adultery an exit from marriage was once again provided by the reintroduction of divorce in 1884. Divorce was one of the main demands of the new wave of bourgeois feminism led by a generation born around 1830, contemporary with the founders of the Third Republic, notably Maria Desraimes and her political partner Léon Richer. The divorce bill was sponsored by Alfred Naquet, a radical republican of Jewish origin, who separated from his wife when she insisted on baptizing their son. While the conservative republican senator Jules Simon argued that indissoluble marriage protected women from abandonment, Naquet replied that there were nearly 3,000 legal separations a year, of partners who could not remarry, and who therefore multiplied the number of illegitimate children. The law of 19 July 1884 was a compromise measure: it stopped short of divorce by mutual consent, which had been possible between 1792 and 1804, and reverted to the regime of 1804, making divorce available on the grounds of adultery, violence or criminal conviction. The marriage of adulterous couples was finally legalized in 1904, while divorce after three years’ separation at the request of one of the partners became legal in 1907.21
The divorce rate more than tripled from 3,880 per year in 1885–8, representing 52 in every 100,000 couples, to 13,655 per year in 1909–13, representing 164 in every 100,000 couples.22 Women initiated 63 per cent of divorce suits in 1886–95, and 86 per cent of separation proceedings. In 1897 women sued on the grounds of their husband’s adultery in 683 cases, while husbands divorced their wives for adultery in 1,344. Women tended to cite brutality, which provided grounds for 8,014 or 77 per cent of divorces in that year. About 30 per cent of divorced women remarried, as against 35 per cent of men, but the author of a 1905 law thesis on this subject concluded very positively that ‘divorce benefits women.’23
Women were now empowered to get rid of their adulterous husbands, as the aristocratic playboy Boni de Castellane found when he married America’s richest heiress Anna Gould in 1895 and assumed that he could continue his affairs. To Boni’s dismay he lost his wife, children and fortune in 1906 while she married his bachelor cousin and became a princess.24 On the other hand the possibility of divorce and remarriage did not always get the better of social conventions. Henriette Rainouard, who divorced her theatre-critic husband and married the leading Radical politician Joseph Caillaux in 1911, found that revelations about her affair with Caillaux before their marriage could threaten not only his career but her own social standing. She feared that being ‘dishonoured’ as an adulteress would result in her father cutting off her inheritance, the impossibility of her marrying off her nineteen-year-old daughter by her first marriage, and in her exclusion from Paris society.25 Although she behaved in a virile way by shooting dead the editor of Le Figaro, which was about to publish these revelations, her defence in July 1914 was based on the old prejudice of the irrationality of women, now dressed up in the language of the unconscious. ‘The case of Madame Caillaux’, explained her lawyer, Maître Labori, who had defended Dreyfus, ‘is a typical case of subconscious impulse, together with a complete splitting of the personality as a result of an intense and continuous emotional state during which the patient has neither rational control of her acts nor a clear notion of their implications and consequences.’26 Henriette was duly acquitted, and her marriage survived, but at the price of a murder portrayed as the act of a hysterical woman.
The prospects of women were shaped, of course, not only by questions of love and marriage, but by educational possibilities and the labour market. The presence of women in the workforce became even more marked as the century progressed – 25 per cent of women were in paid work in 1866, but 39 per cent in 1911. Marriage was not a bar to paid employment: on the contrary, 40 per cent of married women were in work in 1866, but 49 per cent in 1911.27 This was to a large extent a response to global economic competition which sharpened incentives to reduce costs by mechanization, employing less skilled labour and paying lower wages to a workforce that was ‘docile’ and not organized into unions. In all these respects women fitted the bill as the ideal worker. This ‘feminization of labour’ did not escape the notice of contemporaries, whether social reformers or labour leaders.28 It threatened traditional models of motherhood at precisely the time when the demographic deficit, in comparison to countries like Germany, increased anxieties about women producing too much, and reproducing not enough.29 Social reformers brought forward legislation in order to increase protection for women in work. Ironically, however, the main effect was simply to move working women out of the factory or workshop back into the home, beyond the reach of factory inspectors, where they were simply exploited more.
Female industrial workers remained confined to labour ghettos where the conditions of work and pay were poorest. After a law of 1874 banned women and girls from working underground in mines, the proportion of women employed in mining fell from 9 per cent in 1866 to 2 per cent in 1911, while at the same time the proportion of women employed in textiles rose from 45 to 56 per cent, in clothing from 78 to 89 per cent, in the food industry from 11 to 19 per cent and in agriculture from 26 to 38 per cent.30 Working women who married miners or metalworkers in towns like Saint-Étienne were fairly comfortable, as the heavy work was left to the man, while they ran a quarter of the shops in the quartier du Soleil around 1900 – not as butchers or bakers, which were family affairs, but as café-owners, grocers and haberdashers, enterprises which women managed on their own.31 At Roubaix, by contrast, two wages from the textile industry were required to provide the 22–24 francs a week required to sustain a family of five in the 1870s, and 83 per cent of female textile workers were married to semi-skilled workers or labourers.32 Within the textile and clothing industries work was sharply gendered. Thus at Troyes, the centre of the hosiery industry, bonnetiers were skilled male stocking-knitters, the aristocrats of the trade, while bonnetières were employed in the workshop doing tasks to service them, such as bobbin-winding, hooking the fabric on to the machines or repairing flawed goods; their reputations gained nothing from association with men in the workplace.33
The career of one female worker, Jeanne Bouvier, highlights the transitory, insecure and exploited nature of female labour at the end of the nineteenth century. Her father worked as a navvy on the Paris–Lyon–Marseille railway until he inherited a small farm in the Drôme, but his vines were ruined by the phylloxera epidemic and the family moved to the outskirts of Lyon. With her father unemployed, Jeanne went to work after her first communion in 1876 at the age of eleven in a silk-mill, doing a thirteen-hour day for 50 centimes (although under a labour law of 1842 children under twelve could work no more than eight hours). The father then left the family, which returned to the Drôme: Jeanne worked in the fields in the summer and in a silk-mill in the winter, boarding in a dormitory with other country girls from Sunday night to Saturday night, bringing her own food and eventually being paid 1.25 francs a day. In 1879 her mother found work in Paris with a shaving-brush manufacturer and brought Jeanne with her; in one year Jeanne was employed in turn as a servant by a brush merchant, a paint merchant, a grain merchant, an ironmonger and a doctor who was married to one of Proudhon’s daughters. Though her mother soon returned home and Jeanne dreamed of returning to the country to raise hens and rabbits, she stayed in Paris and went into the clothing industry. The pay was so poor that she knew one girl who committed suicide at twenty-two and others who went on to the street as prostitutes. Jeanne began as a hatmaker, paid 45 francs in a good week but 15 out of season, before the firm went broke, then for a corset-maker earning 2 francs a day, then as a midinette or dressmaker in the Opéra district, starting at 2.5 francs a day but later 5 francs a day, supplemented with work at home for personal clients.34
Bouvier hoped that the labour law of 1892, which limited the working day of women to eleven hours, would bring some relief. However the law exempted ‘family workshops’, and in the face of global competition this resulted in a massive increase in women working as sweated labour. This was work at home for a subcontractor who could respond quickly to changing demands without having to worry about overheads. True, the expansion of homework made it easier for women to combine earning a living and raising a family, but it was under the most atrocious of conditions. Making artificial flowers was one of the ‘articles de Paris’ that traditionally employed a female labour aristocracy, but competition from the German and American markets forced prices down and 38 per cent of women in this sector were working at home for subcontractors by 1906.35 The clothing industry was increasingly subjected to homework, facilitated by the arrival of the sewing machine. In the Paris suburbs of Belleville and Ménilmontant women specialized in shirt-making, while wives of shop-assistants, clerks and petits fonctionnaires earned extra family income by making lingerie at home.36 In the west of France, women might earn between 2.5 and 4.5 francs a day in the shoe factories of Fougères, but the Cholet region confronted international competition by developing a niche market in slippers, employing women at home for 1.50 or 1.75 francs a day.37
Since labour legislation served only to drive exploitation underground, women had to take matters into their own hands. Although one attraction of female labour was its docility, women workers did occasionally go on strike. The sugar-workers of Paris struck in 1892, the corset-makers of Limoges struck for 108 days in 1895, the sardine-workers of Douarnenez, who were paid 1.5 francs for every thousand sardines cleaned and made a typical wage of 22 centimes an hour, struck in 1905, and a quarter of the striking shoeworkers at Fougères in 1907 were women.38 Jeanne Bouvier went to the Paris Bourse du Travail to join the union of dressmakers in 1897, and recalled that ‘at that time there were always debates about revolution, the general strike, expropriation, the abolition of capitalism and wage-labour. I didn’t really understand what it meant, but to appear a good trade unionist I applauded as vigorously and with as much conviction as those around me.’39 Few women actually joined trade unions, only 101,000 in 1911, in comparison to 1,029,000 men.40 In part this was because they put family before work and because they were less militant. They also faced great opposition on the part of male workers. Though working women made an indispensable contribution to the family budget, male trade unionists feared that women, working for lower wages, threatened not only their jobs but also their traditional role as breadwinners. ‘Women are beginning to invade the workshops,’ warned a delegate at the 1892 metalworkers’ congress. ‘If this continues, the heads of the family will be doing the cooking while the wife and children go out to work.’41 These fears were not totally without foundation. The introduction of linotype in 1895 led to an increase in the number of female typesetters, some of whom were used to break a printworkers’ strike at Nancy in 1901. At the printworkers’ congress in 1910 the general secretary, Auguste Keufer, took the Proudhonist view that ‘men’s wages must be sufficient for women to remain in the private realm and fulfil their natural function of mother and family educator.’42 Thus, when the printworkers Emma and Louis Couriau came to Lyon in 1912 and asked to join the printworkers’ union, Emma was refused entry and her husband, who had already joined, was expelled. Although Emma’s cause was supported by the South-East Feminist Federation, Parisian feminists and a number of revolutionary syndicalists, the union would not budge.43 The labour movement rallied to spokesmen of both the bourgeoisie and the Catholic Church who opposed female labour in theory, if not in practice.
One way out of the trap of low-level employment in agriculture, industry or domestic service was to pursue an education, and the education of women took important steps forward at the end of the nineteenth century. Overall, the proportion of French departments which educated all girls aged six to thirteen rose from 58 per cent in 1872 to 88 per cent in 1881, when elementary education for that age cohort became compulsory and free, and to 99 per cent in 1906. Whereas for Jeanne Bouvier the end of schooling was signalled by first communion, increasingly it was marked by taking the certificat d’études. Only 25 per cent of girls took this exam in 1876, but 45 per cent did so by 1907, and in that period their pass rate increased from 70 to 85 per cent. Beyond that was the option of taking the brevet, which was awarded to 5,769 girls in 1876 and 18,194 in 1882.44 Such a qualification opened up the possibility of white-collar work for women which was more secure and respectable if not paid much more. In commerce and banking women had 25 per cent of the jobs in 1866 but 39 per cent of them in 1906, as the male clerk was replaced by the female typist or secretary.45 Even more attractive was the possibility of employment as dames employées, first in the telegraph service after 1877, away from the public, then after 1892 in the post office. This provoked a certain amount of resistance from male clerks, and debate about whether ladies should be working face to face with the public. Successful candidates were well qualified. As many as half of them had the brevet, perhaps even ten years’ experience as assistants to rural postmistresses or telegraphers, but they were paid a mere 800 francs per year, raised to 1,000 francs in 1892. In the first wave 86 per cent of the employees were unmarried, but many, particularly in Paris, married simply in order to pool two salaries.46
The most obvious career opened by the brevet was elementary school teaching, which offered great opportunities for young lay women, as nuns were excluded after 1882 first from publicly maintained schools, then from private ones too. Écoles Normales or teacher-training colleges for institutrices, present in only major cities before then, were set up in every department under a law of 1879. The number of lay institutrices increased from 22,000, or 34 per cent of the elementary teaching body, in 1872, to 78,000, or 94 per cent, in 1906.47 A few teachers had brilliant careers. Pauline Kergomard, the daughter of a primary school inspector in Bordeaux, was brought up by her uncle, Jacques Reclus, a Protestant pastor, two of whose sons were exiled after Louis-Napoleon’s coup d’état of 1851. She graduated from the École Normale d’Institutrices of Bordeaux, went to Paris in 1861, moved in republican, liberal Protestant and feminist circles, married one of Garibaldi’s Thousand volunteers who had liberated Sicily and Naples, and was appointed chief inspector of nursery schools in 1879, a post she held until 1917, revolutionizing nursery education in France. In general, however, the career of institutrice was thankless and not well paid. They received 700–900 francs a year in 1875, rising to 1,200–2,000 francs in 1905, but significantly less than an instituteur and between 3 and 5 francs a day when a milliner might earn between 5 and 20 francs a day. Even more difficult was life in an isolated village, especially where nuns had formerly run the village school. Lay teachers might see the priest refuse to take their pupils for first communion, village children would jeer ‘la laïque’ or ‘la communale’ at them, or the locals would refuse them wood or groceries. Sometimes parents petitioned the authorities, alleging that the teacher called their children dirty, or thieves, or bastards, while allegations were made that the teacher was the mistress of the postman or living with a younger man. At worst, the lay teacher was considered a witch. ‘Her gifts are wickedness and ambition,’ complained parents in Normandy in 1881. ‘She is evil towards anyone who does not think like her.’48 In 1897 a public debate was triggered after a review of Léon Frapié’s Provincial Schoolteacher, which highlighted the sufferings of Louise Chardon, sent as an institutrice to a village in Berry where the local population, deprived of their bonnes soeurs, took their revenge on her. Now teachers wrote in with their tales of woe. One complained that the mayor, while drunk, had tried to kiss her and when she resisted suggested that she was a lesbian.49
Career possibilities were further extended by the development of state secondary education under a law sponsored by Camille Sée in 1880. The girls’ lycées and colleges now set up did not break the older grip of the Catholic Church on the education of young bourgeois ladies, and recruited above all the daughters of teachers and civil servants who were still criticized as bluestockings. Most took the brevet to qualify for teaching, but an elite took the baccalauréat, which required Latin and Greek until an alternative combining Latin and modern languages was introduced in 1902.50 To staff these lycées and colleges a new profession emerged, that of the secondary school mistress. In the period 1880–1900 these originated not from bourgeois families who would have been able to provide them with a dowry to make a ‘good’ marriage, but from the milieu of teachers, civil servants, the military, or white-collar workers; 10 per cent of them (18 per cent at the teacher-training college for secondary-school women teachers, the École Normale de Sèvres) were indeed orphans. A quarter were drawn from the primary sector and the majority had the brevet supérieur; if they acquired the agrégation it was in post. A schoolmistress in Paris, with the agrégation, earned a respectable 3,000 francs at the beginning of her career, and 4,700 at the end, though less than the 3,200 and 8,000 respectively for a schoolmaster in the same position. Only 40 per cent of schoolmistresses married, and when they did they had the reputation of marrying ‘badly’, which was not necessarily the case if they came from the lower-middle class. Nevertheless they tended, if they did marry, to marry other teachers. Although or perhaps because the nuns were their rivals, they modelled themselves on the sobriety and decorum of nuns, and were expected to do so in the towns where they taught. Marguerite Aron, who graduated from Sèvres with the agrégation and went to teach in a provincial girls’ lycée, was told by her teachers ‘to behave at the age of twenty-four as a sedate woman of thirty’, only to be teased by the father of one of her pupils as being a member of an ‘authorized congregation’. There was, however, no place for scandal. One headmistress was dismissed for wearing trousers on a climbing holiday; the townsfolk complaining that they did not want a ‘George Sand’.51
Very few women gained a university education in France before the baccalauréat reform of 1902. Even when they did, they were sharply over-represented in arts faculties, where in 1914 they formed 35 per cent of the student body. At that point women made up only 10 per cent of the students in medical faculties, 9 per cent of those in science faculties, and a mere 0.09 per cent of law students.52 Significantly, 43 per cent of those students were foreign, 54 per cent of them in the medical faculties. Two of those were Bronya Sklo-dovska, who came from Poland to study medicine in Paris, and her sister Manya, who followed her in 1891, studied science at the Sorbonne and married a physics lecturer, Pierre Curie, in 1895. Marie Curie, as she now called herself, passed the agrégation in 1896 and taught at the École de Sèvres while undertaking research to isolate radium, defending her doctoral thesis in June 1903 and winning the Nobel prize with her husband that December. Ironically, it was only as a result of the death of Pierre, who was run over by a horse-drawn cab in 1906, that it was possible for her, although with the inferior title of ‘course director’, to succeed to his chair of physics on a salary of 10,000 francs a year. As a woman she was rejected by the French Academy of Sciences in 1911, just before she won the Nobel prize for the second time, and was regularly attacked as a Russian, German, Pole or Jew who had come to Paris like an intruder and usurper.53
The medical world was similarly well defended against women. ‘They want to become men!’ proclaimed one doctor in 1875, but they did not have the ‘virile qualities’ to perform dissections without fainting at the sight of blood. He was hostile to the enrolment of Elizabeth Garrett Anderson who was accepted by Paris having been refused enrolment in London and Edinburgh and became the first qualified woman doctor in Britain. Madeleine Brès, the first French woman to enrol in a medical faculty, was taken on as a provisional clinical intern at the Pitié hospital during the siege of Paris in 1870–71, but was turned down for a permanent internship after the siege ended. Women were not permitted to compete for clinical training as externs until 1881 and as interns until 1885. The number of women medical students in Paris duly crept up from five in 1870–71 and forty in 1881–2 to 114 in 1887–8, although of these 114 twenty were Polish, seventy Russian, eight English, and only twelve French. When women doctors did qualify they were forced into specializations where the advantage of motherly or female skills could be demonstrated, or into areas which were notoriously unpopular, such as mental health. A staunch opponent of women training as doctors was Professor Charcot of the Paris Medical Faculty who was best known in the 1880s for his experiments on hysterical women at the Salpêtrière hospital, which were also a theatrical display of the subjection of irrational females by the male scientist. One of his students, Blanche Edwards, nevertheless passed the examination for clinical training in 1886, and chose the option of specializing in children in care. She married a doctor and succeeded him on his death as director of the nursing school at the Salpêtrière.54 Madeleine Pelletier, the daughter of a fruit and vegetable seller in Les Halles, and educated by nuns till the age of twelve, studied on her own for the baccalauréat. She passed in 1897 and obtained a scholarship from the Paris municipal council to study at the Faculty of Medicine. She chose the specialization of mental health, obtained a doctorate in 1903, and worked as a medical assistant for the social services, dealing with very poor patients, until she was allowed to compete for clinical training in psychiatry, and worked at the Villejuif mental asylum.55
Nursing was another area of medicine where women were allowed to contribute. Anna Hamilton, the daughter of an Irish Protestant father who speculated his fortune away, passed her baccalauréat at Chambéry and submitted her thesis on nursing reform at Montpellier in 1900. She saw herself as a French Florence Nightingale, who would sweep away the rustic and illiterate staff of French hospitals labouring under the eye of unscientific nuns, and replace them with highly trained young women. She secured the help of the mayor of Bordeaux to set up a nursing school at Tondu hospital, Bordeaux, in 1904. This new model was adopted by Blanche Edwards at the Salpêtrière hospital, but was otherwise resisted by conservative doctors and communities of nuns who demonstrated greater competence in retaining control over hospitals than they did in respect of schools.
Slowly, women penetrated the liberal professions, but even more slowly in law than in medicine; in 1914 there were only eight female barristers. And yet even a limited change provoked an outcry against this new model of bluestocking who sacrificed love and family life to knowledge and the pursuit of a career. Catching the mood were the novels of Colette Yver. In Les Cervalines (1902) a young doctor who wishes to marry complains that his problem is not with men-hating feminists who start to look like men but with female doctors and teachers who ‘remain charming but who… having let their life-blood flow to the brain, have no need of love’. Similarly, in Princesses de science (1907) an eminent doctor’s daughter, Thérèse Herlingue, marries a fellow medical student but refuses to give up her career. She builds up a respectable clientele but her own child, abandoned to a nurse, falls ill and dies. Her husband, finding the house cold and deserted, takes to drink and eats out. Finally, on the brink of losing him, she has a change of heart and declares, ‘I am all yours now. You will always find me here. You will love your home again. You have work to accomplish, Fernand, I will help you; you will triumph.’56 Whatever the achievements of women, the dominant opinion expressed in such works was that the traditional model was still the norm, and would win out in the end against female emancipation.
In the pursuit of civil and political rights, as in the battle for education and careers, women had to contend with the weight of opinion behind the dominant model of the wife and mother, which was defended not only by most men but also by many women. The Third Republic saw the emergence of organizations dedicated to women’s rights, but the suffragette was a marginal and uncomfortable figure. There was no militant suffragette movement in France on the scale of the Women’s Social and Political Union in Great Britain. The peculiar nature of French feminism was its attempt to put forward the demand for civil and political rights in a language that did not depart from the cult of motherhood, the family and indeed of femininity, and femininity did not sit well with physical force.
In 1872 Maria Desraismes of the Society for the Amelioration of Women’s Condition issued a firm riposte to Alexandre Dumas fils, whose pamphlet The Man-Woman urged men to reassert control over their wives, killing them if they committed adultery. She argued, as Jenny d’Héricourt had, that it was not the emancipation but the servitude of women that was a threat to society and civilization, and that the new Republic should grant rights to women.57 Despite the failure of the First and Second Republics to grant those rights, Desraismes took the view that the Third Republic offered new hope and should therefore be defended at all costs. The banning of her society by the conservative Moral Order regime in 1875, and its reauthorization by the republicans in August 1878, indicated that she might be correct. Neither was she prepared to move faster than republican opinion would take. In this she came up against a young rival, Hubertine Auclert, an orphan who had cut her anticlerical teeth in a series of convent schools and who tried to raise the question of female suffrage at the Women’s Rights conference organized by Desraismes and her colleague Léon Richer in July–August 1878. When this was rejected as premature she broke away to found her own Society for Female Suffrage, sustained after 1881 by a paper called La Citoyenne. She followed the line of most French feminists that women’s rights would strengthen and moralize the nation. However, she was not prepared to wait for the vote and sought publicity for her cause by trying to register to vote, refusing to pay taxes (until the bailiffs arrived to take her furniture) and by organizing a demonstration with a banner wreathed in black at the place de la Bastille on 14 July 1881.58
Three times as many feminists stayed with Desraismes and Richer than followed Auclert. Desraismes made it a priority to defend the Republic from the right, and turned her Pontoise country estate into committee rooms for the republican cause in the elections of 1881 and 1885, and her Paris salon into a headquarters against Boulangism. She chaired many of the meetings of the Anticlerical Congress in 1881, believing that women had urgently to be freed from the grip of the Church. Richer, who set up the French League for Women’s Rights (LFDF) in 1882, was also of the opinion that ‘it is enough for us to have to struggle against reactionaries of the masculine sex without giving to these partisans of defeated regimes the support of millions of female ballots subject to the occult domination of the priest, their confessor.’59 In the meantime, Hubertine Auclert had tried to harness the re-emerging socialist movement to her cause, perhaps remembering the attempts of Flora Tristan to do the same in the 1830s. Auclert attended the first socialist congress since the Commune at Marseille in October 1879, and obtained a resolution from it in favour of women’s social and political equality. But a year later the Le Havre socialist congress fully committed itself to Marxism, and subordinated women’s rights to the class struggle. Louise Michel, returning from exile, might have become an ally of Hubertine, but preferred to take the socialist line. Declining to run as a candidate she said that ‘Women in the Chamber would not prevent the absurdly low pay of women’s work and the prison and the pavement would continue no less to vomit, one on to the other, legions of unfortunates.’60 The only leading figure to take Auclert’s side, paradoxically, was Alexandre Dumas fils, who had undergone a strange and sudden transformation, arguing that women could vote in elections for school boards in New York and thus that ‘there should be women in the Chamber of Deputies. France owes the civilized world the example of this great initiative.’61 Hubertine Auclert married a government official and followed him to Algeria when he was posted there in 1888. The following year, coinciding with the centenary of the French Revolution, Richer and Desraismes presided in triumph over the Women’s Rights Congress which brought together middle-class and professional women such as Blanche Edwards, to make such moderate demands as equal pay for women teachers, the opening up of the professions to women, control of their earnings by married women, and the abolition of regulated (and thus legalized) prostitution, which humiliated working women and endorsed the infidelity of their husbands.62
The French feminist scene received a new boost in 1897 with the conversion to the cause of Marguerite Durand. Thirty-six years younger than Desraismes and twenty-six years younger than Auclert, Durand, one of the generation born around 1860, was the illegitimate daughter of a general, fled her convent school to become an actress at the Comédie Française, married the politician Georges Laguerre who moved from radicalism to Boulangism, and became the ‘Madame Roland of Boulangism’. She divorced in 1891, and wrote a column in Le Figaro, by which she was sent to write a witty article on the Amazons attending the congress of the 1896 French League for Women’s Rights. In the event she was converted, and launched her own women’s newspaper, La Fronde, making a bid to become a new Delphine de Girardin. La Fronde brought together a galaxy of women writers including Séverine, who wrote ‘Notes of a Frondeuse’, Clémence Royer, who had translated Darwin, Avril de Sainte-Croix, the leading campaigner against legalized prostitution, Pauline Kergomard, the chief inspector of nursery schools, and Maria Vérone, a law student who wrote the paper’s legal column and became in 1907 only the fifth French woman admitted to the bar.63 The great achievement of Durand was to combine feminism with femininity, and indeed to use femininity for political ends. She espoused the cause of women who wanted to emerge from the private sphere without risking the accusation that they were becoming mannish, bluestockings or cocottes. She later wrote,
I was not much more than thirty when I founded the Fronde. The fact of seeing a woman who was still young and not totally out of favour, who made her life seem easy, who was interested in the lot of other women and who made that her preoccupation… all this was at first astonishing and then interesting. Feminism owes a lot to my blonde hair.64
Durand’s feminism was bourgeois and dreyfusard and did not command universal support. One of her ambitions was to encourage women to improve their lot by joining trade unions, and Jeanne Bouvier was introduced to the dressmakers’ union by a private client who read La Fronde.65 But the International Women’s Rights Congress which Durand sponsored in September 1900 was divided over whether maids should be given a whole day off a week. The Feminist Socialist Group of Élisabeth Renaud, the widow of a printworker who had worked in a Jura watch factory and as a governess in St Petersburg and now kept a boarding house in Paris, and a seamstress, Louise Saumonneau, who defended the maids’ holiday, clashed with the wife of the mayor of the 18th arrondissement who declared, ‘So I’m to cook lunch for my maid? I’m not a saint!’66 On another front, Durand broke with Gyp who was engaged to provide a drawing a week for La Fronde, until Durand objected to their anti-Semitic nature. Gyp became an outspoken campaigner for the antidreyfusard cause, called as a witness to give evidence at Déroulède’s trial in the high court in 1899 and famously giving her occupation as ‘antiSemite’. Similarly Durand fell out with the editor of the anti-Semitic La Libre Parole, Gaston Méry, when she refused to give money to help the widow of Colonel Henry and he accused her (possibly alluding to her liaison with Baron Gustave de Rothschild) of being ‘a bad mother, a prostitute with Jewish lovers’.67
Not all French feminism in the Belle Époque was so colourful. One of the powerful streams it emerged from was religious philanthropy, whether Catholic, Protestant or Jewish. A leading light of Protestant philanthropy was Sarah Monod, from a great family of Protestant academics and churchmen, whose main commitment was to fight social injustice, but who also sought ‘a definition of feminism which would reconcile the demand for rights with an edifying conception of the femme au foyer’.68 She chaired a congress on Women’s Charities and Institutions in June 1900 which dealt with the social issues of prostitution, alcoholism and access to higher education for women, and also favoured the extension of sweated labour as a way of helping working mothers to combine work and motherhood. In 1901 she became chair of the National Council of French Women (CNFF), the French branch of the International Council of Women founded in Washington DC in 1888. Its leading lights were Protestant – Sarah Monod, Julie Siegfried – or Jewish – Madame Weill, Madame Salvador – and it was still basically philanthropic, with some interest in civil, but not political, rights. Catholics, troubled by the domination of women’s movements by Protestants, Jews and freethinkers, went their own way, but still tried to combine social action with the cult of the home and family. Marie Maugeret, who founded a periodical called Christian Feminism in 1896, wrote in 1899, ‘the fact that a woman develops her mind with all sorts of serious matters does not make her any less able to be her husband’s companion and child’s educator. The Christian woman respects her husband’s authority as head of the family and takes the place that is rightly hers in the home.’ Catholic women did become involved in politics after the Dreyfus Affair, but in the context of defending the Catholic family and education. Baroness Reille, who was among the founders in 1902 of the Ligue Patriotique des Françaises, whose watchwords were ‘Fatherland, property and liberty’, was against contraception, abortion, the godless school imposed by freemasons and the takeover of the country by the Bloc des Gauches. She was not interested in campaigning for female suffrage but told an audience at Toulouse in 1903, ‘Be honest, ladies, if you do not drop a ballot in the box, you guide the hand that does.’69
In the teeth of the pressure of family values and social reform a limited suffragette movement did take shape in the years before 1914, but it failed to get the better of a more sedate suffragism, which entrusted itself to the regular political process and parties and made very little headway. The suffragette movement was led by Hubertine Auclert, who had returned to Paris from Algeria after her husband died there in 1892 and recruited a knot of younger militants including Caroline Kauffmann, an unhappily married child-labour inspector, and Madeleine Pelletier, now a psychiatrist at the Villejuif asylum. Symbolically, in 1904 when the centenary of the Civil Code, which in so many ways imposed the constitutional inferiority of women, was being officially celebrated, Auclert led a procession of fifty feminists to the statue of Napoleon in the place Vendôme where they tore out pages from the Code. In May 1908, during municipal elections, Auclert, Kauffmann and Pelletier marched into a polling station in the 4th arrondissement, overturning a ballot box, then threw stones at the windows of another. Auclert was sent for trial but the authorities decided not to make a martyr of her; the hostility of public opinion was already doing the job. Pelletier wondered why the feminists did not follow them, and concluded, ‘Marching in the streets seemed vulgar to them; this was suitable for working-class women. A respectable woman should stay at home.’ To see how suffragettes managed it in Britain, she attended a 500,000-strong demonstration in Hyde Park on 21 June 1908, and later wrote, ‘If I had Pankhurst’s troops, I would certainly attempt a violent demonstration.’70
Just as the suffragette movement picked up militancy in Great Britain, however, so it lost it in France. Emmeline Pankhurst herself was no stranger to France. The daughter of a Manchester calico-printer who did much business in France, she was educated in the 1870s in a boarding school on the avenue de Neuilly, Paris, and her best friend was Noémie Rochefort, ‘daughter of that great Republican, Communist, journalist and swordsman, Henri Rochefort’, in exile in New Caledonia following the Commune. She gained an entrée into French literary circles and almost married a French man of letters, but her father would hear nothing of foreign husbands and dowries and summoned her home to marry an Englishman. Women dressed as Joan of Arc figured prominently in processions organized by the Women’s Social and Political Union, which she founded in 1903; her daughter Christabel fled to Paris in 1912 to avoid arrest after the campaign of smashing shop windows in the West End, and edited the Suffragette from there; and after Emmeline was sentenced to three years’ hard labour in 1913 for setting fire to Lloyd George’s country home her suffragette supporters left the Old Bailey singing the Marseillaise. This militancy, however, did not rub off on French feminists. The British state did not avoid confrontation with suffragettes. Arrests led to trials from which political capital was made, imprisonment led to hunger-strikes and renewed militancy. In 1912 the WSPU launched a campaign of violence, pouring acid into postboxes, cutting telephone cables, slashing paintings in art galleries, setting fire to public and private buildings. In 1908, however, Hubertine Auclert, aged sixty and ten years older than Emmeline Pankhurst, attended a meeting of the National Congress of Civil Rights and Universal Suffrage that was designed to federate all movements seeking reform of the Civil Code and votes for women. Publicly, to a standing ovation, she apologized for her use of violence, which had achieved nothing. She had no successors in terms of militancy. The initiative now shifted to the suffragists around Jeanne Schmahl, a doctor who had just piloted through parliament a law of 1907 giving married women control of their earnings and who launched the French Union for Women’s Suffrage (UFSF) in 1907. This was the French equivalent of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, set up in 1897 by Millicent Garrett Fawcett, the sister of Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, which limited itself to constitutional agitation.71
The progress of suffragism by legal means depended of course on obtaining the sponsorship of a major party. Here French suffragists faced the same problem as their British allies, who were blocked by the ruling Liberal Party and unable to persuade the Labour Party to place votes for women ahead of the votes for all adults, disfranchised workers included. After the separation of Church and state in France in 1905 the anticlerical work of the Radical Party was complete and hope for a series of reforms was pinned on the new premier, Aristide Briand, a former socialist turned moderate.72 Schmahl went to see him in October 1909 about votes for women, but he was clear: the country was not yet ready for it.73 No more help was forthcoming from the socialists. Madeleine Pelletier lobbied Jaurès and spoke to the SFIO congress at Nancy in August 1907, but they still insisted that class came before the concerns of educated women.74 Marguerite Durand then hit on the publicity stunt, which was not endorsed by the UFSF, of high-profile feminists running in the parliamentary elections of 1910 in Paris: she in the 9th arrondissement, Auclert in the 11th, Pelletier in the 5th. In the event, Pelletier was offered a nomination by the SFIO, not in the 5th but in the unwinnable 8th, the fief of royalist deputy Denys Cochin. In this respect French campaigners were ahead of their British counterparts, who did not stand themselves but campaigned to unseat MPs of the Liberal Party, such as Winston Churchill in Manchester in 1908. They were divided, however, by the issue of femininity. The former suffragettes felt ill at ease on the election platform in the company of Durand, who flaunted her beauty. Auclert was critical of her ‘regiment of lovers’, while Pelletier, who cropped her hair and wore masculine dress, complained, ‘I do not understand how these ladies don’t see the vile servitude that lies in displaying their breasts. I will show off mine when men adopt a special sort of trouser that shows off their…’75 The women candidates in Paris secured about 4 per cent of the vote. The only success story, with 27 per cent of the vote, was that of Élisabeth Renaud, standing at Vienne (Isère), who was supported by socialists strong in the town council as well as feminists, particularly the local union of institutrices seeking higher pay. Ironically, she was removed from the Group of Socialist Women in 1913 by her former comrade Louise Saumon-neau, who wanted to orientate the group towards a ‘proletarian feminism’ closely tied to the SFIO.76
Feminist politics was defeated in the end by opinion. The more feminists demanded, and the more aggressive their political tactics, the more they found themselves isolated, not only from French men, but also from women who saw themselves as wives and mothers, and even from feminists who did not want to sacrifice their femininity. Marguerite Durand fell out with Hubertine Auclert and Madeleine Pelletier on the issue of femininity, all these were isolated from Protestant and Catholic feminists who would put a toe in the water only if marriage and the family were not called into question, while men, who controlled the political citadel, were not minded to lay down their defences. With some poetic licence, Georges Clemenceau wrote in 1907, ‘If the right to vote were given to women tomorrow, France would all of a sudden jump back into the Middle Ages.’77