CHAPTER VII.SUMMARY.
CHAPTER VII.SUMMARY.
Appear, all ye modern innovators, before your judge, the public. Sum up your opinions.
COMMUNIST.The two sexes differ, do not perform the same functions, butthey are equal before the law.
For woman to be really emancipated, society must be remoulded economically, and marriage suppressed.
PHILADELPHIAN ANDICARIAN.We are of your opinion, brother, except in what concerns marriage.
ORTHODOXST.SIMONIAN.If Christianity has despised and oppressed woman, it has been because, in its sight, she represented matter, the world, evil. We, who are come to give the true meaning of the Trinity, rehabilitate or explain what our predecessors have condemned. Woman is the equal of man, because in God, who comprises everything, matter is equal to spirit. With man, woman forms the couple which is the social individual, the functionary. As woman is very different from man, we do not take the liberty of judging her; we content ourselves withsummoningher that she may reveal herself.
Notwithstanding we think that she can only be affranchised by being emancipated in love.
PIERRELEROUXagitated. Take care! It is not so much in sex that woman should be affranchised; it is only in her quality ofwife and human being. She has sex only for him she loves; to all other men she is what they are themselves: sensation, sentiment, sense. She must be free in marriage and in the commonwealth as man himself should be.
FUSIONISTinterrupting him. You are right, Pierre Leroux; yet neither is the previous speaker wholly wrong; woman is free and the equal of man in everything, because spirit and matter are equal in God; because the man and the woman form together the human androgynus, the derivation of the divine androgynus. It is not so, my dear sister?
MYSELF.Excuse me, brothers, from joining in your theological discussion; my wings are not strong enough to follow you into the bosom of God, in order to assure myself whether he is spirit or matter, androgynus or not, binary, trinary, quarternary, or nothing of all these. It is enough for me that you all grant that woman should be free, and the equal of man.
I permit myself only a single observation; that your notion of the couple or of the androgynus, at the bottom one and the same thing, tends fatally to the subjugation of my sex; if, by a metaphor, a fiction, we make of two beings, endowed each with a separate will, free-will and intellect, a single unity;in social practice, this unity is manifested by a single will, a single free-will, a single intellect, and the individuality that prevails in our society is that which is endowed with strength of arm; the other is annihilated, and the right given to the couple is in reality only the right of the stronger. The use that M. Proudhon has made of androgynyought to cure you of this fancy; as the use which your predecessors made of the ternary ought to have preserved you from trinitary metaphysics. Be it said without offence to you, gentlemen, I have a decided antipathy to any trinities and androgynies whatsoever; I am a sworn enemy to all metaphysics, whether profane or sacred,—a constitutional vice, aggravated in me by Kant and his school.
PHALANSTERIAN.For God's sake, gentlemen, let us quit this mysticism. Man and woman are different, but the one is as necessary as the other to the great work that should be accomplished by humanity; therefore they are equal. As each individual has a right to develop himself integrally, to manifest himself completely in order to perform the parcellary task which his attractions assign to him, the liberty of one sex can no more be called in question than can that of the other. Man modulates in major, woman in minor, with an exceptional eighth; but, as in all the general functions, the combination of the two modes is necessary, it is evident that each of them ought to be double, and that woman ought everywhere to be equal with man.
M.DEGIRARDINsomewhat abruptly. Gentlemen, I agree with you that woman ought to be free and equal with man; only I maintain that her function is to manage, to economize, and to rear her children, while man labors and brings into the household the product of his industry.
As I wish woman to be freed from servitude and all children to be rendered legitimate, I suppress civil marriage, and institute universal dowry.
M. LEGOUVEsmiling. You go too fast and too far, my dear sir, you will frighten everybody. At least, Ibelieve like you in the equality of the sexes through the equivalence of their functions, but I take good care not to breathe a word of it. I content myself with claiming for woman instruction, diminution of conjugal servitude, and offices of charity; counting, between ourselves, that these victories obtained, women will be in a position through their education and proved utility, to affranchise themselves completely. Well! despite my reserve and moderation, you see that some call meeffeminate, otherssans culotte.
M. MICHELET,rising with tears in his eyes. Alas, gentlemen, you are all in the wrong road; and I am very sorry, my beloved academician Legouvé, to see you employ your elegant pen in leading woman in so perilous and irrational a way.
As to you, gentlemen, who lay claim to liberty and equality of rights for woman, you are not authorized by her to do so; she demands no right, what should she do with it—a being always feeble, always sick, always wounded. Poor creature! What can be her rôle here below, if not to be adored by her husband, whose duty it is to constitute himself her instructor, her physician, her confessor, her sick nurse, her waiting-maid; to keep her in a hot-house, and with all these multiplied cares to earn beside the daily bread; for woman cannot, ought not to work; she is the love and the altar of the heart of man.
Some among you have dared utter the vile word: Divorce.
No divorce! The woman who has given herself away, has received the imprint of man. You should not abandon her, however guilty she may be. I thought in the beginning that after your death she ought to wear mourning to the tomb, beyond which, she and herhusband would be fused into the unity of love. But I have thought better of it; you may appoint a successor.
While Michelet is seating himself, wiping his eyes, the lid of a coffin is seen to rise, and Comte exclaims in a sepulchral tone:
Worthilyandadmirablyspoken, illustrious professor!
What! you here? exclaims the assembly. Then one does not perish entirely, as you taught your disciples?
COMTE.No, gentlemen, and I was very agreeably surprised to see myself mistaken. But it is not to instruct you about the life beyond the tomb that I return; that would not have been worth the trouble of disturbing myself. It is to express to the great professor Michelet all the satisfaction that I feel in seeing him so richly poetise the ideal that I set up, and strew so many flowers over theadmirablemaxim of Aristotle and thecommandmentof the great St. Paul.
Yes, thrice illustrious Master, you have rightly said: woman is made for man, she should obey him, be devoted to him; she is only a doll in private life, absolutely nothing in public life. Yes, men should labor for her; yes, marriage is indissoluble; all this is irreproachable.
AUGUSTECOMTISM.I regret but one thing—that you have not preserved the ejaculatory orisons of the wife to the husband, and of the husband to the wife; it would have been a good example and have made a fine effect to see them every morning kneeling face to face, with clasped hands and closed eyes. I hope that this is only forgetfulness, and that you will reëstablish this detail in your next edition. I congratulate you openly on the happy thought that you have conceived of justifying the absorption of woman by man by aid of a wound and themysteries of impregnation; this will have a great effect on the ignorant.
Rebellious women, and the madmenwith corrupt heartswho sustain them, say that you are a poetic and ingenuous egotist, that our beloved Proudhon is a brutal egotist; that I am an egotist by A + B. Let them say so; I approve and bless you."
The apparition was preparing to lie down again in his coffin when, having a passion for encountering phantoms, I seized a corner of his winding sheet, and, notwithstanding an unequivocal sign from him ofvade retro, I had the courage to represent humbly to the defunct high priest that the brow of M. Proudhon deserved quite as much to be blessed as that of M. Michelet. The defunct gravely crossed his fleshless fore finger and thumb over the haughty and irreverent head of the great critic, who neither bowed nor seemed infinitely flattered.
It being his turn to speak, Proudhon rose and said: "Gentlemen Communists, Philadelphians, Fusionists, Phalansterians, Saint Simonians, and you, MM. Girardin and Legouvé, as well as all of your adherents, you are alleffeminate, menhardened in absurdity.
"If my friend Michelet has gilded, perfumed and sugared the pill for you, I cannot imitate his address and moderation, for you know that in temperament I, P. J. Proudhon, am neither tender nor poetical. Permit me then roughly to tell you the truth concerning a questionof which you do not understand the first word.
"The Church, St. Thomas d'Aquinas, St. Bonaventure, St. Paul, and Auguste Comte, as well as the Romans, the Greeks, Manu and Mahomet teach that woman is made for the pleasure and use of man, and thatshe should be subjected to him; now I have sufficiently established these great truths by affirmations without reply. It is demonstrated to-day, therefore, to all who believe in me that woman is a passive being, having the germ of nothing, who owes everything to man, and that, consequently, she belongs to him as the work to the workman. Lest my solution might appear somewhat harsh to you, or to savor too much of antiquity of the Middle Ages, I have borrowed of the modern innovators their farce of Androgyny; I have made the couple the organ of Justice; in this couple, woman, transformed by man, becomes a triple deity, a domestic idol, subject in everything to her priest. I shut her up in the household, and permit her to have only the superintendence of festivals and spectacles, the education of children and maidens, etc.
"Is it not evident, gentlemen, that woman, because she is weaker than we, is,by justice, condemned to obey us, and thather liberty consists in experiencing no amorous emotion, even for her husband? Is it not evident, in consequence, that you, who do not think as I, areeffeminate, absurdmen, and that the women who are no more willing to be slaves than we were in '89 areinsurgents, impure women whom sin has rendered mad?"
The majority of the assembly laugh; De Girardin shrugs his shoulders; Legouvé bites his lip in order not to laugh; Michelet appears troubled at this sally which may spoil everything. As, in uttering the wordinsurgent, the orator glances at me with marked design, I cannot help saying "yes, I deserve the name ofinsurgentlike our fathers of '89. As to you, if you do not amend, I fear greatly that I shall see you die duly confessed and blessed with extreme unction ... and you will have well deserved it!"
Now, gentlemen, let us ascertain the vote of your honorable assembly.
Four schools,—the Communists, the St. Simonians, the Fusionians and the Phalansterians,—with one publicist, M. de Girardin, who makes as much noise by himself alone as a whole school, are for the liberty of woman and the equality of the sexes.
MM. Comte, Proudhon and Michelet are against the liberty of women and the equality of the sexes.
M. Legouvé and his innumerable adherents wish liberty for woman, and desire that she should labor to become equal to man through equivalence of functions.
Which means that the great majority of thosewho thinkare, in different degrees, for our emancipation.
Now that my readers are acquainted with your several opinions, gentlemen, it belongs to me, a woman, to speak myself in behalf of my right, without leaning on anything but Justice and Reason.
PART II.
OBJECTIONS TO THE EMANCIPATION OF WOMAN. NATURE AND FUNCTIONS OF WOMAN. LOVE. MARRIAGE. LEGAL REFORMS. SUMMARY.
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