Feminism, Masculinity, and Gender

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Feminism, Masculinity, and Gender

• Dr Chris Pearson

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Lecture outline

• Gender history
• Femininity and feminism
• Masculinity

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Gender history An overview

• Associated with postmodernism
• Gender identities are fluid and historical they
  change over time
• Against biological determinism nothing about
  the body determines univocally how social
  divisions will be shaped
• Joan Scott, Gender a useful category of
  historical analysis, in Shoemaker and Vincent
  (eds.), Gender and History in Western Europe,
  (1998), 2

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• Man and women are at once empty and
  overflowing categories. Empty because they have
  no ultimate, transcendent meaning. Overflowing
  because even when they appear contain to be
  fixed, they still within them alternative,
  denied, or suppressed definitions.
• Joan Scott, Gender a useful category of
  historical analysis, in Shoemaker and Vincent
  (eds.), Gender and History in Western Europe,
  (1998), 61

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Histories of masculinity

• White, European masculinity constructed against
  outsider males, such as Blacks and Jews
• George L. Mosse, The Image of Man, The Creation
  of Modern Masculinity (1996)
• Masculinities come into existence at particular
  times and places and are always subject to
  change.
• R. Connell, Masculinities (1995), 185

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Gender relations

• Masculinity and femininity exist and change in
  relationship to each other
• Masculine and feminine identities are not
  distinct and separable constructs, but parts of
  a political field whose relations are
  characterized by domination, subordination,
  collusion and resistance.
• Michael Roper and John Tosh (eds), Manful
  Assertions Masculinities in Britain since 1800
  (1991), 8

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The new women

• The new women was most commonly represented as
  a dangerous creature, masculinsed but man-hating,
  emancipated politically and sexually, a
  perversion of the natural order of things and a
  threat to morality and civilisation itself.
• James McMillan, France and Women, 1789-1914
  (2000) 142

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Mademoiselle Ly a new women

• As a women who fashioned her identity around
  her professional accomplishments and her call for
  womens political and sexual emancipation, she
  subverted the traditional domestic image of the
  honorable woman.
• Andrea Mansker, Mademoiselle Arria Ly Wants
  Blood! French Historical Studies 294 (2006),
  p.630

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Changes to womens lives during the belle époque

• Republican expansion of education in the 1880s
  e.g. Camille Sées law of 1880 introduces female
  secondary schools
• More and more women enter university 2,772
  French women enrolled at the universities by
  1911-12, a twentyfold increase from the 1889-90
  period. (Mansker, p. 639)

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Professional women

• Teachers 57,000 female teachers by 1906, almost
  50 of the profession
• Office and clerical work for banks, railway
  companies etc
• By 1914, 30 of the female workforce were
  employed offices and department stores
• McMillan, France and Women, 148-9

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Marie Deraismes (1828-1894)
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Léon Richer (1824-1911)
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Gradualist, liberal feminism

• Feminism could best advance by making small
  dents in the hard wall that patriarchy had
  constructed against womens claims. The
  feminists task was to locate the loose brick and
  hammer against it. It was a realpolitik.
• Claire Goldberg Moses, French Feminism in the
  Nineteenth Century (1984), 199

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Richer on the family

• Since man alone was enfranchised he alone moved
  on. Woman, his daily companion, excluded from
  this benefit, stayed behind, and within the
  passing of half a century an enormous distance,
  an abyss, inexorably divided the two sexes. Out
  of this division was soon born, within the heart
  of families, irreparable dissatisfaction,
  ruptures that one had not suspected.
• Quoted in Moses, French Feminism in the
  Nineteenth Century, 201

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Women not ready for the vote, according to Richer

• I believe that at the present time it would be
  dangerous in France to give women the
  political ballot. They are in great majority
  reactionaries and clericals. It they voted today,
  the Republic would not last six months.
• Quoted in James McMillan, Housewife or Harlot
  (1981), 84

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Hurbertine Auclert (1848-1914)
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Hurbertine Auclert, speaking in 1876

• In spite of the benefits that came from our
  revolution of 1789, two kinds of individuals are
  still enslaved proletarians and women. Women
  proletarians have an even more deplorable fate...
• We have no rights. As interested as we may be in
  the happiness of our country, we are pitilessly
  turned away from all meetings, whether elective
  or legislative... We count for less than noting
  in the state. A stupid and profoundly ignorant
  man counts for more in France than the best
  educated woman. He can name his legislators
  woman cannot. She is a creature apart who is born
  with many duties and no rights.

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Madeleine Pelletier
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• For a feminist, the extreme care of ones
  person and a studied sense of elegance are not
  always a diversion, a pleasure, but rather often
  excess work, a duty that she nevertheless must
  impose upon herself, if only to deprive
  shortsighted men of the argument that feminism is
  the enemy of beauty and a feminine aesthetic.
• Margerite Durand, Acting Up, French Historical
  Studies (1996), 1119

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• In mimicking the real woman, they exposed its
  artifice as a role that can be staged even in the
  most unconventional of lives. By mimicking
  femininity, Durand... was able to defang her
  opponents and at the same time reveal the
  artifice of gender identity.
• Roberts, Acting Up, French Historical Studies
  (1996), 1130

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Modern femininity in Femina

• Beyond the domestic ideal showed women
  performing professional and other roles
• Its coverage presumed that women could achieve
  important advances on their own by raising their
  sights and exploring their own individuality.
  Lenard Berlanstein, Selling Modern Femininity,
  French Historical Studies, 304 (2007), 635

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Achievements of French feminism by 1914

• No vote for women but
• Married women allowed to dispose of their own
  incomes (1908)
• Paternity suits allowed (1912)
• Raised issue of womens rights

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Perhaps the greatest tribute to the force of
feminist ideas and activism in fin-de-siècle
France was that it precipitated a major public
debate and gave rise to a vitriolic antifeminism
that forced men (especially those in political
power) to take a position on the women question.
Karen Offen, Depopulation, Nationalism, and
Femininsm, American Historical Review (1984), 661
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French masculinity under threat?

• Defeat to Prussia (1870) and the Commune shook
  the confidence of middle class Frenchmen
• French men feared deep down that foreigners saw
  them as lacking in the honor and warriorlike
  virility still widely believed to embody
  masculinity itself.
• E Berenson, Trial of Madame Caillaux, p. 114

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• The First Empires women had been overwhelmed
  by the intense and magnificent whirl of activity
  accomplished by men who returned home between two
  battles to get them with child, only to hasten
  back to the front having left behind the
  overpowering image of conquerors.
• Le Gaulois (1900), quoted in Berenson, Trial of
  Madame Cailloux (1993), 115

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Male honour codes

• Hangover from the ancien régime
• In private, men must display sexual vigour and
  potency
• In public, they must be ready to defend their
  reputation and honour, hence the popularity of
  the duel
• See Robert Nye, Masculinity and Male Codes of
  Honor in Modern France (1993)

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Sketch by Alfred Grévin (c.1880)
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Culture of force (1890s)
See Christopher Forth, The Dreyfus Affair and the
Crisis of French Manhood (2004)