A Belle Epoque?

Women and Feminism in French Society and Culture 1890-1914

Diana Holmes, Carrie Tarr, Diana Holmes, Carrie Tarr

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9780857457011
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Feminism & Feminist Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

The Third Republic, known as the 'belle époque', was a period of lively, articulate and surprisingly radical feminist activity in France, borne out of the contradiction between the Republican ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity and the reality of intense and systematic gender discrimination. Yet, it also was a period of intense and varied artistic production, with women disproving the critical nearconsensus that art was a masculine activity by writing, painting, performing, sculpting, and even displaying an interest in the new "seventh art" of cinema. This book explores all these facets of the period, weaving them into a complex, multi-stranded argument about the importance of this rich period of French women's history.

PART I

FEMINISM AND FEMINISTS

a CHAPTER 1 A

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NEW REPUBLIC, NEW WOMEN? FEMINISM AND MODERNITY AT THE BELLE EPOQUE

Diana Holmes and Carrie Tarr

The New Republic and Political Feminism

Postwar nostalgia played its part in constructing the Belle Epoque as an optimistic, confident and colourful era, but this image is not made of myth alone: the Third Republic did usher in what, for France, was an unaccustomed period of stability, relative prosperity and (qualified) democracy. Born out of national defeat in the 1870 Franco-Prussian War, and the resulting demise of the Second Empire, the new regime survived the bitter conflict of the Commune and the opposition of the monarchists to restore national pride and consolidate a democratic republic that, on 4 July 1880, was able for the first time to celebrate the anniversary of the fall of the Bastille with a national fête. Political stability was accompanied by economic growth, above all in the technological and tertiary sectors (McMillan 1985: 47–48), and by imperialist expansion: between 1880 and 1895 the size of the French colonial empire grew from one to 9.5 million square kilometres (Magraw 1983: 235). The expanding empire fuelled a growing mood of national self-confidence, and added a touch of safely contained exoticism to the great Expositions or World Fairs held in Paris in 1878, 1889 and 1900, such as the 1889 reproduction of an Arab street with its fountains, cafes and belly-dancers.¹

The Republic’s founding principles of liberty, equality and fraternity were never intended to apply to women as they did to men – or at least to white, metropolitan-born men. Male authority and privilege were built into the political, legal and economic fabric of this regime, just as into all the preceding ones: ‘universal’ suffrage meant male suffrage, the husband was legally the sole authority in the family, women workers – by 1906 38.9 percent of the female population and considerably more than a third of the country’s workforce (McMillan 2000: 161) – were automatically paid lower salaries, and a married woman’s earnings were in any case the property of her husband. Inequalities such as these were so familiar that they had come to appear natural. But the Republic’s commitment to the ideals of democracy and equal rights produced a very visible contradiction: how could these be defended while half the population was excluded from civil rights and subjected to the authority of the other half? As would occur later with the nations France had colonised, the Republic provided the ideological basis for contestation of its own practices. The development of state education for women,² designed to wean them away from the influence of the Catholic Church and create a generation of good Republican mothers, also strengthened the social confidence and the intellectual armoury of women inclined to question the assumption of male supremacy.

Feminism was a minority activity in France at the Belle Epoque but, fuelled in part by belief in those very human rights from which the Republic excluded women, it was highly vocal and received a good deal of attention in the press, so that feminist ideas were ‘in the air’. There were numerous campaigning groups that varied in political shade from conservatively Catholic to radically socialist, with the largest organisation, the Conseil national des femmes françaises, led by Protestant and pro-republican women such as Avril de Sainte-Croix and Sarah Monod. Though small in relation to the British or American movements, feminist campaigning groups could count about twenty to twenty-five thousand members in 1901 (Hause and Kenny 1984: 42) and well over one hundred thousand by 1914 (Waelti-Walters and Hause 1994: 6, 167). Regular feminist congresses – at least eleven between 1878 and 1903 – provided a very public forum for discussion of the major issues: the suffrage, reform of the profoundly sexist legal code (the Code Civil), equality in education, employment and equal pay, the recognition of maternity and domestic labour as socially important functions, the reform of the laws on prostitution. Though female membership of the trade unions remained low (5.26 percent of total membership in 1900, McMillan 2000: 183), not least because of the traditionalist hostility of male unionists, women workers demonstrated their capacity for a fierce and imaginative militancy on many occasions, both alongside men and in women-only strikes such as those of the sugar workers,³ textile workers, tobacco workers and sardinières (McMillan 2000: 182–84). Those women who worked in the most traditionally feminine sectors – domestic labour and the fashion trade – were significantly absent from such protests, for their isolation and often harsh working conditions made the development of a politicised sense of collective identity particularly difficult.⁴ For many working-class women gender and class identities conflicted (Sowerwine 1982: 8), so that on the whole even the most militant of female workers would probably not have recognised themselves in the label ‘feminist’. At the congresses and through shared campaigns, however, middle and working-class women moved towards a collaboration based on the recognition that, as the socialist feminist Hélène Brion put it, ‘women are even more exploited as women by the male community than they are as producers by the capitalists’ (Waelti-Walters and Hause 1994: 148).

The most radical thinkers proposed arguments that would be central to the post-1968 second wave of feminism: Hubertine Auclert not only adopted a series of imaginative strategies to campaign for political rights, but also denounced the subordination of women within marriage; the popular public speaker Nelly Roussel argued for women’s right to choose maternity, hence for contraception and at least implicitly for abortion on demand; Madeleine Pelletier made this demand explicit, and argued the constructionist case for gender as made rather than born; in defending prostitutes from the harsh system of regulation that operated only in the interests of their clients, many feminists made the connection between political rights and sexuality, and saw that patriarchy operated at the most intimate levels of behaviour.⁵ Feminists won a series of small but important victories that extended women’s legal rights and, by 1914, when the outbreak of war led them to suspend the struggle, they seemed very close to winning the right to vote.

The Anti-feminist Backlash

The existence of male ‘experts’ on women’s nature, health and potential to make trouble was a very marked feature of the Belle Epoque. Despite the small scale of the feminist movement in France, a crisis in men’s confidence in the solidity of the patriarchal order seems to have occurred, at least among intellectuals.⁶ In essays, novels, lectures, plays and press articles men exhorted women to be what they claimed (with some lack of logic) they inevitably and essentially were: kind, more concerned with the good of (male) others than with their own, gracefully passive, chaste, the guarantors of a humane society not through any active political role but indirectly, by taming the brute that was one aspect of masculine strength. They waxed vehement on the dangers of any other course of female behaviour: women who wrote, voted, pursued their education too far would become sterile, hysterical or mad, while their men folk would become feminised and French civilisation would decay. Henri Marion, Professor of education at the Sorbonne, devoted a lecture series (1892–4) and a book (Marion 1900) to the ‘Psychology of Woman’, arguing, in a manner that typified the anti-feminist discourse of the age, that science had proved women to be ill-adapted to rational thought or intellectual enquiry, and that the hallmark of an advanced and progressive civilisation was the maintenance of firm gender boundaries (Marion 1900). Medical science pathologised both the female body (for mental illness in women was widely attributed to the effects of the uterus and the menstrual cycle) and ‘feminine’ qualities; for if women’s emotional and intuitive ‘nature’ was praised as a useful complement to male reason, it was also seen as the source of the second sex’s mental instability and propensity for hysteria.⁷ At this period an ideology of gender difference that had long been largely uncontested came to be articulated insistently and emphatically, not to say hysterically.

There is an apparent discrepancy here between the small scale and limited strength of the French feminist movement, and the virulence of the backlash against the ‘blue-stocking’, the ‘emancipated woman’, the ‘Man-Woman’,⁸ who according to so many male authors was threatening to abandon to men the tasks of ‘making jam and feeding the children’.⁹ Annelise Maugue identifies a crisis in male identity around the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and interprets this as a reaction to a modernity that many men perceived as empowering for women, but as profoundly destructive of virility. During forty-four years of peace, as work became gradually more mechanised, spectacular consumption took precedence over production, and sedentary white-collar jobs (the lower-paid ranks of which rapidly became feminised) proliferated in public and private sectors, men – at least some men – felt ‘deprived in the social sphere of the means to satisfy their demiurgic aspirations and will to conquer’.¹⁰ New social conditions that seemed to hold liberatory potential for women were experienced by many men as a threat to their virile identity. The small but noisy feminist movement undoubtedly fuelled male fears, but the intensity of the backlash and the wave of rhetoric defending an essentialist view of gender expressed a reaction not just to feminism, but to more widespread and less explicitly political shifts in women’s behaviour and sense of identity. There was a widespread fear at the Belle Epoque that the ‘New Woman’ had arrived in France, heralded by Ibsen’s Nora – A Doll’s House was first performed in Paris in 1894 (Ibsen 1965 [1879]) – and already a stock figure to be celebrated or (more often) lampooned in the British and American press. She filled the pages of reviews like La Revue and La Plume, the subject of articles and cartoons, dressed in bloomers, abandoning husband and children to cycle to a feminist congress, abrogating male rights and forcing men into domestic servitude. The New Woman merged in the public imagination with feminism, but she represented a more ubiquitous and insidious manifestation of some perceived shift in gender relations. The question is, how far was she the mythical projection of male fears, and how far the emblem of real forms of emancipation?

Modernity and the New Woman

The perception of some significant change in female identity came in part from changes in the fabric of everyday life, or at least everyday urban life. Feminism in the political sense was not a concern for most French women whose lives were situated, practically and by centuries of tradition, in the private sphere. But changes in the material infrastructure of the everyday also had their effect on the scope of women’s activity and on their possible senses of identity. Belle Epoque France was proud of its own modernity – its new technologies, its cutting-edge fashion and design, its capacity to master and integrate the exotic cultures of the colonies – all of which it celebrated and displayed in the three great Paris Expositions (1878, 1889, 1900). In France as a whole, urbanisation was still advancing slowly: in 1899 only 35 percent of the population lived in a town of more than five thousand inhabitants (Weber 1986: 51). But as the railway network expanded and travel time reduced, it became much more feasible for people to visit the larger cities, just as it became more possible for affluent city dwellers to depart for a seaside or rural retreat at the height of summer. And life in the cities – Paris especially – felt increasingly different from that static, inherited lifestyle, ruled by the natural rhythms of seasons and sunsets, that still prevailed in rural France. Electricity put an end to dependence on natural light, and further altered the relationship to space: the Eiffel Tower (one of the star attractions of the 1889 Exposition) could be ascended in seconds thanks to the electric elevators, and electrified trams made much of Paris more easily accessible even before the 1900 opening of the Paris underground. Nature – also the bedrock of arguments for gender difference – was clearly able to be changed by human intervention, and the new forms of transport in particular quite literally opened up the public world to women. From the 1880s on, the design and mass manufacture of the bicycle gradually progressed until by 1914 France counted three and a half million cyclists (Weber 1986: 200). For men, but still more for women, as the advertisers emphasised, the bicycle represented a liberating sense of mobility, independence and freedom to roam.¹¹ The soon generalised fashion for less constricting clothing – divided skirts and culottes, masculine-style tailored suits (the ‘tailleur’) – took its initial impetus from the need to pedal and to move around more generally whilst adhering to contemporary standards of female decency.

More markedly in Paris than elsewhere but, thanks to new forms of media and transport, in a way that had its impact across the country, this was already becoming the sort of fast-moving world that would be entirely recognisable a century later – a world of competing images and narratives, of a collective imagination both stimulated and distorted by the power of marketing and of modern urban bustle.

New modes of consumption in one sense situated women still more firmly in their roles as managers of domestic life and objects of desire: household goods, made-to-wear fashions, beauty products were all designed and displayed to appeal to female taste. But the transformation of Paris into the ‘emblem of the consumer revolution’ (Williams 1982: 12), begun under the Second Empire, also favoured women’s personal mobility and a new sense of the self as a legitimately desiring, pleasure-seeking subject, free to travel around the widened streets with their colourful posters advertising products and leisure pursuits, the grands magasins with their mouth-watering merchandise, the dreams and fantasies propounded by the Expositions themselves. For bourgeois women, the propriety of staying close to home and venturing out only when chaperoned conflicted with the economic imperative to seek and purchase. In the city, the female body was on public display to an extent hitherto unknown, as advertisements for new commodities and entertainments eroticised the offered pleasure by embodying it in the person of a beautiful, inviting (and often minimally clothed) young woman. The deployment of women’s bodies as spectacle reached its apotheosis with the twenty foot high stucco figure of la Parisienne, a statuesque creature gorgeously dressed by a leading couturier, above the entrance gate of the 1900 Exposition. But the pose of la Parisienne suggested movement, not passivity: she was clearly on her way to explore what the city had to offer, the consumer as well as the object of consumption, hence subject as well as object of new ways of looking.¹²

The new consumer-oriented city had the technology and the will to feed the imagination of its inhabitants, selling them dreams, and mobilising fantasies to sell them merchandise. The Belle Epoque, armed with effective mass-printing techniques, supported by a liberal, anti-censorship regime, also fed the demand for stories and images. Mass-circulation daily newspapers captured modern life as it happened and turned it into colourful tales, as well as offering fiction proper in the form of serialised novels or feuilletons. The publishing industry thrived as an increasingly literate population devoured the new low-cost novel collections, many of them deliberately aimed at a mass, popular audience. Stories and spectacles...