1869, Ep. 119 with Carolyn Eichner, author of Feminism's Empire

2:24PM Jul 7, 2022

Speakers:

Jonathan Hall

Carolyn Eichner

Keywords:

feminists

french

kanak

paris commune

women

imperialism

feminism

michel

anti

book

people

france

revolutionary socialist

revolutionary

thought

empire

interested

algeria

ideas

question

Welcome to 1869, The Cornell University Press Podcast. I'm Jonathan Hall. This episode we speak with Carolyn Eichner, author of Feminism's Empire. Carolyn teaches history and Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee. She is the author of Surmounting the Barricades, and the Paris Commune. Carolyn shared with us her research documenting the major role that feminism played in the development of 19th century French anti-imperialism, the important role that race played in feminist thought and activism of the time, and some of the most memorable stories of the five prominent French feminists she profiles in a new book. Hello Carolyn, welcome to the podcast.

Hi, Jonathan. Thank you. Thanks so much for inviting me.

Well, we're glad to be talking to you about your new book Feminism's Empire that just came out. And before we start, I guess as an introduction, I'd love to hear you read the passage that starts chapter two.

All right. Crossing the Rocky Mountains Olympe Audouard reported in 1871. Quote, "one finds oneself in Utah, a state colonized by the followers of Brigham Young Frenchman, unhappily for French women also support polygamy. For those tempted to join the Latter Day Saints in order to benefit from this institution, I give a little charitable advice. in Salt Lake City, a man must feed all of the women he marries. wives have the right of divorce, but the husband does not. He must give his name and bread to all of his children. Frenchmen, so accustomed to taking pleasures, without any inconveniences, would undoubtedly miss the Napoleonic Code, which grants men complete impunity for all their bad passions."

That was great. That was so funny and spot on too. So tell me, you know, this is just going to segue to the feminists that you cover in your book, tell us how this project came about, tell us the backstory of this project. Okay, so my first book, Surmounting the Barricades, Women in the Paris Commune, looked at a feminists and feminism and feminist socialisms during the 1871, Paris Commune, which was a really tremendously influential revolutionary civil war in France. And doing that book, I was really looking at questions of gender and class. And so in, you know, as I was working in this project, especially as I was finishing it up, and I was thinking, What about race? What about imperialism? Because these were questions that were becoming increasingly important in the latter half of the 19th century in France. And so I was thinking about what about feminists engaging with Empire. And there has been scholarship on this in the British context for a few decades, but there was virtually none. When I started this project, and when I finished this project, and not that much more, but um, so I was looking then, for the first few feminist, to engage with empire to go into empire, not just to even think about it, but to go into empire either physically, which was the case with four of these women or literarily, and with her imagination, which is one of them, Léonie Rouzade. And I was interested both in their ideologies, and their embodied experiences. So what you know what that meant, what the experience is of traveling into empire, and not just the French empire, but the imperial the larger imperial world, which would include like the Metropole, Turkey, of Russia, but Imperial and impure realizing contexts. And so I found these five women from ranging from around the 1860s into the end of the century, but by the end of the century, there's much more of this. And they fall and this was kind of a lucky thing for me, they fall on an ideological range from left to right in terms of different kinds of feminism's. And this is something really important to me, in my, in my work, and including in my first book, Surmounting the Barricades, is about the multiplicities of feminism's that existed in France in the 19th century. Oftentimes, if I'm speaking to someone and I say something about feminism in 19th century France, they're so surprised and it's like, no, there were many kinds of feminism and many conflicting types...the intersecting types. So these five women fall on a range from on the far left the revolutionary anarchist feminist, Louise Michel, to on the far right, which is really a center-right...it's a relative thing...Olympe Audouard, who was a loyalist, but also had, like, had Republican ideas and idea the like for the Republic, the Republic of France, not the United States idea of Republicanism. So, you know, much more conservative with the others falling along that range as more Republican socialist feminists who were not revolutionary, but advocated legislative change and move towards socialism, and pull a man who's this sort of a second to the left, which, who was a revolutionary socialist feminist. And so and then later, as the project developed, I started to focus on other themes, you know, kind of emerged from the sources emerged from looking at their writings and writings about them. And that's when really this question of pro- versus anti-imperialism emerged. And also the figure of the Jew and anti-Semitism. And this is not something I intended to write about going into it. But it really emerged from the sources because they spoke. They use this idea of this figure of the Jews so often for political reasons. And then questions of law, intimacies, education, translation, and morality and linguistics are all really significant themes that emerged as I said the project

Wow. So it's fascinating to hear, you know, there's left-wing, right-wing feminism and, but all of them all of these feminism's playing a major role in developing this 19th century French anti-imperialism. But this anti-imperialism is a complicated mix, there's, there's there's a lot of contradictions, it's very complex. Tell us the nuanced view from your research.

Okay, so all of the feminists were opposed to existing imperial programs that just saw the imperialism as it existed, they all thought it was exploitive, and wrong. And, you know, essentially, for all of them, there was a moral question about, you know, the rights of state doing this to another state or group or community. But at the same time, they all to varying degrees, and really different degrees, saw in imperialism, potential forum to bring about change and to bring about even progressive change, especially through a kind of a feminist imperialism. And so, only two of the feminists were self identified anti-imperialists. And that's Louise Michel and Paule Mink, and especially Louise Michel, who was really vociferously about us. The Parliament was pretty vociferous about it too. And and Michelle, thought that a little Western education could be beneficial for helping indigenous peoples develop and evolve. And for her, it was very specifically the Kanak people in New Caledonia, which was a French prison colony to which she was exiled after the 1871 Paris Commune that I mentioned earlier. So I mean, she's so anti-imperialist and yet, she while at the same time, she talks about learning from the connections like Western education, and she also referred to them as childlike, and occasionally savage, but compared to pretty much everyone else. In her era, she saw them as people and as people with a culture and a culture with value and language. And, and so from my perspective, it was virtually impossible or if not impossible, for, for someone, even with the most progressive values and ideas and the most openness to actually fully escape the ideas, all of the ideas of the era, especially the these are rooted in race and ideas of civilization. She didn't think that white people were superior, but she thought that they hit advanced more rapidly. And that and this is she's not alone in that. But she puts a lot of value in the in the in the Kanak and yet she still is infantilizing towards them and and so basically, what I come to argue is that the the binary between anti-imperialist and pro imperialist of this period is impossible. There is no no clear binary, that every one is falling on a range because people cannot extract themselves from their time period. One of my pet peeves is when people say that someone is ahead of their time, you can't be ahead of your time, your of your time, you may think more openly or more progressively than other people in your time. But everyone is up their time. And and that sort of became very starkly clear and this project.

Interesting, that's tough to be able to, knowing what we know now, to be able to look back and be sympathetic with viess that today we would we would be horrified by but at the time, as you were saying at that time. You know, Michel was super progressive!

And this is a historian, it's vital to not put our contemporary standards and understandings onto people in the past, because they they do not have the benefit of, of what we think of what our understandings are. I mean, you can certainly label things racism, anti -semitism, misogyny, absolutely. And even with feminism is the word feminism didn't come into use until the 1880s. And I explained this in the book and I explained this and anytime I've used feminism in this way that I it's not an anachronistic, it's labeling something that had no label, but it's it is consistent with these ideas of gender equity, and in efforts to end a kind of a gender hierarchy and sexist and misogynist practices and structures. So thing that I found really interesting is that the contemporary Kanak in New Caledonia, today, see Louise Michel, in an extremely positive light, is it, they are able to recognize that the derogatory term she used towards them where she was a product of her time, but was so different in the way that she regarded them and one of the key things was when she was in she and 4500 other Communards, the revolutionaries of the Paris Commune were deported to New Caledonia to the prison colony after this revolutionary civil war. And while they were there in 1878, the Kanak rose up against the French, and they had risen up against the French a number of times before and after, and she was the only Communard to consistently side with the Kanak. The other Communards, many of them even fought on the side of the French and the French, at the end of the Paris Commune 72 Day conflict, the French army slaughtered about 15,000 Persians in the streets of Paris during a week. So, the antipathy towards this government was intense, but when it came down to it, when the Kanak people who are, they're Melanesian, they're the south, the southern South Pacific, and so they're black. And so the French considered them like Sub-Saharan Africans to be the lowest of their colonized people. So when it came down to it, the other commune are prisoners sided with whiteness, and not with another oppressed group. And while some of them had some sympathy, Michel was the only one who consistently sided with the cannot. And this is something that that contemporary cannot really value and recognize.

It lasts through history. That's, yeah, that's nice. So we've heard a little bit about Michel, tell us some other memorable stories of the other feminists that you featured in this book.

Okay, um, well, Olympe Audouard, she's the most conservative of them. The one that the the quote, I read at the beginning, she, so she traveled to Russia to Egypt, she was in Jerusalem. She was in Turkey, she was in the kingdom of the Mormons, as she termed it, as she crossed the United States. And so she was there right after the end of slavery in the right after the Civil War, and speaking to people, if she's in trouble to the American South, but she spoke to people about it, including some formerly enslaved people. And she was extremely interested in law. And with the exception of Louise Michel, the other feminists were quite interested in law, and Paule Mink was also not as interested because of the revolutionary politics that, you know, thought the whole system had to go and didn't have this kind of value in legal structures. But But for the other three, they really did. And they saw law as a way of really understanding a society and trying to change the law as a way of bringing emancipation So Audouard always, she would study the law of a place before she went to it. And so she saw anti-miscegenation laws in the United States. And so when she was writing about enslaved women, in one thing she and all these other feminists did was to compare what the legal situation and social situation was for women in different places in France. So when she saw what she believed that white men and black women could not even have sex, let alone be married, she thought that this protected the bodily protected black women from white men. And so when comparing the situation of enslaved black women, and married white French women, she said that in some ways, enslaved black women had had it better, because she spoke about that, you know, in the evening, after working in the fields, or in the house, they could go to their heart and have privacy and time to themselves. And that they could, that they, the one thing that they had was the right to say no to sex, and that French, married women did not have their right there's no concept of marital rape and the Napoleonic Code that men were men, a man had, by law, access to his wife's body. And so she thought, because the law said that white women, white men and black women could not have sex, that's this meant that black women are not sexually exploited. So this sort of extraordinary misunderstanding was really, really profound. She also had a really idealized view of the United States in general, and this fit into it. And so this idealized view of the US and kind of an overemphasis on the word of the law, and a misunderstanding of it really shaped her misunderstanding of that context. So for Hubertine Auclert, especially, she's was the next farthest right though she's, she's a socialist, she's a Republican socialist, she believes in the vote, she is the motor of the French women's suffrage movement, which was miniscule in the later 19th century, compared to the US or England, she had money and intense drive. And she started a newspaper called La Citroën, which is the woman citizen. And the main goal was women's suffrage. But she also was really interested in the situation of women around the world, and also in imperialism. And she started editing and writing for this newspaper, and funding it when she lived in France. And then, a few years later, her partner who she did not want to legally marry for a number of reasons, because of the the mainly, she didn't want to be under the Napoleonic codes, the way that you know, wives were basically lost all of their freedoms, and on how she was also opposed to taking a patronage. She was an advocate of women maintaining their birth names. And so but ultimately, her partner was the being sent to Algeria for to was posted there, he was a lawyer, and, and he was he had tuberculosis, and he was dying. And so she, she married him and went to Algeria, and then became even more interested in questions of imperialism. And so she, so the newspaper really, really reflected that. And she had a kind of a core group of male feminists and female feminists writing for this newspaper. And so this is this was a 10-year project that she really kept going.

Very cool. Very cool.

Yeah. And then moving on to Léonie Rouzade. And she's the one and her politics are very similar to Auclert's, Republican socialist feminist. And Rouzade is the one who did not physically go into empire, but literarily, and creatively did and she was a novelist, and she wrote kind of fantasy fiction. She's actually some science fiction aficionados now look back at her as a science fiction writer because she wrote a number of kinds of futuristic stories. And the one that I'm interested in is called the Le monde renversé (The World Turned Upside Down), in which a European a beautiful young European woman is basically captured by pirates at sea and taken to an unnamed sultanate as a prisoner. And it's clear this place is Muslim. And she gets there and she is able through her intelligence and beauty and you know, while to take over, and she takes over the society, and she flips the gender hierarchy, thus the world the or the world turned upside down. And she does it in a way like, like completely so that men have all the disempowerment that women in France is she's using this as an example to show the, the situation in France and and that women have all the power and people are, you know, going nuts because the the men are like, This is absurd. How could this be and she's making this point and then you know, and then ultimately she developed develops, she's kind of lays out the plans for this to become a democratic republic. And with fit that where 50% of the legislature will be women and 50% of the legislature will be men, which foreshadows the French, the 2002, French law parité, wher which where the goal ultimately is a 50 5050 split in the legislature. And, and then she dramatically kills herself with the heir apparent to the throne. So to get rid of him and to get rid of the the non Democratic leader and then leaves this country as a true democratic republic.

So that's a that sounds like a good book.

Nice, nice.

It really is. It's really very, I mean, and this is, this is 1870. She is a, I believe she's the first leftist the first socialists to really write about imperialism. Man or woman, and maybe if she's, she's doing this, you know, through the this fictional story, but she's her interest in this is really cutting edge.

And then we can move to Paule Mink, and she's a revolutionary socialist feminist second from the left, so to speak. And she, she is she was involved in the Paris Commune. She's very well known in France in the 1870s. And 80s. As a revolutionary socialist, she is flamboyant speaker, a speaker very committed. And when I was doing research on her, for my first book, there was a year long gap in the archives there was in the mid 1880s, it was like there was because the the parent of the French police followed her issues, threatening dangerous character. And they followed her every day of her life, from the time that she came back from exile after the commune until her death. At the turn of the century, there was a gap and it was ultimately retracted, contracted down and figured out that she was in Algeria for a year. So she went to Algeria on a anti imperialist anti-military, anti-clerical propaganda tour. And she was there for a year. And as she went from, from city to city newspapers would announce her arrival, there are some accounts of her of her talks and the way that Europeans and Algerians came to them. But then there was I found a book published by missionaries, a couple of missionaries, who, in their sort of story of their experience, their spoke of their how horrified they were that this terrible, cangerous woman was also there, and they apologize to the readers for even mentioning her, and how she was basically spoiling their potential converts by saying all of these negative things about religion, and it was a pretty impressive document, showing how afraid they were of her influence. And you know what that influence was, and so it's pretty, it's extremely interesting to me that this kind of had disappeared from the historical record, given how significant it was, and how it shaped her subsequent politics.

Interesting. Do you know if she was followed by the Algerian police or the you know, the French authorities in Algeria? I assume?

That's, that's a great question. And I hadn't found any evidence of that. But I it is actually possible that she was and I just didn't find the evidence. That's a great question.

Wow. Yeah, a revolutionary socialist, as you're saying, you know, she's a rabble rouser and, but also, you know, raising consciousness as well.

Exactly, exactly. That was it. That was her goal to you know, to go into talk about the ways in which imperialism was exploitative the ways in which I mean her her anti-clericalism was from her teens and this was pretty central thing to a lot of the French left. Um, in the period after 1848, a number of things changed. And, but she extended it to any kind of organized religion, you know, as did Louise Michel that they were just really opposed to any organized religion. So she was anti-clerical in a broader sense to an audience of mixed of Muslims and Christians and probably Jews. Also, I don't really know much about the composition of the audience besides audiences besides that they were in European attire and Algerian attire with papers describe them.

Nice, nice. Wow. Well, these are great stories and I know that there's many, many more fleshed out in your new book, Feminism's Empire. It's just out now available on our website and all bookstores around the world. It was a pleasure talking with you, Carolyn. It was a pleasure talking with you, Jonathan.

Thank you so much, you take care. That was Carolyn Eichner, author of Feminism's Empire. You can follow Carolyn on Twitter @EichnerCarolyn. If you'd like to purchase Carolyn's new book, use the promo code 09POD to save 30% on her website at Cornell press.cornell.edu. If you live in the UK, use the discount code CSANNOUNCE and visit the website combined.academic.co.uk Thank you for listening to 1869, The Cornell University Press podcast