Abstract
The Second International Congress of Women’s Charities and Institutions held at the Universal Exposition of 1900 featured a debate on the ‘repeal of all exceptional measures applied to women in the sphere of morals.’ Planned under the patronage of the French government, this event was one of two major congresses spearheaded by republican feminists at the turn of the century world’s fair in Paris. Considered the more ‘moderate’ of the two by scholars, the Congress of Women’s Charities focused its philanthropic attention on combating national degeneration and shied away from addressing overtly political issues such as the vote.1 Despite their reluctance to discuss women’s suffrage, congress members nonetheless spotlighted sexual politics. Following a report condemning state-regulated prostitution by the secretary-general of the French branch of the International Abolitionist Federation (FAI) Auguste de Morsier, Maria Pognon took the floor and attempted to infuse a more radical feminist hue into the debate. Pognon, pacifist freethinker and president of the Ligue française pour le droit des femmes (LFDF), argued that women’s right to control their own bodies had to be highlighted as central to the‘moral question’ and insisted that the double sexual standard touched much more broadly on the lives of middle-class women than Morsier had indicated. Framing her attack in terms she felt would generate the most outrage among the majority of bourgeois feminists present,2 Pognon asserted that:
There is a right that does not belong to the man, but that he has accorded to himself very gratuitously, just as he procures all rights in our society.
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Notes
Laurence Klejman and Florence Rochefort, L’Egalité en marche (Paris: des femmes, 1989), pp. 137–9;
Steven C. Hause and Anne Kenney, Women’s Suffrage and Social Politics in the French Third Republic ( Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984 ), pp. 30–1.
Fiaux gives a history of debates that took place on this issue at the 1899 Conférence internationale de prophylaxie and the 1901 Congrès de la Fédération internationale pour l’abolition de la Police des moeurs in his Le Délit pénal de contamination intersexuelle ( Paris: Félix Alcan, 1907 ), pp. 1–38.
William Reddy argues that ‘Both men and women were expected to conceal serious infractions of morality—this is the other dimension of preserving honor—whether the infractions were their own or committed by their spouses or close relations.’ Honor was ‘a collective, familial state.’ Reddy, The Invisible Code: Honor and Sentiment in Postrevolutionary France, 1814–1848 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p. 72; See also Rachel Fuchs, ‘Paternity, Progeny and Property: Family Honor in the Late Nineteenth Century,’ Chapter 7 in this volume.
Anne-Marie Käppeli, Sublime croisade: Ethique et politique du féminisme protestant, 1875–1928 (Carouge-Geneva: Editions Zoé, 1990);
Geneviève Poujol, Un Féminisme sous tutelle: Les protestantes françaises, 1810–1960 (Paris: Les Editions de Paris, 2003); Alain Corbin, Women for Hire: Prostitution and Sexuality in France after 1850, trans. Alan Sheridan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press);
Karen Offen, ‘Intrepid Crusader: Ghénia Avril de Sainte-Croix Takes on the Prostitution Issue,’ Proceedings of the Western Society for French History, 33 (2005): 352–74; Hause,‘Social Control in Late Nineteenth-Century France: Protestant Campaigns for Strict Public Morality,’ Chapter 6 in this volume.
Karen Offen, ‘Defining Feminism: a Comparative Historical Approach,’ Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 14(1) (Autumn 1988): 119–57; Hause and Kenney, Women’s Suffrage, pp. 25–6.
Pierre Larousse, Grande Dictionnaire Universel du XIXe Siècle ( Paris: Administration du Grand Dictionnaire Universel, 1873 ), p. 377.
Émile Littré, Dictionnaire de la Langue Française, vol. 2 (Paris: Hachette, 1885 ), p. 2041.
Larousse, Grande Dictionnaire Universel du XIXe Siècle ( Paris: Administration du Grand Dictionnaire Universel, 1867 ), p. 1063.
Robert A. Nye, Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor in Modern France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), p. 46;
Julian Pitt-Rivers, ‘Honor,’ International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (New York: Macmillan, 1968), pp. 505–6;
Mansker, ‘“Mademoiselle Arria Ly Wants Blood!” The Debate over Female Honor in Belle Époque France,’ French Historical Studies, 29(4) (Fall 2006): 621–47.
For the continuing influence of aristocratic culture and mores over the belle époque bourgeoisie and the idea that men’s sexual competition for desirable women was a part of the honor code in this period, see Edward Berenson, The Trial of Madame Caillaux (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), pp.181–207;
Christopher E. Forth, The Dreyfus Affair and the Crisis of French Manhood (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), pp. 39–44. In fact, anthropologist Julian Pitt-Rivers makes a compelling case that male honor in the Latin countries of Europe has long included these elements of sexual rivalry and conquest over women as enhancing men’s prestige, whereas within the family the imperative of sexual purity has been restricted to women as a result of its moral division of labor. Honor, Pitt-Rivers argues, continues to submit to ‘the reality of power’ throughout a man’s life, and this includes sexual as well as economic, military and political power. See Pitt-Rivers, ‘Honor,’ pp. 504–6.
Susan Kingsley Kent, Sex and Suffrage in Britain,1860–1914 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), pp. 60–79;
Lucy Bland, Banishing the Beast: Sexuality and the Early Feminists ( New York: New Press, 1995 ), pp. 95–123.
Judith Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London ( Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992 ), p. 92.
Emilie de Morsier quoted in Theodore Stanton, The Woman Question in Europe: a Series of Original Essays ( New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1884 ), p. 266.
For this early twentieth-century debate between neoregulationists and abolitionists in which Bérenger took a leading role, see especially meetings of 13 and 20 January 1905 in Commission Extraparlementaire du Régime des Moeurs. Procès-Verbaux des Séances (Melun: Imprimerie Administrative, 1909), pp. 266–307.
Avril de Sainte-Croix was an active member of this extra-parliamentary commission. For Parent-Duchâtelet, see Corbin, ‘Présentation,’ in La Prostitution à Paris au XIXe siècle, texte présenté et annoté par Alain Corbin (Paris: Seuil, 1981), pp. 7–49;
Jill Harsin, Policing Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century Paris ( Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985 ), pp. 96–130.
For press clippings on a sample of the brochures, meetings and speeches given by feminists on the sexual question after the turn of the century, see Dossier Avril de Sainte-Croix, 1897–1907 (6 microfilm reels) and 351 Pro (Dossier Prostitution), 1900–1919 at the Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand (BMD). A growing emphasis on fighting double morality can also be traced in the congresses and committees of the major feminist organizations. The International Council of Women (ICW) had a committee on‘White Slave Traffic and Equal Moral Standard,’ which Avril de Sainte-Croix chaired from 1904. The Union française pour le suffrage des femmes (UFSF) tended to highlight a single moral standard in their propaganda and meetings, especially under the influence of Marguerite de Witt-Schlumberger, who served as UFSF president from 1913. The CNFF did not create an actual section on‘l’unité de la morale’ until 1916, but it showed a dedicated interest in the issue from the organization’s foundation in 1901. See Offen, ‘Intrepid Crusader,’ p. 352; Dossier Marguerite de Witt-Schlumberger, BMD and the Assemblées générales of the UFSF from 1910 in 1 AF 2, Fonds Cécile Brunschwicg, Centre des Archives du Féminisme (CAF); Christine Bard, Les Filles de Marianne: Histoire des féminismes ( Paris: Fayard, 1995 ), pp. 66–7.
Judith Surkis, Sexing the Citizen: Morality and Masculinity in France,1870–1920 ( Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006 ), pp. 185–205.
For this rhetoric on depopulation, see Offen, ‘Depopulation, Nationalism, and Feminism in Fin-de-Siècle France,’ American Historical Review, 89 (3) (June 1984): 648–76.
See examples nos 43–46 under Art. 2 in Dalloz, Jurisprudence générale,Troisième Table Alphabétique de Dix Années du recueil périodique,1887–1897 ( Paris: Bureau de la Jurisprudence générale, 1897 ), p. 418.
H.D. Lewis, ‘The Legal Status of Women in Nineteenth-Century France,’ Journal of European Studies, 10 (39) (1980): 178–88.
In belle époque France, only a small number of feminists pressed for women’s right to birth control and abortion, since such reforms were seen as extremely radical in a country plagued by a slowing birth rate. Those activists who did so, such as Madeleine Pelletier and Nelly Roussel, tended to frame their arguments primarily in the language of individualist, natural rights philosophy. The public and the mainstream women’s movement branded Pelletier’s feminism as hostile to men and as inappropriate to the ‘feminine’ character of the French women’s movement. Reactions to Roussel were similar, even though she deliberately framed her arguments in the context of birth control improving marriage and motherhood, as well as being a woman’s right; she also publicly shamed men about the double standard they practiced. On Pelletier, see Felicia Gordon, The Integral Feminist: Madeleine Pelletier, 1874–1939. Feminism, Socialism and Medicine (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1990), pp. 134–40;
and Charles Sowerwine and Claude Maignien, Madeleine Pelletier, une feminist dans l’arène politique (Paris: Les Éditions Ouvrières, 1992), pp. 213–33;
on Roussel, see Elinor Accampo, Blessed Motherhood, Bitter Fruit: Nelly Roussel and the Politics of Female Pain in Third Republic France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), esp.
chapters 3 and 4. For successful attempts by women to regain their sexual honor in the public forum of the courtroom, see Rachel G. Fuchs, ‘Seduction, Paternity, and the Law in Fin de Siècle France,’ Journal of Modern History, 72 (4) (2000): 944–89.
Jean Elisabeth Pedersen, Legislating the French Family: Feminism, Theater, and Republican Politics,1870–1920 ( New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003 ), pp. 87–97.
For crimes of passion, see Ruth Harris, Murders and Madness: Medicine, Law, and Society in the Fin de Siècle (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp. 208–42;
Ann-Louise Schapiro, Breaking the Codes: Female Criminality in Fin-de-Siècle Paris (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), pp. 136–78; on seduction suits, see Fuchs, ‘Seduction, Paternity, and the Law,’ pp. 944–89.
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Mansker, A. (2010). Shaming Men: Feminist Honor and the Sexual Double Standard in Belle Époque France. In: Forth, C.E., Accampo, E. (eds) Confronting Modernity in Fin-de-Siècle France. Genders and Sexualities in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230246843_9
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