II
WE speak of steady advance. Yet measured by American standards, or those of other Northern countries, Frenchwomen must yet travel far to reach the point where these were fifty years ago. Americans accept as a matter of course liberty of thought and action, equal opportunities for study and work, and the respect of men. Frenchwomen are not generally possessed of these blessings. Why this difference? Among many causes, three stand out preëminent—social, civil, and religious reasons.
Socially, France belongs with the Latin races. In these countries man has generally treated woman with gallantry, but not respect, and has received her attempts at higher life in a spirit of mockery which it has been almost impossible to overcome. Because her happiness depended on his good will, her one aim in life has been to please him. As Pierre de Coulevain expresses it, “She is entirely absorbed by man and maternity.” The moral standard of both men and women has been low, and the well-known bargaining about the dowry has added sordidness. The case of the jeune fille serves as an example. Her carefully guarded, restricted life, her interests, and her education, not fitting her to think or to be of service to her community, are too well known to need amplification. It well illustrates how, in Southern countries, their Latin heritage has been a strong social factor in the retarded awakening of women.
In France these conditions were fixed still more immutably by Napoleon’s civil code, which thus becomes the second, or civil, reason. Napoleon’s only use for women was as producers of more men for his wars. “Make them believers, not thinkers,” was his command. In legal status he classed them with children, imbeciles, and criminals. A married woman could possess no property; her husband owned what she brought him in marriage and what she inherited or earned thereafter. The pitiful plight of Balzac’s Eugénie Grandet and her mother was not an exceptional case, but the rule. Furthermore, she could not testify in civil suits, or be a witness to any legal document, or have any part in the family council for the government of her children. Yet this Frenchwoman, a nullity in the eyes of the law, is respected by all the world for her marvelous common sense and managing ability. So marked is this that virtually all the petty retail business in the country is in her hands, and she manages her business, her children, and her husband as a matter of course.
This principle of the subjection of woman to the higher authority of man, installed by immemorial custom, fast bound in civil law by Napoleon’s code, has in general also been emphasized by the church. It has consistently developed the passive virtue of sacrifice and the cheerful acceptance of things as they are. Therefore, although conditions have changed, to-day, and there are many noble Catholic feminists, it has in the past been the exception rather than the rule; and Frenchwomen of the upper classes have been led by their convent training to accept without question the position assigned them by social custom and the Napoleonic code. Two of these three conditions are aptly summed up by Pierre de Coulevain when she says, “France is the land of femininity, not of feminism: femininity is Latin and Catholic; feminism is Anglo-Saxon and Protestant.”
Against these germs of arrested development have sprung up other germs which have almost killed the first and have produced the present epidemic of feminism. World forces which affect even China are of course felt in France. One of these is economic pressure. By the introduction of machinery and the constantly increasing cost of living, women of the lower classes have been forced into industry in France as everywhere else, until it has been stated that sixty per cent. of the women of France are now wage-earners. Naturally, then, industrial conditions have compelled them to demand recognition on the same basis as men. In the middle classes this same pressure postpones the age of marriage for the man, thus throwing the burden of support for a longer time on the girl’s father; at the same time it makes it increasingly difficult for the father to provide the necessary dot. It therefore sends girls into professions to ease the family burden, instead of into the convent. “To ease the family burden,” I say, for she seldom works, as do so many American young women, for her own enrichment. Her earnings go to her parents.
Photograph by T. T.
MME. MARGUÉRITE DURAND
Editor and journalist.
Photograph by Chéri-Rousseau
MME. DIEULAFOY
Lecturer and archæologist.
Photograph by Henri Manuel
MME. CURIE
The joint discoverer of radium,
who succeeded her husband
in a chair of physics and
chemistry at the Sorbonne.
From the portrait by Gandara
COUNTESS MATHIEU DE NOAILLES
Novelist and poet.
Photograph by Touranchet
MME. BLANC (TH. BENTZON)
Novelist and journalist.
Then, too, the tradition that every girl must marry or retire to a convent has left too many women unaccounted for in the social scheme. Four and a half million women in France have no home or children—unmarried women, widows, divorcées, or mothers whose children are grown. Olive Schreiner says that the woman movement is the endeavor on the part of women to find new fields of labor as the old slip from them—a demand for a continued share in the work of the world. And these millions of Frenchwomen with no home ties are clamoring for their share. They claim the privilege of employing their hitherto ingrowing energy in useful work, and in whatever field they wish.
To these economic and social stimuli a third factor should be added—the result of the separation of church and state in 1905; and with time this change will be increasingly felt. Since the convents exerted a conservative influence, their dissolution minimizes that tendency. The convents had been almost exclusively the schools of the girls of the higher classes; they had been the refuge of unmarried and unfortunate women; the sisters had had charge of the hospitals, nursing, and nearly all other charities. But since girls must now follow the nuns to the border countries for their education, not so many go; and those who stay at home receive a more modern and less conservative training. Since the unsought in marriage must leave France in order to take refuge in a convent, more stay in the world. And since the hungry and sick were left without caretakers, other women had to take up the works of charity discontinued by the nuns. Thus perforce, since the separation, new fields of activity, new occupations, new responsibilities have been thrust upon the women of France. The withdrawal of the nuns created a vacuum into which others have rushed.
They are ready for these fresh fields and pastures new. They see women of other nations so engaged, and example is contagious. A gain for feminism in Sweden gives impetus in France; a rebellion against long-established custom in Constantinople gives courage for one in Paris. Above all, the several international women’s conferences that have met in Chicago, Berlin, London, and Paris in the last fifteen years have been great educators, great awakeners. Then, too, Parisians never lack for foreign examples, for Paris is cosmopolitan, and Americans especially she has always with her. The Frenchwoman, who, when her children are grown, is inclined to lose all interest in life, and settle down to old age, sees American grandmothers making a tour of the world, and tries to find the secret of their eternal youth. Thus it may be that as French diplomats have won half Africa by the skilful use of American inventions and institutions, so Frenchwomen may yet win all France by clever adaptation of the American type of woman.
Englishwomen also furnish examples in their interest in sport. “Sport” is fashionable. Bicycling was once a fad; tennis, riding, and swimming are popular. The girls’ schools are now advertising swimming-pools and tennis-courts. For one woman that you met skating thirty years ago, you now meet five hundred. We long ago learned, if we ever had to learn, the moral and intellectual value of exercise. The French, both men and women, are only now discovering it. We find, therefore, that the hothouse products are vanishing, and with them, morbidity, unhealthy thoughts, overstimulated emotions, sluggish brains. In their stead we find healthy bodies, healthy minds, initiative, organizing ability, development of the dormant will power, and last, but not least, natural and unrestrained meeting with men in all sorts of games.
Certain classes of men have been strong and active supporters of the feminist cause. Indeed, this is one of the most characteristic features of the movement in France. It seems sometimes as though the men were more ardent and intelligent feminists than the women themselves. The little band of French Protestants is naturally in the forefront of sympathy for the movement. There are fewer Protestants in all France than there are Jews in New York City, but they exercise an influence for progress far out of proportion to their small number. Almost all literary men, no matter what their creed, and lawyers, teachers, professional men in general, as well as a few deputies and senators, are on the side of the feminists. The constant pounding away on the question by playwrights and poets such as Brieux, Lavédan, Mirbeau, and Jules Bois, has done much to break down prejudice and widen the point of view. The Odéon and Comédie Française have struck sounding blows against the old order of “The Doll’s House,” and novelists like Victor Margueritte, and Marcel Prévost have done their part in arousing sympathy for the Noras of France. Socialists, too, espouse the women’s cause.