The only thing that need occupy us in this rapid review of contemporaneous opinions is the investigation of the sentiments and ideas of Fourier and his school in that which concerns the principal object of this book. A few pages from the chief of the order, and a summary analysis will suffice for this.
In the Théorie des quatre Mouvements, M. Fourier writes;
"That the ancient philosophers of Greece and Rome should have disdained the interests of women is by no means surprising, since these rhetoricians were all ultra partisans of the pederasty which they had brought in high honor in la belle antiquité. They cast ridicule upon the associating with women; this passion was considered dishonorable.... These manners obtained the unanimous suffrage of the philosophers who, from the virtuous Socrates to the delicate Anacreon, affected Sodomitish love alone and contempt for women, who were banished to the upper apartments, immured as in a seraglio, and exiled from the society of men.
"These fantastic tastes not having found favor among the moderns, there is reason for surprise that our philosophers should have inherited the hatred that the ancient scholars bore to women, and that they should continue to disparage the sex on account of a few wiles to which woman is forced by the oppression which weighs upon her; for every word or thought in conformity with the voice of nature is made in her a crime.
"What can be more inconsistent than the opinion of Diderot, who pretends that, to write to woman, one has only to dip his pen in the rainbow, and sprinkle the writing with dust from butterflies' wings? Women might reply to the philosopher: Your civilization persecutes us as soon as we obey nature; we are obliged to assume a fictitious character and to listen to impulses contrary to our desires. To give us a relish for this doctrine, you are forced to bring in play deceitful illusions and language, as you do with respect to the soldier whom you cradle in laurels and immortality to divert his thoughts from his wretched condition. If he were truly happy, he would welcome the plain and truthful language which you take care not to address to him. It is the same with women; if they were free and happy, they would be less eager for illusions and cajoleries, and it would no longer be necessary in writing to them to place rainbows and butterflies' wings under contribution.
"When it (Philosophy) rails at the vices of women, it criticises itself; this it is that produces these vices by a social system which, repressing their faculties from their infancy and through the whole course of their life, forces them to have recourse to fraud in order to yield to nature.
"To attempt to judge of women by the vicious character which they display in civilization is like attempting to judge of human nature by the character of the Russian peasant, who is destitute of all ideas of honor and liberty; or like judging the beaver by the stupidity which they show when domesticated, whilst in a condition of liberty combined with labor, they become the most intelligent of all quadrupeds. The same contrast will reign between the women who are slaves of civilization and those who are free in the combined order; they will surpass men in industrial devotion, in loyalty, in nobleness; but outside of the free and combined state, woman, like the domesticated beaver or the Russian peasant, becomes a being so inferior to her destiny and talents that we are inclined to despise her when judging her superficially according to appearances.
"It is a surprising thing that women should have always shown themselves superior to men when they have had it in their power to display on the throne their natural talents, of which the diadem assured them a free use. Is it not certain that of eight queens, independent and unmarried, seven will be found to have reigned with glory, while of eight kings, we count habitually seven feeble sovereigns.
... The Elizabeths and Catherines did not make war in person, but they knew how to choose their generals; and it is enough that these are good. In every other branch of administration, has not woman given lessons to man? What prince has surpassed in firmness Maria Theresa who, in a disastrous moment, when the fidelity of her subjects was tottering and her ministers were struck with terror, undertook herself alone to inspire all with new courage? She intimidated by her presence, the disaffected Diet of Hungary; she harangued the Magnates in the Latin tongue, and brought her very enemies to swear on their sabres to die for her. This is an indication of the prodigies that would be wrought by feminine emulation in a social order which would permit free scope to her faculties.
"And you, the oppressing sex,—would you not go beyond the faults imputed to women if you, like them, had been moulded by a servile education to believe yourselves automatons created to obey prejudices and to cringe before the master whom chance had given you? Have we not seen your pretensions to superiority confounded by Catharine, who trampled under foot the masculine sex? In creating titled favorites, she trailed man in the dust, and proved that it is possible for him in full liberty to abase himself beneath woman, whose degradation is forced, and consequently, excusable. It would be necessary, to confound the tyranny of man that, for the space of a century, a third sex should exist, which should be both male and female, and stronger than man. This new sex would prove by dint of blows that men as well as women were made for its pleasures; then we should hear men protest against the tyranny of the hermaphrodite sex, and confess that force ought not to be the sole law of right. Now why are these privileges, this independence, which they would reclaim from this third sex, refused by them to women.