"It is in treating of education that we must determine the part of woman in society. Woman, until she becomes a wife, is apprentice, at most under-superintendent, in the work-shop, as in the family, she remains a minor, and does not form a part of the commonwealth. Woman is not, as is commonly affirmed, the half nor the equal of man, but the living and sympathetic complement that is lacking to make him an individual."
In the "Economical Contradictions," we read:
"For my part, the more I reflect on the destiny of woman outside of the family and the household, the less I can account for it: courtesan or housewife, (housewife, I say, not servant,) I see no medium."
I had always laughed at these paradoxes; they had no more doctrinal value in my eyes than the thousand other freaks so common to this celebrated critic. A short time since, an obscure journal pretended that Proudhon, in private conversations, had drawn up a formula of an entire system based on masculine omnipotence, and published this system in its columns. One of two things is certain, said I to myself; either the journalist speaks falsely, or he tells the truth; if he speaks falsely, his evident aim is to destroy Proudhon in the confidence of the friends of progress, and to make him lose his lawful share of influence, in which case, he must be warned of it; if he tells the truth, Proudhon must still be warned of the fact, since it is impossible that, being the father of several daughters, paternal feeling should not have set him on the road to reason. At all events, I must know about it. I wrote to Proudhon, who, the next day, returned me an answer which I transcribe verbatim:
"MADAM:
"I know nothing of the article published by M. Charles Robin in the Telegraphe of yesterday. In order to inform myself with regard to this paraphrase, as you entitle the article of M. Robin, I examined my first "Memoir on Property," page 265, Garnier edition, (I have no other,) and found no note there. I examined the same page in my other pamphlet, and discovered no note anywhere. It is therefore impossible for me to reply to your first question.
"I do not exactly know what you call my opinions on woman, marriage and the family; for I believe I have given no one a right to speak of my opinions on these subjects, any more than on that of property.
"I have written economical and social criticisms; in making these criticisms (I take the word in its highest signification), I may have indeed expressed judgments to a greater or less degree relative, concerning a truth. I have no where that I know of, framed a dogma, a theory, a collection of principles; in a word, a system. All that I can tell you is, in the first place, as far as concerns myself, that my opinions have been formed progressively and in an unvarying direction; that, at the time at which I write, I have not deviated from this direction; and that, with this reserve, my existing opinions accord perfectly with what they were seventeen years ago when I published my first memoirs.
"In the second place, with regard to you, Madam, who, in interrogating me do not leave me in ignorance of your sentiments, I will tell you with all the frankness which your letter exacts, and which you expect from a compatriot, that I do not regard the question of marriage, of woman, and of the family in the same light as yourself, or any of the innovating authors whose ideas have come to my knowledge; that I do not admit, for instance, that woman has the right at the present time to separate her cause from that of man, and to demand for herself special legislation, as though her chief tyrant and enemy were man; that further, I do not admit that, whatever reparation may be due to woman, of joint thirds with her husband (or father) and her children, the most rigorous justice can ever make her the EQUAL of man; that neither do I admit that this inferiority of the female sex constitutes for it either servitude, or humiliation, or a diminution of dignity, liberty, or happiness. I maintain that the contrary is true.
"I consider, therefore, the sort of crusade that is being carried on at this time by a few estimable ladies in both hemispheres in behalf of the prerogatives of their sex, as a symptom of the general renovation that is being wrought; but nevertheless, as an exaggerated symptom, an infatuation that proceeds precisely from the infirmity of the sex and its incapacity to understand and to govern itself.