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.