“Justice,” wrote Proudhon, “had been nothing, it must be everything.” But for this hide-bound economist justice could exist only between man and man, for all men should be equal; but between man and woman, who must ever be unequal, justice need not be considered, for man must ever dominate woman. And why? Because man regarded as a working member of the community is more productive than woman, who is physically, intellectually and morally man’s inferior. Such an argument gives us pause in these days of the Great War, when manufacturers are telling us that the average output of women in factories is twenty per cent. higher than that of men.
Woman, man’s inferior physically, maintains Proudhon, must necessarily be mentally his inferior also. For physical strength is no less necessary to the work of the mind than to the work of the body. Here the retort was obvious; and we may be sure Proudhon’s young opponent did not miss it. “What, M. Proudhon,” she rejoins; “then a porter will be a better thinker than a philosopher. M. Proudhon’s God is obviously the dynamometer.... Force, always force. In force lies the millennium. That was the opinion of the Prætorian Guard when they chose for emperor the great Maximin, because he was stronger than a horse.”
Instead of the subjection of woman to man, which Proudhon maintains to be inevitable, his young adversary contends that the progress of society requires that men and women shall work together as equals. “A mere glance at the history of mankind,” she argues, “will suffice to show that among nations civilisation is in proportion to the part played by woman, to her influence, to her moral worth; and, as civilisation increases, the greater will be the value set upon the position accorded to woman.” This is an argument which no profound observer of human nature could deny. Unless men and women laugh together you cannot have that true comedy which is the very salt of the intellectual life, was the opinion of George Meredith.[52] “Where the veil is over women’s faces,” he wrote, referring to the silence of comedy among Eastern peoples, “you cannot have society, without which the senses are barbarous, and the comic spirit is driven to the gutters of grossness to slake its thirst.” Nous avons débrutalisé la société française was the proudest boast of Juliette’s forerunner, La Marquise de Rambouillet, foundress of the first great French salon.
Mme. Lamessine was one of the earliest French women writers to divine that which this war is proving: woman’s capacity for work, for which her asserted inferiority to man had been held to unfit her.
Anticipating John Stuart Mill, Mme. Lamessine demanded that all the liberal professions should be thrown open to women, and that women should be admitted to a share, if not in the legislation at least in the administration, of their country. The rôle of mayoress she considered particularly appropriate to women. She demanded the admission of women to those conseils de prud’hommes which in France regulate disputes between employers and employed.
“O Nazaréen incorrigible!” she exclaims, when her adversary falls a prey to the ancient myth that woman is ever the source of evil and the mother of impurity. “Men who, like M. Proudhon,” she continues, “desire to restore the patriarchate by imprisoning women in the family are des abstractions de quintessence who are blind to all that is going on around them, who misjudge the collective life which is daily developing new needs, engendering new forces, and giving rise to social institutions responding to these needs and organising these forces. They mean well, doubtless, and they think they are serving the cause of progress, or at least of morality, which always comes to be that of progress. By compelling woman to shut herself up in her family, by limiting her to the rôle of wife and mother, they hope to put an end to her growing passion for luxury and dissipation.... But they are mistaken. It is not by limiting the scope of her activity that they will arrest this disorder, but rather by opening up new channels for the wholesome play of her energy. Women must be educated thoroughly, and, wherever it is possible, professionally. They must be made productive. Work alone has emancipated man. Work alone can emancipate woman. Let woman provide herself by honest work with clothes which will adorn and become her. Then, instead of dragging in the dust of the pavement her lace shawls and her silk skirts, she will walk free and proud in the modesty of clothes which will reveal her beauty, without tarnishing her virtue or selling her honour....
“But do not let me be accused of undervaluing woman’s rôle in the family: I, like Proudhon, believe that a woman’s first duty is to be wife and mother. But I maintain that family life need not absorb all woman’s activities, physical, moral and intellectual. The part of a broody hen is honourable without doubt, but it is not suited to every one, neither is it so absorbing as it is represented.”
In Juliette’s childhood her father had given her a catechism embodying the principles of democratic socialism. Now in the last pages of this book she expressed in another catechism her views of society and of women’s rôle in it.
The question of the parliamentary franchise Mme. Lamessine did not discuss in this volume. It is obvious that so ardent an advocate of sex equality must have believed in woman’s right to vote. Woman’s suffrage, we remember, was one of the reforms demanded by the Mlles. André’s pupils when, in 1848, Juliette marshalled them in the playground at Chauny beneath the banner of her father’s social democratic handkerchief. But the so-called universal, in reality manhood, suffrage of 1851 had led to the Empire, and Mme. Lamessine abhorred the Empire: henceforth therefore she placed no great faith in the people’s vote, not even if, as she believed, in all justice it should do, the people included women.