FeministConsciousnessintheNineteenthCentury:APariah Consciousness?

FeministConsciousnessintheNineteenthCentury:APariahConsciousness?

byMichleRiotSarceyEleniVarikas

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Source: PRAXISInternational(PRAXISInternational),issue:4/1985,pages:443465,onwww.ceeol.com.

FEMINIST CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: A PARIAH CONSCIOUSNESS?

Michle Riot-Sarcey and Eleni Varikas
Collective militant feminism is in crisis. Has it fulfilled its mission? From the legal point of view, great gains have been made, but the facts belie this legal equality. Inequality persists, memories of the years from 1970 to 1980 blur, the feminist counter-revolution gains strength. In Western countries the declining birthrate worries the powers that try to urge women to return to the hearth, using traditional incentives, but also facilitating diverse demonstrations against abortion, legalized in the era of the growing feminist movement and some feminists of the past are reaching their second stage.1 Why? Why must feminism be merely a passing phase? Why is it constantly condemned to spring anew from its ashes? Must it be the eternal Sisyphus? It is more important than ever to understand the reasons for this permanent state of incompletion, in as much as we are not the first to ask ourselves about these cycles of emergence and disappearance. Back in 1848, a feminist wrote that history was to be redone2 because it was lies. She discovered that other women before her had struggled for equality and was dismayed to learn that most women were left in ignorance of their own history. If we wish to avoid the situation in which others coming after us are forced to rediscover feminists of long ago, we must try to shed some light on the conditions relating to the emergence of feminism, on its different expressions, on its revolutionary potential as well as on its impasses. The appeal to history is indispensable to us and to nineteenth century history in particular. In the nineteenth century one sees the growth of certain movements rich in social upheaval. Such movements allowed women to collectively express their desire for equality; but also, in a revealing paradox, the nineteenth century, a cornerstone of our own era, is the one in which the web of imprisonment was slowly being woven to enclose women within the family cell, the glowing hearth, the haven of peace for the bourgeois citizen. Until then, traditional history had not considered gender relations as a subject of study worthy of interest to researchers. Yet the status and the place of women in the nineteenth century were the subject of conflicts, the object of reflections, a constructed image before ending up as a separation of roles and sexes. Not that the nineteenth century is exceptional in this matter, but as in all fundamental historical periods in the course of which a new society is being formed, gender relations were redefined and the significance of the nineteenth century is to have reinforced considerably the division between public-private
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divisions: public space became the arena for masculine action, private space limited to the feminine garden. That is why the history of relations between men and women, an antagonistic relationship, is essential if we wish to understand one of the underpinnings of every society. In this vibrant history, filled with revivals, periods of mollified tensions, mutual consent and daily compromise alternate with open gender conflict. Thus, to grasp the sense of emerging feminism, we must focus on the explosive historical periods that allow us to examine it clearly, and therefore to approach it more closely. Organized collective feminism appears more frequently in times of social instability, in periods in which former social relationships are ineffective, because they are in conflict with new relationships of production that upset traditional family relationships. Sometimes added to this conflict is the buffer of the political society in gestation, based upon an ideal universality but dominated in reality by a very real class and sex. I. The Growing Awareness of Exclusion

Two parallel studies concerning countries as different as Greece and France allow us to discover similar structures from the point of view of the emergence of feminism. Against a background of social crisis in France, of nationalist turmoil in Greece, although several decades apart, gender relations are caught in the same trap. In France, the aborted revolution of 1830, the unlimited exploitation of an unprotected working class left to the mercy of the nouveaux riches, aided by romanticism, gives rise to ideal social structures in which woman appears as a social actor if not a saviour. The more pragmatic revolution of 1848 discovered the virtues of universal republican values. For the revolutionaries of 1848, the Revolution seems to be made by and for the people. Why not for women? In Greece, half a century after independence had produced a tiny state comprising barely one-third of the population that had been under Ottoman Empire control,3 the fulfillment of the objectives of the national revolution became the order of the day. Nationalist ideology that rallies irredentist aspirations to expansionist projects, in combination with a westernization of culture in opposition to Ottoman barbarity gave women new visibility: as mothers of future soldiers, keepers of the oral tradition and glorious legends of the past, conveyers of the mother tongue among the Greeks of the Ottoman Empire, they are granted a form of symbolic citizenship. Nationalist struggles promise to grant to all Greeks the title of free citizen. Wouldnt they do as much for women? In these key periods, new gender roles are not yet fixed by this social order that is slowly being forged and in each instance sex roles are reworked by those in power to curtail the social relations between the sexes thus reaffirming Natural Order. Certain women can then fill this relative void and place themselves in a position that escapes masculine control. Surely, in past centuries, and the nineteenth century was no exception, there have been numerous cases of those who individually became totally active participants.

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But in France in 1830 and 1848 and in Greece, from 1887 to the turn of the century, collective feminism appears. Taking advantage of circumstantial contradictions, collective feminism is able not only to oppose the traditional passivity of women but also to project woman as a historical subject, a subject capable of bearing a vision of society, of achieving equality between the sexes. Thus, the study of feminist consciousness lets us grasp and analyze by word and deed how women struggling for the liberation of their sex perceive themselves.
Beginning on February 25, a thousand strange systems sprung up impetuously from the innovators minds and spread to the troubled spirit of the crowd. Everything was still in place except royalty and parliament, and it seemed that society had been reduced to dust from the shock of the revolution, and that they had set up a competition concerning the new form to give to the edifice they would erect in its place; everyone proposed his plan, . . . . One proposed to destroy the inequality of wealth, another the inequality of knowledge, and the third sought to strike down the most ancient of inequalities, between men and women.4

Now if the shock of 1848 in France, or the irredentist period in Greece, acts as a catalyst in the appearance of militant feminism, the emergence of feminist consciousness is the result of an underground process which, beginning with the French Revolution and the Greek Nationalist Revolution, had undermined the foundations of traditional gender relations. We think that this process originated in what it is fitting to call a constellation that we can summarize in a schematic way: a) First, the disintegration of traditional socio-economic structures and the relative void that resulted with respect to the place women would occupy in the new society. This void is gradually filled with the construction of the ideology of the two spheres, with the maternal ideal in France under the impact of the industrial revolution and the private/public division, and with the spreading of the market economy that follows urbanization and westernization in Greece. b) Second, the setting up of post-revolutionary societies that are supposedly to be based on universal ideals and womens encounter with the philosophy of natural law. c) Third, the relational decline in the position of women, in regard to the evolution of rights of men. As the historian Joan Kelly has shown, we find this phenomenon at all great historical moments considered to be times of progress. This decline results from women being excluded from the rights and privileges acquired by men.5 Indeed, several decades after 1789, French women found themselves denied civil and political rights accorded to their masculine counterparts. Similarly in Greece, they kept all the traits of rayeas, the ethnic minorities of the Ottoman Empire, in a society that had proclaimed to have made rayeas free citizens. Their movement in public places was still controlled,6 they did not have control over their wealth, and they were excluded from the right to vote that had been granted to men by the constitutions of 1844 and 1862.

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d) Fourth, the possibility of women to obtain an education and thus to enter the new system of ideas and values and be on common ground with men, a place where comparison becomes possible; but also in acquiring writing, to obtain the right to public speech.7 It is quite characteristic, in this respect, that education constitutes one of the primary demands of nineteenth century feminist movements, from the proletarian Saint-Simonians, who go as far as publishing grammar courses in their newspapers,8 to the Greek feminists whose first collective action is a petition, sent to parliament in 1888 in which two thousand women lay claim on behalf of their sisters to a right that had been granted long ago to the humblest sons of shepherds and peasants.9 These multiple factors, which converge on the eve of great social upheavals when contradictions sharpen, place women in a new position of lucidity, allowing them to articulate their grievances, to see their situation as one of exclusion. Exclusion from the great humanist values: liberty, equality, fraternity, independence; but also from concrete economic, political, social privileges that men had acquired in their name.
Following a revolution made to benefit all, is it just to refuse the exercise of social rights to a significant portion of society? No more monopolies, no more exclusions, no more special castes! This was the cry of France free and renewed. Isnt the participation of women in political life the necessary consequence of the right that has just been proclaimed?10

Exclusion is only the result of an imposed power relationship that defines them as a separate social category having common interests.
What struggles, what difficulties have ex-slaves confronted before convincing their masters that they too, as human beings, had the right to Liberty and Independence. These are the same struggles, the same sacrificies, we have to engage in today.11

Finally, exclusion constitutes a violation of the principles of natural law and reveals perfectly the duplicity and injustice of the existing social order. It is through this awareness of exclusion that women will be ready not only to fight to change their social position but to be indispensable agents of all radical social change whether it be to establish the republic or the nation as agents of a radical project to transform society, radical because it is utopian in the original sense of the word. Whether it is through the condemnation of a society that excludes them or through womens desire to take part in society the perception of exclusion is a basic element in the process of forging the feminist consciousness and precedes the quest for an independent identity. The first is a pronounced tendency of women to identify with other excluded members, to think of themselves as serfs, slaves, pariahs. From the beginning, the link between the plight of women and that of other excluded groups has been part of the womens question. Throughout the nineteenth century, women in various parts of the West, establish parallels in silence following the example of Charlotte Brontes heroine.12 France has its proletariat,13 America its black slaves,14 England has both,15 and Greece has its rayeas. Parallels that go beyond rhetoric and discourse to produce a collective commitment of women in favor

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of abolitionist, nationalist, workers movements out of which emerged a significant number of independent feminist movements in the nineteenth century. These parallels travel via underground routes of awakened consciousness to forge a pariah identity this is often claimed explicitly by feminist themselves. Flora Tristan was not the only feminist proudly to assume this identity. Scarcely a few years later, across the ocean, the American feminist leader, Susan B. Anthony laid claim to this title while, a century later in England, Virginia Woolf called for an independent organization womens Conscious Outsiders. This essential dimension of feminist consciousness, the pariah identity, seems to suggest a particular approach to the history of feminism from its beginnings, a research direction to grasp and articulate its complex expressions, its inherent contradictions, the impasses it has continued to struggle against, as well as its many moments of rebirth and its subversive potential. Thus from a comparative study of the two historical examples already cited, we propose to study the emergence of feminist consciousness from the viewpoint of its pariah nature, using existing theoretical tools to examine the situation and consciousness of pariahs, in so far as they can shed new light on the historical experiences. We will begin with a brief outline of the objective position of women as pariahs, and then propose an ideal classification of the manifestations of independent and collective feminist consciousness, examining the specific relationship each type has with exclusion. We have here in mind, of course, ideal Weberian types which, in reality, are combined and articulated in the living experience of one person or one feminist current. Both the suggested models and the hypotheses could, in our opinion, serve as point of departure for an inquiry not only into feminism of the past but also into certain aspects of the emergence and evolution of present day feminism. But this method is certainly neither exhaustive nor incompatible with other approaches to the study of feminist consciousness. The pariah concept, originating in the caste system of India, has already been used to study other excluded groups, especially Jews. Max Weber and Hannah Arendt have done so16 as have more recently feminist writers such as Vivian Gomick, Carolyn Heilbrun, Elisabeth Lenk, although in a less systematic manner.17 There are important differences between women as a social group and the other excluded groups. If we tried mechanically to base an analysis of the oppression of women on a study of other pariahs, we would tread on dangerous ground. This has already been acknowledged with respect to certain feminist currents in the U.S. and Europe.18 Women are present in all categories of pariahs and often face more than one type of exclusion. They are also members of privileged social groups and some women participate, although in a specific way, in the domination of the oppressed. This serves to explain their complex and varied relations with exclusion. Nevertheless two essential elements of their objective position link them to other pariah groups: 1) they remain fundamentally exterior to the hierarchical social structure;

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2) their real difference is used as a keystone in the construction of a socially imposed otherness, otherness that legitimizes, maintains, and reproduces their position as outsider. Like other pariahs, women are a group deprived of independent organization and subjected to economic and social discrimination. They live in a segregated society built according to variations of cultures and historical periods, maintained by laws, conventions, and customs. This segregation limits their relations with the world of men to a perimeter constantly redefined but always present. As in the case of other pariah groups, the subjective perception of their difference determines their relations with society. The individual clearly defined as other can do or be what he/she wishes, but in any case she faces scorn or on the other hand, is superstitiously feared or worshipped. Worshipped or despised, superior or inferior, woman can only exist as the image of the other, par excellence beyond which she becomes an anomaly. But, the segregation of women is never absolute. Excluded from the social hierarchy, they nevertheless belong to society, even if on the fringe as non-persons without a voice.19 Living in close proximity with the world of men (much closer than for instance in the case of Blacks and Whites, Jews and Gentiles), they are in a certain way the pariahs most exposed to integrating consciously and unconsciously the values of this world. Internalizing self-deprecation which society foists on the pariah, marks womens existence whether through their active consent or through resignation to their fate, but it also marks, either positively or negatively, the moments of their revolt. The woman pariah who wants to put an end to exclusion and claim her place in society as a full-fledged individual, has two choices: to assimilate the dominant values, by rejecting her identity as pariah, thus hoping to attain the status Hannah Arendt calls the status of the parvenu20; or claim her denied heterogeneity by turning a source of contempt into a source of dignity.21 In the second instance, the claim to heterogeneity can lead either to a radical questioning of social values that denigrate the otherness of the pariah and divide human beings into privileged and non-privileged citizens or to an inversion of dominant values which turns real or claimed otherness, biological or social otherness of woman into a mark of superiority.22 We think that these three types of responses that mark the growing awareness and struggles for the liberation of several categories of excluded groups correspond to three models of feminist consciousness developed during the nineteenth century, and which appear in both discourse and practice: a) the consciousness of exceptional women or the path to assimilation; b) subversive feminism or the path to social disorder; c) feminism as the art of the possible. These are not structured models construed beforehand by feminists but they rather correspond to different attempts to break out of exclusion, to escape from the world of pariahs. They are ideal types which may overlap in individuals trying to put an end to ages of partriarchal oppression.

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The Consciousness of Exceptional Women or the Path to Assimilation. This way is only open to individuals and is accessible to a tiny minority. The woman pariah rebels against exclusion by her fundamental claim to the community of human beings. She rejects heterogeneity, the basis of so-called inferiority and source of discrimination, and crosses the barriers imposed upon her gender by appropriating greatly valued masculine roles and activities that legitimize her claims to equality and can assure her entry into the forbidden world. In doing so, she runs up against laws and conventions of the establishment which she counters with the laws of her own consciousness as a free individual. Family, society institutions; I hate you all to death!24 This revolt often (but not necessarily) leads the woman pariah to see her personal struggle as part of the struggle waged by her pariah sisters.
Strip yourselves of your degrading superstitions, your futile tasks, your self-centered devotion. Get away finally from the land of servitude.25

3.

By affirming their presence as subjects, by imposing themselves through their creative or political activity upon masculine society, some exceptional women in the nineteenth century were able to break out of their exclusion gain important positions in the social hierarchy, win prestige and often even considerable power. The most well-known examples are George Sand and Daniel Stern in France, for their literary activity; and in Greece, Kalliopi Papalexopoulou for her political activity, and Sevasti Kallisperi and Alexandra Papadopoulou for their educational and literary contributions. But since the society they entered was still based upon the exclusion of their group, they could only be admitted as exceptions. This is one of the main traits that characterized and still characterizes the exceptional woman. She can only be an exception that confirms the rule, the rule of the inferiority and exclusion of the rest of women. This exceptional status, the price she pays to be admitted into the society, places her in a dilemma which is the same for the Jewish or Black pariah: either reject the dominant values that affirm inferiority and subservience of her sex at the risk of remaining a pariah, or assimilate the values and become a parvenu.26 The well-known ambiguity that characterizes the position of the majority of exceptional women with respect to womens liberation stems from this.27
Woman is not destined to leave private life. The role of each sex is defined . . . Why would society reverse this admirable order?28

How can we explain these declarations written by the same pen that several years earlier had written Indiana and Lelia? How do we explain that Alexandra Papadopoulou, Greeces first prominent woman writer, who never stopped working as a teacher and journalist, proclaimed publicly that she was the enemy of womens emancipation and right to work? Social pressure? The need to build alliances? Certainly these were motivations. But in so far as the exceptional woman agrees to dissociate her fate from that of the rest of her sisters, accepting her status as parvenu in the world of men, she is forced to accept a false neutrality that masks the unequal relations between the sexes; she is forced to deny a fundamental dimension of her personality, she is forced

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to deny her feminine gender. To keep her status she submits to the social and psychological travesty of which masculine pseudonyms are only a symbolic aspect. She becomes a kind of man honoris causa. But can one get rid of ones sex as easily as one can break with ones counterparts? We can change class and even nationality individually, but can we stop being women? That is the dilemma for the woman pariah condemned to acknowledge her origins. That is the problematic fate for the exceptional woman who, beyond her talent and virile qualities, is constantly called upon to pay lip service to the dominant feminine image, to pay for her non-conformity, and to get rid of this smell of the whorehouse.29 When the hen crows like a rooster, kill her on the spot, advises G. Roidis, a founder of Greek literary criticism and a fervent admirer of the West, in his polemic against some literary women who begin publishing their work at the turn of the century. He finally concedes their right to express ideas appropriate to their sex concerning fashion and kitchen recipes but denies their right to write about social or scientific matters.30 In order to be accepted in violation of patriarchal norms, the exceptional woman is often forced to adopt behavior that neutralizes the hostility and fear aroused by her transgression. In one way or another, this behavior aims to reestablish in mens eyes her conformity to the feminine image, to the perfect Other which, by encroaching on his territory, she had upset.
If some pages of this book incur the harsh reproach for a tendency towards new beliefs, if rigid judges find their manner imprudent and dangerous, one must respond to the critics that they pay too much attention to an unimportant work . . . in which the writer has barely created anything.31

The ritual denigration of the importance of ones work which we find present among a good number of famous women writers is one of the common forms of this neutralization. Thus, when Daniel Stern begins to write her memoires, she confesses to endless uncertainty.32 Participating actively in politics in nineteenth century Greece, during a period when the streets were off limits to women of the masses, constituted a violation much more unacceptable than publishing new beliefs. The price paid by K. Papalexopoulou, mother of the revolution of 1862 fit the extent of her transgression. The wife and mother of antimonarchist politicians, one of the first women to hold a salon and perhaps the most liberated woman of her time on equal footing with the most eminent political figures and intellectuals K. Papalexopoulou had to buy her way into the political sphere by submitting to one of the most traditional rituals of expiation found in Mediterranean cultures: in 1850, at the death of her husband and her son, she had all the furniture, mirrors and windows of her house covered with black crepe and secluded herself to reappear again on the eve of the Revolution of 1862 that toppled King Othon. By submitting to this custom long abandoned by urban women far less Westernized than she was, she could continue her political activity as an independent individual who was no longer defined by her role as wife and mother. Moreover, she was the only woman in Greek history given a public welcome organized by the provisional government following the fall of the Baviarian dynasty.33

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Far from considering the case of Papalexopoulou as an example that confirms the rule, Greek feminists seek to prove that feminine hands, revered for their weakness and tenderness, not only have the strength to establish or lose homes but also to support or destroy very powerful thrones.34 Similarly, Feminists of 1848 see in the exceptional admission of George Sand an argument to force patriarchal reign to give way, a breach which can be opened to grant all women legal rights.
To cross the threshold to our destiny let us call upon the one who is already in the temple among the chosen . . . . Sand is powerful and frightens no one. We must call her to the National Assembly by unanimous appeal.35

La Voix des Femmes wrote this in its appeal for her candidacy.
I do not have the honor of knowing any of these women who form the clubs and write in the magazines.36

The arrogance with which the admitted exception sends her sisters back to exclusion, the assimilation of dominant values that lead her to dissociate herself from her sisters; these are the dues the exceptional woman must pay to patriarchal society. This is the price she must pay for having inspired, through her own personal struggle, the collective struggles of her pariah group. The case of Sevasti Kallisperi also fits this pattern. Her relentless struggle to gain a higher education inspired the first Greek feminist campaigns for the admission of women to the university. As the first doctoresse es lettres, Kallisperi became a kind of sacred monster with the help of feminist propaganda, using the halo from her long studies at the Sorbonne to blast Feminists and assure a public eager for Western propriety that selfrespecting French women who are respected dont mix in politics.37 But by having paid her dues to the masculine world that has accepted her, the exceptional woman risks losing, along with the quality of being a pariah, her ability to view the exclusion of her sex as a generalized reality and to take an interest in it in any way other than as an individual. She risks developing a view of the world similar to the one described by H. Arendt in her biography of Rachel Varnhagen, where the parvenu thinks she is a kind of superman of efficiency, a particularly successful, solid, and intelligent specimen of humanity,38 a model that her pariah sisters have only to follow individually in order to succeed. This view of the world is in conflict with feminist consciousness in so far as it denies the systematic character of the exclusion of woman as a social category. For that reason, the consciousness of exceptional women, notably in the nineteenth century, is at the crossroads between feminist consciousness and the consciousness of the parvenu. But it would be anachronistic not to consider the fact that the space available in nineteenth century society for assimilating rebel pariahs was very limited. Cultural, political, and civil barriers separating pariah women from the society of men were such that the very existence of a woman within this society would suffice to unleash fear, hostility, aggressive mockery. Crossing the barrier, the most assimilated exceptional woman could only feel her success was superficial; that instead of belonging essentially to this society, as she had dreamed, she was simply tolerated, and in spite of her many

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denigrations of her gender she could not escape from the position of being intolerably exposed to insult.39 This problematic situation often kept the exceptional woman from becoming a satisfied parvenu and placed her between pariah and parvenu, to use H. Arendts phrase. The curse of despised otherness, the smell of the whorehouse dogged her steps towards success and impeded her total assimilation to values of the establishment, preserving in the depth of her neutral conscience a small corner for her old pariah identitys anger and indignation. This gives rise to bitter lucidity even in moments of success. We are troublesome beings . . . They tolerate us by habit like the rest of the pets40 writes Alexandra Papadopoulou during the period when she is the only woman whose work is accepted for the first Greek anthology of short stories.
But when one only conceives of . . . the existence of a woman in a totally relative, dependent, impersonal, subordinate manner what spirit can govern the education of young girls? . . . when intelligence can become a difficulty, reason an obstacle, conscience an occasion to struggle or rebel . . . 41

Conversely, as the twentieth century moves on, the space for assimilation of the exceptional woman grows and the distance between parvenu and pariah becomes an insurmountable abyss. Modernization and rationalization of the partriarchal order, formal legal equality, at least in the West, the extension of the oppression of women in the new salary system obscured by seductive myths of equal opportunity neutralize the potential tensions of the parvenus position. The much greater number of exceptional women feeds womens illusion of individual success and more easily hides the inevitable fact of their gender from them.
In the old days, says Plutarch, the Leucothean temple was forbidden to women slaves with the exception of one woman whom the Roman women let in while striking her on the cheek.42

The rare woman who attains a high position of power and authority today has more chances of perpetuating this infernal logic of the slap on the cheek than identifying with the slaves excluded from the temple. 4. Subversive Feminism or the Path to Social Disorder. As we have seen, women, the others, in some sense outcasts, are profoundly integrated in the world in which they are indispensable non-beings. Also, most of them, although they belong to the pariah caste, are not aware of being excluded from public society, particularly since the promoters of this society keep granting them space, most often private but precious, and find them wonderful but inaccessible mythic sanctuaries. Whether from an imbalance in the social structure or a flaw in the carefully tended machinery, a breach opens to all kinds of conflicts. Through this breach some women can then perceive as clearly as their position as outsider allows them to, the oppressive nature of this society in which the dominant force is masculine. They are then aware of being deceived, reified, dispossessed of their identity, relegated to the world of inferior beings.

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The woman who chooses the path of subversive feminism uses her otherness, as well as her position as outsider, to create an approach through which she perceives the whole picture of social reality. It is also a source of practical daily resistance against the norms imposed upon her as a member of a pariah people. For her, the achievement of feminist consciousness is not simply the awareness of her oppression, but a radical transformation that makes her view the present and future in a qualitatively different way, shedding light on the world of daily activity, making it unbearable from then on. Unjust and shameful subservience of women becomes a touchstone that allows her to judge society in its entirety, and reject the laws and values that govern it.
Behind your codes and charters . . . your charters that declare men equal before the law, when among these very members a small number in their laziness accumulate all the wealth and happiness wrested from the other . . . the other who is starving to death working for the wealthy . . . and if your laws are false for men, how much more so for women . . . for the women you bar from all political activity and keep in your households as parade horses. . . .43

Using a utopian model, a project for a future society free of inequality, this consciousness is subversive to the established order. This consciousness identifies a revolutionary potential that can only stem from women.
It is up to women to tear down the screen behind which your parliamentary illusions appear; it is up to women to cut the gilded strings of your diplomatic puppets.44

This subversion always takes place on two levels. One must disassemble the masculine social order not only by proposing an ideal egalitarian society, but this transgression must be also lived, put into daily practice, to show what it means for women to refuse the patriarchal order, to destroy from within this social framework cleverly policed by doctors of all disciplines. At this point difficulties occur, for as long as these propositions remain utopian the ideal future can overlap with other projects, for example, the subversion of class relations. But when this utopia becomes daily practice, it confronts sexual traditions deeply rooted in social relationships; not only do ordinary men and even revolutionary men become obstacles, but women themselves oppose those who project a degrading image of the traditional female or who, worse yet, propose a way they perceive to be inaccessible because it demands a total break, interior as well as exterior. More than any other type of feminist consciousness, subversion involves an upheaval of the most intimate practices, of the most internal mental habits. From this position, facts as evident and natural as love, marriage, childbearing, are transformed into contradictions. As Sandra Lee Bartky explains, feminists are sensitive to a certain dimension of society the sexist dimension that seems to specialize in duplicity.45 But the deceiving nature of this aspect of social reality makes the feminist experience of life difficult to communicate to the non-initiated. The woman who gains subversive consciousness finds herself constantly divided between the certainty that life is different from the way it appears, and the difficulty, if not impossibility, of

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communicating this message; there is a tension between the impulse that forces her to act in accordance with this certainty and the lack of comprehension that her action will provoke. This division, this anguished tension that haunts the person who intends to subvert the masculine order, can only be endured if the collective militant group supports this form of action and encourages new awareness on the part of women, but it also demands another relationship of powers which encourages men to take on the project that would free them from this secular alienation based on power, and would allow them to experience freely their complex nature. (The implementation of this project implies a joint undertaking by both sexes.) In the nineteenth century, these steps were taken only by isolated individuals. Their attachment to the collective movement was temporary. Torn between a too distant utopia and a too unbearable reality, between a collective project and a marginality even among pariah women, between the perception of the possibility of another existence and the lack of power to impose it, these subversive feminists were doomed to live in the isolation and the despair that usually led to complete marginalization, even to suicide. This type of feminist consciousness is absent in nineteenth century Greece. The largely pre-capitalist economic structures, the delay in the industrial revolution, the nonexistence of a significant proletariat during this period kept social relations from reaching the degree of contradictions that produce the social conflict that gives rise to subversive feminism. But in the 1830s in France, emerged a radical feminist subversion that even violated the rules of the parent Saint-Simonian movement. After the July days, with all due respect to Mr. Guizot, the peoples rancor was great:
In the last months of 1830, the era in which the people, taking vengeance upon the disillusionment wrought by the quasi-legitimacy, chanted with its poet poor sheep.46 The ghost of 1793 hovered over all these events; keep on with July; stop 1789; the fears and enthusiasm of the period were structured around this alternative.47

The room for liberty opened by the 1830 revolution, with the goal of breaking the shackles of the preceding monarchy that stifled the entrepreneurs development, will both profit republican society and widen the field of participation for Saint-Simonism that then reaches the masses and influences women who are profoundly disappointed, aware of having been manipulated by the profit-hungry bourgeoisie. This period of free expression was short, barely four years, but sufficient for women to shed the weighty cloak of the First Empire and experience some moments of utopian enthusiasm that recalled the privileged moments of the womens clubs forbidden by Montagnards in 1793. Claire Demar, like many other subversive feminists, embraces SaintSimonism with fervor, with such a strong feeling that her contemporaries called her ecstatic (today she would be considered hysterical). She believes

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in the liberation of humanity by women. Our intent here is not to evaluate the use that Father Enfantin, the promoter of this doctrine, made of it, nor to point out all its ambiguities. We wish to show why Claire Demar, more than any other, took up these teachings and tried to put this new liberty into practice. Beginning with the somewhat hypocritical utopia of Saint-Simonism she transformed the doctrine into a revolutionary firebrand that upsets social power, enters public space and individual lives, and breaks down the sacrosanct barriers of the private domain. Masculine order is to be transformed, whatever its origins:
The revolution in marriage customs does not occur on the street corner or in the town square in three days of glorious sunshine, but it occurs at every hour, in every place . . . in the long cold dreary nights of which there are so many in the nuptial chamber.48

That is why Claire Demar was a nuisance. Her critical spirit and her ability to detect duplicity within the Saint-Simonian family were annoying. She was a nuisance because she insisted on having the principles of the doctrines applied, on seeing liberty follow exigency, confidence follow mistrust, free love follow slavery.49 Did she practice free love? She tried to. Her statements are declarations of faith in favor of the true liberty that would encourage the development of all individuals, whatever their age or sex. A commitment which meant making all power, including parental power, no longer sacred.
No more slavery, no more exploitation, no more tutelage. Emancipation for all, slaves, proletariat, minors, the big and the small.50

She was a nuisance because of her dissidence, her practical revolutionary zeal that forced her to break with the pacificism of the doctrine and approach republican circles:
I am still the woman of the barricades; I am not yet religious enough to wish happiness to those who make you suffer, to those who cause the people suffering by the right of might. No, a thousand times no. To the barricades . . . cannonballs for their castles! . . bullets for their brains!51

She was a nuisance because of her impatience, tenacity, and bitter despair as she tried to tear down the walls of misunderstanding and indifference that separated her from those who, by their words, were seeking a womanmessiah. She was separated from everyone. For even the Saint-Simonian dissidents who regrouped around the Tribune des Femmes after being expelled from the Menilmontant family, distanced themselves from the one who demanded the right to use and abuse our independence . . . this right without limits, rules, authority.52 Women dont understand my ideas very well.53 Their moderation, their lack of individuality exasperated her and it became more and more difficult for her to bow to the norms that link their collective movement to the boundaries and limitations set up where boundaries and limitations are not possible.54 Refusing to replace old world morality with another restrictive norm that would stifle the complex needs of each individual in one fixed law of movement and life, she claimed the right of

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every woman to express every need and suffering, to formulate her own law for the future.55 For her, if women carry with them a subversive and liberating potential, it is because
The word of the woman saviour will be supremely rebellious for it will be the widest, and consequently the most satisfactory for all nature. . . 56

Her ideas about sexual morality, the completely physical experience of flesh by flesh57 that she did not hesitate to practice, nor publicize, made her marginal even within this movement which was the only one struggling for the emancipation of women. Thus, even though her project was intended to be collective and her revolt is originally expressed in the first person plural,58 her radicalism leads inexorably to the solitary path of individual action. It is inevitable for her to slip from the first to the second person in order to express most profoundly her revolt as a woman, expressing the sacrilegious words that abolish the law of blood:
You wish to free women! Well, then take the newborn child from its biological mother and place it in the arms of a state nursemaid and the child will be raised better.59

Although Claire Demar proclaimed the need to live as a free woman and wanted to subvert the established masculine order theoretically as well as practically, she was nevertheless prisoner of a doctrine that was not her own, an ideology not constructed for womens interests. Her anguished letters to Father Enfantin reveal her strong dependency, her desperate need for recognition and support for the person who tried to make her understand how little involved I am with womens projects . . .60 Her correspondence abounds with this contradiction in which strength and weakness are entangled, her conscience strangely divided between the need for an organic community and the refusal to comply with its norms. All the women have forsaken me, and most of the men as well.61 A stranger to her society, to most of the people she loved, to the non-emancipated aspects of her own personality,62 she commited suicide on August 1833 at the age of thirty-two. No, Claire Demar was not free. But how could she be in this world in which everything institutions, literature, religions, and even social protest concurred to disown the real women, women for-themselves, for the benefit of the mother figure who becomes publicly useful, whose availability harmonizes so well with the subordination of women.63 Doesnt she herself reproduce the dominant structure of dual nature which reserves the functions of social motherhood to women at the same time that she rejects the law of blood? In spite of these contradictions, Claire Demar made a break with the biological determinism that was developing at the time and imprisoning women. For contrary to the quasi-totality of Feminists of her time who based their claim to equality on the reproductive function, she questioned the universal vocation of all women to raise children, and called for their emancipation in their own right as independent human beings.64 This divided feminist conscience that subverts order, including morality,

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others will discover later. In the same period, Pauline Rolands tries to become independent by assuming the freedom to love which causes a scandal while she struggles to end the exploitation of the oppressed. Later, Madeleine Pelletier would write at the end of her life:
This is how they punish women who distinguish themselves intellectually. Arriaky committed suicide and I am locked up in an insane asylum.65

5.

Feminism as the Art of the Possible.

This form of feminism is different because it develops out of a collective movement. It is not a question of drawing blue prints for a distant future. It is not an exemplary individual demonstration nor a preview of future society. The time has come to build new social relationships based on Equality and Independence and to lay the foundation for this long awaited new humanity. In periods such as those of developing democracy in France, or irredentist struggles in Greece, when certain social groups destroy the past structures responsible for their oppression, contradictions sharpen, oppositions occur, a new power balance of forces is formed. New exclusions stand out clearly. Both objective and subjective possibilities of perceiving oneself, otherwise than through the eyes of men, suggest a new mode of action beyond the range of institutionalized classifications: Collective Feminism becomes possible. Womens Voice (la Voix des Femmes) entered the public stage, intent on making itself heard. That is why feminists set themselves two objectives: organize a majority of women and convince the men. For them feminism was only possible through collective action. In this way, new social relationships based on gender equality would be established. Thus, they appropriated republican and nationalist slogans concerning human-kind and expanded them to include the demand of equality in gender relationships. In this context, equality seemed possible. But even if the word pariah became unacceptable, inequality remained. Individual men and women were not yet prepared to cast off centuries of established differences. Gender equality was not the order of the day. For the majority of revolutionaries it was social groups which clashed and women were not seen as such. Each era creates its own set of gender differences. In the 19th century biological determinism permeated all social relationships. Only as mothers or potential mothers were women respected, only in this quality was their otherness venerated. The only women who existed in public were prostitutes. To make themselves heard, partisans of feminism as the art of the possible had to stress womens otherness as defined by the developing ideology. From this point of view, their discourse is not original and their message is borrowed from the conceptual heritage of the past. Their language uses cultural instruments made by others. Their writings are filled with words whose deep meaning is rooted in the period that produced them the meaning given them by men. Surely, this discourse is largely determined by tactical pre-occupations. But accepting the maternal role ascribed to women was not just a maneuver to

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persuade men. Glorification of motherhood, stressing the difference served them as a mediation in developing a collective identity. For these pragmatic feminists, otherness constituted the most visible element that united women, that distinguished them as a group, that promoted the esteem of the pariah people. But, instead of limiting feminine space to the home, they widened it to embrace society as a whole. The angel of the hearth became a missionary, a redeemer for the world in disorder. Picking up the old myth of the redeeming Woman, they constructed a world regenerated by the saving grace of women.
The coming of Woman is near and Humanity will abandon the fateful roads to progress by pain, struggle, misery, to enter the providential paths of peaceful and harmonious progress, through the intervention of the mother of Humanity, the woman restored by liberty. Barely a century will pass before Woman, by her spiritual superiority . . . will make the prejudices of unjust insitutions disappear, abolish the barbarity of war and carnage that civilized man has not known how to reject.67

Women form the very best social category to save the world since, kept from power, they cannot assume responsibility for disorder. Their secular lack of responsibility, opens new paths of redemption.
. . . until now man alone ruled Humanitys destiny and took the initial steps along the fatal paths of injustice and tyranny, refusing solidarity, oppressing Woman, his mother, sister, companion. And women bowed down under the yolk or tried to escape by imitating man. And man alone organized society, and in so doing, based all institutions on privilege, with no solidarity, based on the principle that might makes right.68

Their project for the liberation of women implied a re-organization of humanity, one that for the first time includes the feminine element of the human being. Dominant values were thus inverted in this specific way which characterizes pariah people. Feminine nature gained importance. From an inferior being whose usefulness was limited to reproduction, she became essential, superior to the virile male who until then had been capable only of inventing mans exploitation of man; naturally drawn towards a charitable pacifism, only woman could reestablish the original balance. Thus, fundamental equality would be restored. Inverted, glorified, this womens vision of the female nature was none other than the distorted vision of a masculine construction. This strategy of diversion could not lead to the end of exclusion. The image of woman put forward by these feminists had been created to maximally limit their public intervention; it could not help them enter a space that remained male monopoly. But in spite of their dependency, feminists hoped nevertheless to live in a more egalitarian society. And if their discourse offended as little as possible, if the verbal transgression avoided alienating liberal support, their writings and daily practice led them inevitably to confrontation. Confrontation with those

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who were willing to share power with women by providing them with the emancipation that fitted the norms of the period, in other words: the female nature must be accompanied by its corollary, inferiority. For Feminists, the principle of equality must apply to one and all. For their allies it was merely a means to circumscribe the revolutionary potential inherent in the project. Practice reveals the conflict that emerges in spite of the required consensus. The partisans of freedom for women, most often the founders of feminist theory, only accepted equality within a functional, unbalanced, insurmountable otherness. For Feminists, this theory was a means to perceive the possibility of the struggle necessary to attain the egalitarian ideal; the natural barriers are quickly overcome when there is a gender confrontation. The possible that feminists consciousness introduces reveals what is unacceptable to men. When the mother gives up her place to woman, to a complete individual, the forbidden appears. Feminine practice that goes beyond normative discourse soon confronts social taboo. The transgressors are quickly rejected, cast out in solitude. To escape this insurmountable exclusion a good number of Feminists choose to flee to other struggles that are socially acceptable, most often to the detriment of their feminism. They thus join the camp of the oppressed and let themselves be convinced that the struggle for the liberation of other pariahs, recognized by masculine society, has priority over their own emancipation. In France, the February Revolution opened the way to Feminism as the art of the possible. Within a general movement of liberation, the perspective of a coming liberation was no longer utopian for a large number of women. The republican victory had increased their hopes. For the first time, all men would be given the vote. There were projects to end the exploitation of man by man. Discourse had the stamp of a new fraternity. The oppressor seemed to have been banished, the oppressed liberated. Did some inequality remain? In Greece, the result of the Great Idea and the strategic importance of spreading the Greek language (the mother tongue) among the dispersed populations of the Ottoman Empire, opened political opportunities to a great number of middle-class women. Our road will be an obscure desert if women do not follow it69 wrote one of the most fervent bards of the Great Idea. Overtures to the potential mothers of warriors of the irredentist struggles as well as the prospect of freeing all the Greek rayeas offered possible path towards equality. To convince the most sympathetic men revolutionaries and nationalists to end the oppression that was so ingrained in customs that it seems natural, required an infallible argument. The claim to equality must include the participation of women in the construction of the Republic, the establishment of the Nation. To do this and avoid all reservations, their rights, so loudly proclaimed, would be based on their specific duties.
It is a national necessity that forces us to break our spiritual chains . . . . The survival of our mother tongue, the dissemination of philohellenic feelings among the other populations depends upon the efforts of Greek women . . . .70

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It is in the name of our duties that we claim our rights . . . in the name of the tender servitude of mothers that we say: yes, we, like you, have the right to serve our country.71

Only women can fulfill these duties which are directly linked to female nature, to womens distinct qualities, to their difference from men: Man is the head and arm of humanity, woman is the heart.72 For the Feminists of 1848 as well as their Greek descendants at the turn of the century, this division of human nature no longer proved womens inferiority. Deprived of heart, mens virile capacities ended up in disorder and social injustice. Opposing moral superiority of women based on maternal virtues of altruism and love to these virile vices, Feminists inverted the hierarchy of dominant values and granted their sex a new dignity, a positive identity indispensable to the creation of a struggling collective subject. Women became the most important lever of the social machine, and as such did not have to envy men for the privilege of killing their neighbor on the battlefield or engaging in mean economic transactions.73
Woman must not emancipate herself by becoming a man; she must emancipate man by making him a woman.74

This newly acquired dignity rested on the redeeming role that would be theirs in the future, their mission of peace, harmony, and love75 to which they were destined, as much by their difference from men, as by their age old oppression:
Constantly oppressed, woman in saintly fashion is united with the oppressed of all nations and classes. Their suffering evokes her tender compassion.76

As the paradigm of oppression, women in their revolt must embrace the liberation of all the oppressed.
Drunkenness, conceit, tyranny, injustice, these are the enemies of humanity against which woman must fight . . . Her nation is the whole world, her family all of humanity.77

By linking their cause to the redemption of the world, and affirming that equal rights had as its goal to restore humanity in the interest of the entire society,78 French and Greek Feminists strove to legitimize their struggles and gain the support of republican, socialist, and irredentist movements. Within this framework, the emphasis on the moral superiority of woman had double importance. It called upon a large regrouping of women, based on biological and social community a regrouping made possible because it did not disturb the dominant sexual morality. They judged womens organization indispensable for any substantial change in social relations between the sexes. But at the same time, by placing themselves in a ground acceptable to men, by magnifying the ideal feminine image created by men, they hoped to be heard more easily. The stakes were high. Feminists of 1848 still remembered how the liberated women of 1830 were received. Pauline Roland, regreted her past errors, the

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mistakes of her youth for which she atoned in her mature years.79 Feminists of 1848 kept a distance from their predecessors who had not been heeded. They wished to be heard. In Greece, the rigidity of the sex segregation system and the crushing weight of patriarchal morality left much less room for deviation from established norms. The very presence of Feminists, the very act of public speaking sufficed to evoke fantasies of a topsy-turvy world. They must be exemplary figures, ward off any criticism of immorality, certain that they will be more persuasive by claiming specific functions linked to feminine nature. Since mother alone was acceptable, as mothers they would be in their right to claim their place in the city.
Do you want women to be the serfs of your Republic? No, citizens . . . the mothers of your sons cannot be slaves.80

In this way, they reaffirmed the discourse of their closest friends, potential allies who seeked to establish an essential place for the woman that fitted in the cultural and economic realities of the period. These philogynes, both French and Greek, believed that feminine superiority could provide important services to the community, in the areas of education,81 medicine, philanthropy,82 thus foreshadowing the basic feminine activities of our century that have widened the scope of maternal vocations to include society as a whole. The dialogue begins on this basis, the one that naturally divides the sexes. The partisans of Feminism as the art of the possible were the only partners in dialogue with nineteenth century men. However, the dialogue did not go very far. The place that men wanted to set up for their closest women allies did not match the Feminists dreams. For some, notably Legouv, womens mission was to do what men do not do, to aspire to vacant places. Women were accepted in the struggle for the redemption of an asexual non gendered humankind, not for the redemption of their own gender. As long as they fought as mothers of the Republic, alongside men, they were heeded and venerated. But when they formed independent clubs to claim their rights, they became incomprehensible and unacceptable.83 Strange things were said in these clubs; man was considered to be an enemy.84 Similarly, their presence in public shocked no one when it served the national cause and supported nationalism in the disputed territories of the Balkans, but this same presence was considered to be a serious blow to decency when women studied at the university or claimed to right to work.
Many men would consider with dread the prospect of women improving their minds by studies similar to theirs, of women taking an active part in affairs which, until then, they have monopolized.85 Would it be an exaggeration to say that feminine ignorance is consciously desired and systematically organized? . . . They fear that by educating themselves women will claim political independence and will want to take an active part in the nations politics . . . . And why should it be illegal for women to participate in politics?86

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Coming up against the refusal of the men who were most sympathetic to their cause to share the power which men took to be naturally their own, Feminists were obliged to face the facts: glorification of their different nature was a far cry from leading to emancipation.
Above the title of wife and mother, ephemeral and dependent upon chance, belonging to some but not to others, is the eternal priceless title that bows to no yoke, the title of human being.87

However, pragmatic feminists had difficulty in claiming the title of human being in a coherent manner. Their practice went way beyond the limits, prescribed to feminine nature, and their anger strikes out at the repression imposed upon them by the patriarchal order:
In 1848, in the midst of a century of enlightenment and progress, a man dared to call for the exclusion of women from all clubs and political meetings discussing social issues, in the National Assembly; (. . . ) this unjust degree was adopted almost unanimously and not one protest was heard.88

But in vain. Prisoners of conceptual and ideological machinery that was not made for their liberation, with a self-definition that did not break with patriarchal logic that excluded them, yielding to a balance of forces that was extremely unfavorable, they faced the following dilemma; either to be isolated or to follow a social movement that did not include womens liberation. When Jeanne Deroin ran for office in the legislative elections of 1849, her socialist friends treated her with reserve. They did not understand the actions of the militant who dismissed her role as mother to claim the rights of women in the name of gender equality. She no longer fitted the norm. The order between the sexes was disturbed. Now, according to the mechanics of male power, even though Socialist, choices were to be made following the days of June 1848. One of her closest socialist collaborators reminded her:
I told you that the emancipation of workers was more pressing than yours . . . . The privilege of sex which will be the last to remain on this earth will be far weaker when there will be not others to support.89

Thus, gender struggle must stop at the threshold of class struggle. This problem of priorities, of a hierarchy of oppressions, feminists would also confront it in Greece, some decades later. Whether it be for the cause of nationalism, or social reform, a large number of Greek Feminists found themselves forced to put feminism in second place. Once again, the question posed by La Voix des Femmes in 1848 went unanswered:
Why is our free-will always surrendered to the will of a master, the domineering despot of our useless feelings . . . ? Why must we either blindly follow the current that drags us backwards or find ourselves tossed by the impetuous wave that dashes us against dangerous shores. . . ?90

These models and hypotheses are the result of research on the nineteenth century. However, we believe it would be a point of departure for studying current Feminism. Indeed, approaching current feminist consciousness from the viewpoint of its pariah dimension, can shed light on the evolution of the

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strands in the feminist movement today, their problematic relationship with assimilation and exclusion, and their falling back on the quality of difference. (Translated by Mildred Mortimer)
NOTES
1 Betty Friedan, The Second Stage (New York: Summit, 1982). 2 La Voix des Femmes, no. 28, April 20, 1848. 3 N. Svoronos, Histoire de la Grce Moderne (Paris: PUF, 1972), and L.S. Stavrionos, The Balkans Since 1453 (New York, 1958), p. 292. 4 Alexis de Tocqueville, Souvenirs (Paris, 1983), p. 108-109. 5 Joan Kelly, The Social Relation of the Sexes: Methodological implications of womens history, in Signs, 1976, no. 4, p. 81. 6 In the Ottoman Empire, women like rayeas are in the same boat concerning their freedom of movement in public which is controlled. See N. Seni, Ville Ottomane et Representation du Corps Fminin, in Les Temps Modernes, no. 456-457, pp. 66-95. 7 G. Fraisse, LHistoire du fminisme, in LHistoire des Femmes est-elle possible? (Paris, 1985). 8 The thesis of Ch. Plant, Les Saint-Simoniennes ou la qute dune identit impossible travers lcriture la premiere personne, 1983, Paris III. 9 Petition of Greek Women in Parliament, in Le Journal des Dames, 20-3-1888. 10 La Voix des Femmes, no. 22, Avril 13, 1848. 11 Le Journal des Dames, 4-3-1890. 12 Charlotte Bront, Jane Eyre (London, 1949), pp. 15-16. 13 Like J. Deroin, D. Gay, and still others among 1848 Feminists. 14 M. Fuller, Women in America; H. Beecher Stowe, Uncle Toms Cabin. 15 Harriet Talyor Mill, Elizabeth Barret Browning, etc. 16 Max Weber, Economie et Socit, (Paris, 1971); also, Essays in Sociology (London, 1967); Hannah Arendt, Rachel Varnhagen (London, 1974), and The Jew as a Pariah (New York, 1978). 17 Vivian Gornick, Women as Outsider in Women in a Sexist Society (New York, 1971); Carolyn Heilbrun, Re-inventing Womanhood (New York, 1979); Elisabeth Lenk Indiscretions and the Literary Beast in New German Critique. 18 The tendency of contemporary Feminists to adapt the study of the oppression of women to concepts and analyses that are different from it, notably those pertaining to Black nationalism in America as well as its close links to the development of separatism within the movement, is discussed in a pertinent although strongly polemical manner in the article of Ti-Grace Atkinson, Le Nationalisme feminine in Nouvelles Questions Feministes, no. 6-7, 1984, pp. 35-54. 19 E. Lenk, op. cit., p. 106. 20 H. Arendt, Between Pariah and Parvenu, pp. 199-215. 21 M. Weber, Economie et Societ, op. cit., pp. 511-512; also, Ancient Judaism (New York, 1975), pp. 375-376. 22 M. Weber, Ibid. 23 Resisting all forms of moral constraints became second nature to her, a principle of conduct, a law of conscience, G. Sand, Indiana, Paris, Garnier, 1962, p. 69. 24 G. Sand, Valentine, Paris, 1852, p. 140.

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D. Stern cited in l Almanack des Femmes in 1842, published by J. Deroin. For a study of the concept of parvenu as it developed within the context of Jewish pariahs, see H. Arendt, Rachel Varnhagen, op. cit., pp. 199-215 and The Jew as a Pariah, p. 76-79; and also B. Lazare, Le Fumier de Job. This ambiguous, if not hostile, attitude towards womens emancipation also characterized most exceptional women in England and America in the Victorian Era. See C. Heilbrun, op. cit., p. 42-46. G. Sand, Lettres Marcie (Paris, 1837). An expression of Lammenais concerning G. Sand and D. Stern, cited by H. Guillemin La Comtesse et les quarante-huitards, Le Monde, February 15, 1985. E. Rodis, The Greek Literary Women, Athens, 1896. G. Sand, Indiana (Paris, 1962), p. 6. D. Stern. Mes souvenirs, 1806-1833 (Paris, 1880), p. viii. For the life of K. Papalexopoulou, see K. Xiradaki, Kalliopi Papalexopoulou (1809-1898) (Athens, 1898). Journal des Dames, September 13, 1898. La Voix des Femmes, no. 16, April 6, 1848. La Voix des Femmes, no. 19, April 10, 1848. Journal des Dames, October 15, 1895. H. Arendt, Rachel Varnhagen, p. 214. Ibid., p. 210. A. Papadopoulou, Nouvelles (Athens, 1954) p. 129. D. Stern, Mes souvenirs, 1806-1833 (Paris, 1880), p. 180. B. Lazare, Papiers indits (unedited papers). Valentin Pelosse, Claire Demar. Paris, 1978, pp. 16-17. Ibid., p. 21. Sandra Lee Bartky, Toward a Phenomenology of Feminist Consciousness in Feminism and Philosophy (New Jersey, 1977), p. 28, Suzanne Voilquin, Souveniers dune fille du peuple, Paris (Maspero, 1978). Pierre Rosanvallon, Le Moment Guizot (Paris: Gallimard, 1985), p. 294. C. Deman, Appel dune femme, in Valentin Pelosse, Claire Demar: L affranchissment des femmes, Payot, 1976, pp. 16-17. Ibid., p. 17. Ibid. Ibid., p. 45. Ibid., p. 165. Ibid., p. 26. Ibid., p. 68. Ibid., p. 63. Ibid., p. 67. Ibid., p. 75. Ibid., p. 14. Ibid., p. 94. In Saint-Simonian terminology, the state nurse-made designates individual social competency. See Ch. Plant, op. cit. Pelosse, op. cit., p. 46. Ibid., p. 12. S. Lee Bartky, op. cit., pp. 32-33. K. Blunden, Le travail et la vertu, Paris, 1982, p. 68. Letter of the Saint-Simonian feminist Suzanne Voilquin, cited by V. Pelosse, op. cit., p. 164: . . . use your title as mother to demand equality from man . . .. Letter to H. Gosset, Bibl. M.D., cited by Cl. Maifrier, ed. Syros, p. 55.

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66 J. Deroin, Almanach des femmes, second year, 1853. 67 Journal des Dames, April 4, 1893. 68 Journal des Dames, May 7, 1895. 69 Lettre de Jean Psichari A. Papadopoulou, cited by T. Staurou, Les salons de Constantinople in Nea Estia (Athens, 1956), p. 1485-1486. 70 Journal des Dames, January 2, 1888. 71 Voix des Femmes, no. 20, April 11, 1848. 72 Voix des Femmes, no. 3, March 23, 1848. 73 Journal des Dames, February 10, 1888. 74 La Voix des Femmes, no. 20, April 11, 1848. 75 La Voix des Femmes, no. 18, April 20, 1848. 76 LOpinion des Femmes, May 7, 1895. 77 Idem. 78 La Voix des Femmes, no. 27, April 19, 1848. 79 Letters of Pauline Roland from May 25, 1851 and June 9, 1851, cited by E. Thomas, P. Roland, Socialism et Feminisme, 1956, p. 172. 80 La Voix des Femmes, no. 7, March 27, 1848. 81 G. Papadopoulos, Au sujet de linstruction publique en Grece, in Pandora, 1865-1866, p. 165. 82 E. Legouv, Histoire morale des femmes, 4 me edition, Paris, 1864, p. 395, and E. Assopios, La femme en Grce et lOccident in Almanach Attique de 1883 (Athens, 1882). 83 Maxime du Camp. 84 Idem. 85 Opinion des Femmes, January 28, 1849. 86 Le Journal des Dames, September 20, 1887. 87 Le Journal des Dames, January 21, 1890. 88 Opinion des Femmes, January 28, 1849. 89 Opinion des Femmes, March 10, 1849. 90 La Voix des Femmes, no. 32, April 24 and April 25, 1848.

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