Year: 2012

Black and Red Feminism

Jenny d’Hericourt vs. the Double Standard

July 28, 2012 Shawn P. Wilbur
[Proudhon took a beating when he challenged her. What chance would a mere abstract inconsistency have against the power of Jenny P. d’Hericourt? This is enough fun to merit a full cross-post from Black and Red Feminist History. And d’Hericourt continues to rise in my list of sharp and entertaining radical writers.] MORALITY ACCORDING TO THE SEXES BY JENNY P. D’HERICOURT Dear reader, let us for a moment listen to a conversation between wife and husband: Wife—“Men continue to be absurd, and to affirm the contrary of facts. The New York Nation writes thus:” (She reads.) Society refuses to treat […]
The Sex Question

Jenny P. d’Hericourt, “Morality According to the Sexes” (1869)

July 28, 2012
MORALITY ACCORDING TO THE SEXES BY JENNY P. D’HERICOURT Dear reader, let us for a moment listen to a conversation between wife and husband: Wife—“Men continue to be absurd, and to affirm the contrary of facts. The New York Nation writes thus:” (She reads.) Society refuses to treat men’s licentiousness with the same severity as women’s, because the consequences to the family, to children, and to property are less serious. Husband.—“But that is true, wife, and,” (He reads.) A woman must be taught to take care of her honor, and to bear unsupported the loss of it. Wife.—“Then, if I […]
Contr'un

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the blogosphere…

July 28, 2012 Shawn P. Wilbur
Things have been a little quiet on this blog, due in part to offline concerns, but I’ve been puttering away, and regular readers here may find material of interest among the newish posts to some of my other blogs. I’m particularly happy to have completed the translation of An Account of a Voyage from the Arctic to the Antarctic Pole by way of the Center of the Earth, a 1721 French “imaginary voyage” involving a passage through the center of the earth. At Black and Red Feminist History: Jenny d’Hericourt, “Woman’s Rights in France” (1869)  La Femme, “Madame Jenny P. […]
The Sex Question

Jenny P. d’Hericourt to “The Agitator” (June 12, 1869)

July 28, 2012
  Madame d’Hericourt, having returned from New York, writes full of interest and enthusiasm concerning her plan for a “Universal League of Women.” She will have something to say of this in future numbers of the Agitator. In concluding her letter, she says: I hope my next journey to New York will not be like the last one. In going I was left on the way, losing part of my hand baggage, and in coming back I was pickpocketedat Crestline. Happily, I had only five dollars, a little key, and my ticket in the portmonaie which was in my pocket. […]
biography

La Femme, “Madame Jenny P. d’Hericourt” (1869)

July 28, 2012
MADAME JENNY P. d’HERICOURT Dear Agitator: You ask me the biography of Madame Jenny P. d’Hericourt! I consent only to draw the great lines of her eventful life, those which can be interesting to those identified with the holy cause to which she has devoted a part of her existence. She was born in Besancon, the capital of the ancient Franche-Comte, in 1819. She is therefore the compatriot of Victor Hugo, Charles Fourier, Proudhon, Bichat, Courbet, Rouget de l’Isle, the author of the Marseillaise, and the celebrated Georges Cuvier, to whom she is a relative through her grandmother. By hereditary […]
Contr'un

Notes on “the disposition of intellectual products”

July 24, 2012 Shawn P. Wilbur
I’m always surprised by the lasting (and often false) impression that this bit of off-the-cuff theorizing has left in certain circles. But I’m also generally pleasantly surprised, when I am reminded of its existence that, despite being the product of a very different place in my theoretical development than I occupy at present, it’s fairly solid stuff. It was very specifically part of a series of attempts to determine just how far, and in what directions, fairly conventional property theory would stretch when applied in anarchistic contexts. So it has to be read as a series of speculations, aimed at […]
Anarchist Beginnings

Fourier’s response to the Gazette de France — II

July 24, 2012 Shawn P. Wilbur
SECOND PART OF FOURIER’S REFUTATION OF THE GAZETTE OF FRANCE. [Part One] For some time past the secret influence of the philosophic Pandemonium had enjoined the discipline of general science in the press, concerning the science of “attractive industry,” but the indiscreet Gazette has disobeyed the word. It is proverbially noted for its gossiping propensity, and notwithstand the tactics of obscurism, one of its scribes, inspired with a new idea, has aimed a fatal blow of calumny against my principle, by charging them with insult to our Saviour, Jesus Christ. The cause of this attack was a speech made by […]
Contr'un

Terrence, “A Short Introduction to the Works of Charles Fourier” (1848)

July 24, 2012 Shawn P. Wilbur
A SHORT INTRODUCTION  TO THE  WORKS OF CHARLES FOURIER. BY TERENCE   ————————————————- “In Nature and in State, it is easier to change many things than one.” BACON.—Essay on Health. “Entertain variety of delights rather than surfeit of them.—Idem. “ And let the main portion of the lands employed to gardens or to corn be to a common stock, and to be laid in, and stored up, and then delivered out in proportion.” BACON.—On Plantations. “Fourierism, which is diametrically opposed to Communism.”—Morning Chronicle, March, 1848. ————————————————- LONDON: PUBLISHED BY THE PHALANSTERIAN ASSOCIATION AND TO BE HAD OF P. ROLANOI, 20, […]
The Sex Question

Jenny d’Hericourt, “Woman’s Rights in France” (1869)

July 22, 2012
WOMAN’S RIGHTS IN FRANCE LETTER FROM MADAME JENNY P. D’HERICOURT Dear Agitator: I will give you a page of history as an answer to a translation on Women’s Rights in Europe, accepted in the Revolution. If the Journal des femmes, whence this article is taken, were a French paper, the author could not be excused. But this paper is not French, though written in French; which explains how a “Woman of Geneva” does not know anything about thousands of wide awake women who were preaching, writing and claiming their rights in France in 1848. Having been one of those women, […]
fiction

Han Ryner, “The Paradox” (1913)

July 21, 2012 Shawn P. Wilbur
ORIGINAL THE PARADOX By Han Ryner I know a country in which the inhabitants are always clothed. Beside the woman in labor, the priest and magistrate wait and, as soon as the child appears, seizing it, they enclose it entirely, hands and face included, in an elastic material which conforms to the contours of the body and which grows with it. Perhaps, despite its elasticity, the cloth resists, opposing itself to the growth, for the people of that country remain singularly small. The strange garment has holes corresponding to the eyes, nostrils, AND mouth. But it folds a bit, with […]