Black and Red Feminism

Black and Red Feminism

Jenny d’Héricourt, “Illinois” (FR) (1866)

February 15, 2024 Shawn P. Wilbur

If, through constant communications, through many stories, we know in France the morals and customs of that part of the United States that borders the Atlantic and which, as the first seat of colonization, mixes with the habits of democracy those of civilization European, this is not the case with the Western countries. There everything is new and follows not from the inspirations of tradition, but from the force of things and the demands of necessity. There, the genius of labor accomplished wonders, but with a strange and naive rustic quality. Large cities are improvised, ports are built, companies are founded and all the agitation of the large commercial centers gives way to the melancholic poetry of Indian solitude. […]

Black and Red Feminism

Jenny P. d’Héricourt in the Messager Franco-Americain (1865-1869)

February 14, 2024 Shawn P. Wilbur

Now, what makes war possible and produces the disastrous results I am pointing out? A lack of equilibrium in social forces. Woman is one of these forces, and she has neither her place nor her liberty of action. If, as I believe, the government of women alone should be bad, it does not seem surprising to me that the government of men alone has produced what we see. It takes the equal influence of both sexes to produce balance, because they are equal by “difference” as much as by philosophically defined law. […]

Black and Red Feminism

Jeanne Marie, “What the Socialists Want” (1848)

February 8, 2024 Shawn P. Wilbur

It is to this celestial banquet that, for a long time, the socialists have been inviting you! It is therefore no longer a question of fighting them, but of aiding them. The great human family is marching toward the goal to which God leads it. Forward then, you who aspire to the honor of leading it. Support our efforts, but do not hinder them: you will be crushed! […]

Black and Red Feminism

Feminist Responses to Proudhon

August 1, 2023 Shawn P. Wilbur

The effort to translate Proudhon’s Justice in the Revolution and in the Church is just one step in the much larger project of coming to terms with the fundamental tensions in his thought, which have their clearest expression in his discussions of love, marriage and the alleged biological differences between men and women. […]

Black and Red Feminism

Jenny P. d’Héricourt, “La Femme affrancie / Woman Emancipated” — Volume II

July 31, 2023 Shawn P. Wilbur

A daughter of my century, raised with the doctrines summarized by our glorious Revolution, I will not seek the sources of Right and Duty in the world of Supernaturalism. No. I will leave to the last echoes of the ancient world the irrational fantasy of using their argumentation, based on the unknown, to prove that Right is granted and Duty imposed by some God. On the contrary, I say that both have their origins within us; that they result from the ensemble of our faculties, from our destiny, from the necessary relations that sustain us with ourselves, with our fellows, and with nature. […]

Black and Red Feminism

André Léo, “Woman and Mores” (1869)

July 28, 2023 Shawn P. Wilbur

It is almost overnight that this question rejected at first as chimerical, then combated by ridicule, which however, today, in spite of so many prejudices and sarcasms, is agitated in the two worlds, and each day grows. It was born out of the French Revolution, which created or renewed all questions by the new principle that it proclaimed, in which the equality of woman, like all the others, is contained. […]