Stephan Molyneux has recently graduated from shoddy to What is this I don’t even…, with a pair of videos on feminism, which he describes as “socialism with panties.” There is a hopeful part of me that would like to believe that nobody could take “Stef” seriously on his best days—and it is definitely not those we see in these videos—but the rest of me knows better. So I would like to draw attention to “An Open Letter to Stefan Molyneux and Other Anti-Feminists,” written by a group of good folks, including Sharon Presley, Charles Johnson, Nathan Goodman, and Ross Kenyon—and with an increasingly long list of signatories—which does a nice job of actually isolating the arguments in Molyneux’s meltdowns and responding. There are all sorts of curious notions about, and resistances to, feminism in anarchist and libertarian circles, most of which seem to involve shoe-horning a complex bundle of social and philosophical movements into one or another boxes small enough to discard, and the debate in “libertarian” circles isn’t free from some peculiar reductions. But, within that context, this is a useful, and potentially important, response. Give it a look.
Black and Red Feminism
Feminism in Lyon before 1848 — Eugénie Niboyet
This short account of the life of Eugénie Niboyet is the first part of an article that appeared in the Revue d’histoire de Lyon (Vol. 7, 1908, pp. 348-358). The second half of the article focuses on Flora Tristan in Lyon in 1844—which will be at least slightly more familiar subject-matter for most people—but the lesser-known Mme. Niboyet was really one of the most formidable figures of feminism in the 19th century. She was a prolific writer, editor, and translator. She organized around women’s issues, pacifism and the abolition of the death penalty. She had close ties to most of […]
From the Archives
Joseph Déjacque, “The Human Being” (1857)
I’ve been working to track down the various feminist critiques of Proudhon by his contemporaries, and translate those which have not been translated. I was actually about half-way through a translation of Déjacque’s “On the Human Being, Male and Female,” when I stumbled across this translation that appeared in Lucifer the Lightbearer. I’ll try to post my own translation later , but Jonathan Mayo Crane rendering of the French certainly captures the spirit of Déjacque’s assault. Mayo’s translation appeared in two sections, and I’m posting them separately. THE HUMAN BEING. (Letter written to P. J. Proudhon by Joseph Déjacque in […]
Contr'un
Ezra Heywood to “The Revolution,”
This letter from Ezra H. Heywood is the first fruits of several days spent researching in Eugene, OR and Berkeley, CA, over the last couple of months. When I discovered that both André Léo and Jenny d’Héricourt had corresponded with the American women’s rights papers The Revolution and The Agitator, and that both papers had published partial translations of André Léo’s La femme et les mœurs, it became obvious that I needed to track those papers down. I was already familiar with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Parker Pillsbury’s paper, The Revolution, which contained contributions by Ezra Heywood, Josiah Warren, C. […]