💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › rene-chaughi-the-slave-woman.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 13:35:16. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
➡️ Next capture (2024-07-09)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Title: The Slave Woman Author: René Chaughi Date: 1901 Language: en Topics: women, feminism, anarcha-feminism Source: Translated on 2021 from https://pt.calameo.com/read/0014076306b1d28bab391 Notes: René Chaughi is the pseudonym by which Henri Gauche became known in the anarchist press. He was a French journalist, writer and anarchist, having collaborated in several important French libertarian periodicals, for which he went into exile in Belgium and Netherlands in 1894 due to persecution by the French authorities. His pamphlets on feminist issues ― Immoralité du Mariage, Les Trois Complices, La Femme Esclave ― have been edited numerous times and enjoyed significant popularity in French and Spanish-speaking anarchist and syndicalist circles. The Slave Woman (La Femme Esclave) was originally published in 1901 by Les Temps Nouveux (Paris)
Since humanity has existed, the woman has been slave of the man.
Still three-quarters of monkey, armed with fangs and claws, covered with
hair, jaws protruding and forehead depressed, it was natural that our
prehistoric ancestors behave like wild beasts. They did not miss it. The
females were for them nothing but prey, which they fought over with
flint strokes, and I imagine they neglected to ask these frightened
companions for their consent. Conquered in a fierce struggle, they had
to repay in work the food granted by the master, and any labor that did
not please him, it was on his serf that he imposed it. Among most of
today’s primitive peoples, woman is considered and treated as a beast of
burden. Her fate is not very diferente among us.
The ancestral man seized his wife by violence; we seize ours by ruse: a
ruse which consists in leaving them in the ignorance of everything about
marriage and life, and then asking them for a fallacious consent. The
ancestral man considered his partner as his thing, we regard her as our
property; he had the right of life and death over her, so do we. We
terrorize the young girl with implacable conventions made by us for our
benefit; we terrorize the wife with bloodthirsty laws made by us for our
benefit. It is still the regime of kidnapping and violence honored by
our simian ancestors.
And yet our jaws have shrunk, our claws have flattened into fingernails,
our skull has enlarged. Since we are involved in thinking and reasoning,
it would be advisable to match our actions with our reason, and to
abandon the habits that come to us from the days when we had fangs and
claws. Our whole social life, our sexual life in particular, is built on
the traditions of wild beasts. It must stop.
Good souls think that it is right for a woman to be kept in an inferior
condition, because she is weaker. Logic of beasts, always. If the words
right and duty were not meaningless, it would be fair to say, on the
contrary, that we must impose more duties on the strong and grant more
rights to the weak. The weakness of women is, however, quite relative:
some women are more robust than some men. In many animal species, the
female is just as strong as the male, and even more terrible in combat.
Weakness is therefore not a necessary correspondence of maternal
function. If the woman today is a little more delicate than her partner,
this is perhaps only the result of a long division of labor between
them, he warring and hunting, she looking after the home and the little
ones. Moreover, muscular strength is no longer of any importance in
contemporary social life; it cannot therefore be a ground of inequality.
More and more, it is the nervous energy that takes precedence, the
thinking and willing brain. If a woman’s nervous system was not capable
of developing as much thought and will as that of man, would it follow
that she should be held in tutelage? Not at all. Like all living beings,
woman has possibilities within her. Let her bring them to light and
develop them as she pleases. She alone is the judge of what she can and
must do.
It was always the same. The nobles did not want the bourgeois to
emancipate themselves: they believed themselves to be superior to them.
The bourgeois do not want the artisans to free themselves: they also
believe themselves to be superior. The military want to be superior to
civilians and the priests to the laity. Civilized people look down on
savages, without realizing that the distance between them (for how many
minutes?) is only an accident of general evolution. Each people believe
to be more sensical than the rest of humans. The man’s belief in his
superiority over woman has no more serious motives. It is a mixture of
egocentric error and the desire for domination.
Mainly desire for domination. Reading the Code, we see that it is men
who made the laws. The way in which legislators speak of the rights and
duties of each of the two spouses, the very different way in which they
regard the adultery of one and the other, the way in which they treat
the single mother and the illegitimate child, are truly lovely things.
There emanates such a naive egoism, that it almost disarms. The legal
power of the husband is almost limitless, that of the wife is zero. She
belongs to him; but not him to her. It depends on the whims of this man
whether this woman is happy or unhappy forever. The law that delivered
her does not defend her. In fact, woman, as in prehistoric ages, is
regarded, not as a person, but as property. For love to be born and
last, between this master and this servant, very exceptional
circumstances are needed. Most of the time, there is no love; there is
an exchange of two momentary desires, or even worse: brutality on the
one hand, submission on the other. In marriage, property is rape.
To escape this humiliating state of possessed thing, woman increasingly
seeks to move away from male tutelage and to live off her own work. But
there again, she finds herself in front of her arrogant boss who, for
the price of crushing toil, offers her starvation wages. Always the
strong enslaving the weak, always the old simian tradition.
In order not to die, many women seek refuge in prostitution. If only
they were sure, in doing so, to avoid the charcoal stove or the jump
into the river?
Whenever a woman seeks to emancipate herself, and wants, from thing that
she was, to become a person, the man puts all his efforts to prevent it.
He does not want her to develop her faculties, to become his equal. The
deputies do not want elector and eligible women; magistrates do not want
women lawyers; doctors do not want women professor. In the school of
fine arts, the male students shout down the female students. Well,
despite rebuffs and difficulties of all kinds, many women do science,
letters and the arts, and sometimes better than men.
There is no hiding it: deep down, the man despises the woman, and this
politeness which he affects towards her, is nothing but an abominable
hypocrisy intended to mask the condition of slave in which he maintains
her harshly. Beneath the ceremonial varnish, he is still the ferocious,
cowardly master.
This disdain is reflected even in the language. To signify all the
beings of our species, we say: man, men, humanity. The woman is included
therein as an accessory; we do not do her the honor to name her.
By claiming to have excluded women from social life for the sake of the
delicacy of their body, man is lying. For if it had been so, man would
have taken for himself all the painful or disgusting work, and that’s
not how it is, and he would have left all the sedentary work to her,
first of all the studying. Now, this is what man did not want. From the
beginning of societies, he has made every effort to prevent women from
learning. Why? Because an educated slave becomes a bad slave.
The education of the young girl is the education of a servant. One is
concerned, not with developing her skills, but only with training her
for a master. She is taught only what is needed so as not to make too
many orthographic errors and not to appear too stupid in a conversation;
one agrees to adorn her mind with some decorative arts, one concedes to
her the piano strumming, because that is not very dangerous for the male
prerogatives. But we are careful not to introduce her to the sciences,
which would open her eyes to the religious and social lies, basis of her
servitude; we don’t want her to be interested in public life, to look at
society face to face, and to learn about the institutions of ideas,
which could well be of revolt.
One cloisters her in the house, between the saucepans and the crochet
work. One stupefies her intelligence with silly readings; one degrades
her character with the habit of obedience. To obey! this is what, from
an early age, we try to make her see as the great affair of her whole
life. At the same time, we deviate her moral sense with exhortations
that are supposedly virtuous, but in reality degrading. The young girl
is made to believe that there is shame in loving a young man loyally and
in being a mother otherwise than following an established ceremony; on
the other hand she is made to believe that there is no shame in selling
herself to an old man, following the ceremonial. By hiding the truth
from her, by regulating her readings, one offends her: one insults her
by supposing that, left to herself, she would be incapable of restraint;
one considers her, with Christianity, as an impure being. Degraded in
her body and―what is worse―in her brain, the woman is the prey of all
the superstitions, of all the prejudices.
Well! we want for women, as for men, a resolutely scientific education.
The sciences, and especially the natural sciences, are essential for
women. First, to cleanse her brain once and for all of all the religious
stupidities that clutter it up. Then, because if the woman’s main goal
is to give birth and to bring up, she must know what an organism is,
what life, love and death are. How can she claim to be treating a child
if she ignores anatomy, physiology, medicine? I would like all young
girls―all young men too―to do a two or three year internship in
hospital, and learn, in addition to the art of healing, respect for
human pain. It would be better than piano lessons for some, and than the
barracks for others.
A slave for centuries and centuries, woman has retained the habits of a
slave, the thoughts of a slave, the tastes of a slave. Observe her: in
the most honest you will find traces of venality, if only to her
husband. At the offer of a new dress, of any gift, she becomes more
tender, which is shameful. Like all slaves, she applauds success,
prefers mediocrity that comes in light to merit that remains in the
shadows; she has an unhealthy need to appear, to attract attention, an
evil desire to dominate, to humiliate. Like the savages, she loves
gilding, beads, unnecessary and cumbersome adornment; for whole hours,
she remains in the windows of the jewelers, stopping in front of ugly
things, but which shine; she covers herself with necklaces, bracelets,
rings, pendants, ribbons, a host of trinkets which have not the
slightest reason to exist, except to cost a lot of money and thereby
aggravate the struggle to live.
All her toiletries are also a challenge to hygiene and common sense. She
wears feathers on her head, like the savages (and our generals). Like
the savages, she wears amulets, little pigs or four-leaf clovers. Like
the savages, she has a taste for body paintings, illuminates her eyes,
her cheeks, her lips. Like the savages, she deforms and mutilates
herself. She pierces her ears to hang objects; but she has lost the
habit of piercing her lips or nostrils, which is always a gain. She
squeezes her feet in extravagant shoes which make her unfit for walking;
she squeezes her lungs and stomach in a corset, which compromises her
health and the health of the children born to her ... if they can! But
it doesn’t matter to her: in the brains that slavery has depressed,
vanity is stronger than anything.
It must stop. The woman must become aware of herself, have a disgust for
her present state, refuse to be any longer a doll here, a servant there,
a property everywhere. She must know that there is no possible dignity,
and therefore no possible morality, for a being, but in freedom, in full
possession of oneself. May she want to be free and she will be. The free
woman is a revolution in the world whose consequences cannot be
calculated. It is the end of religions, which subsist only through her,
and through her they still hold the child and the man. It is also the
end of wars, killers of husbands and sons, and which the wife and the
mother cordially hate. For the woman’s adaptation to humble tasks has at
least had the good of making her lose the habit of brutality, the taste
for murder. The woman educated and gaining a foothold in social life is
a more effective means of pacification and disarmament than the lying
words of despots. It is yet the end of prostitution, of mercenary and
vile debauchery. It is the end of the reign of violence and the crushing
of the weak by the strong. It is the advent of mercy and kindness.
The free woman is a new humanity that is rising.
RENÉ CHAUGHI.