Children of the Revolution

by Robert Gildea

  The career of one female worker, Jeanne Bouvier, highlights the transitory, insecure and exploited nature of female labour at the end of the nineteenth century. Her father worked as a navvy on the Paris–Lyon–Marseille railway until he inherited a small farm in the Drôme, but his vines were ruined by the phylloxera epidemic and the family moved to the outskirts of Lyon. With her father unemployed, Jeanne went to work after her first communion in 1876 at the age of eleven in a silk-mill, doing a thirteen-hour day for 50 centimes (although under a labour law of 1842 children under twelve could work no more than eight hours). The father then left the family, which returned to the Drôme: Jeanne worked in the fields in the summer and in a silk-mill in the winter, boarding in a dormitory with other country girls from Sunday night to Saturday night, bringing her own food and eventually being paid 1.25 francs a day. In 1879 her mother found work in Paris with a shaving-brush manufacturer and brought Jeanne with her; in one year Jeanne was employed in turn as a servant by a brush merchant, a paint merchant, a grain merchant, an ironmonger and a doctor who was married to one of Proudhon’s daughters. Though her mother soon returned home and Jeanne dreamed of returning to the country to raise hens and rabbits, she stayed in Paris and went into the clothing industry. The pay was so poor that she knew one girl who committed suicide at twenty-two and others who went on to the street as prostitutes. Jeanne began as a hatmaker, paid 45 francs in a good week but 15 out of season, before the firm went broke, then for a corset-maker earning 2 francs a day, then as a midinette or dressmaker in the Opéra district, starting at 2.5 francs a day but later 5 francs a day, supplemented with work at home for personal clients.34

  Bouvier hoped that the labour law of 1892, which limited the working day of women to eleven hours, would bring some relief. However the law exempted ‘family workshops’, and in the face of global competition this resulted in a massive increase in women working as sweated labour. This was work at home for a subcontractor who could respond quickly to changing demands without having to worry about overheads. True, the expansion of homework made it easier for women to combine earning a living and raising a family, but it was under the most atrocious of conditions. Making artificial flowers was one of the ‘articles de Paris’ that traditionally employed a female labour aristocracy, but competition from the German and American markets forced prices down and 38 per cent of women in this sector were working at home for subcontractors by 1906.35 The clothing industry was increasingly subjected to homework, facilitated by the arrival of the sewing machine. In the Paris suburbs of Belleville and Ménilmontant women specialized in shirt-making, while wives of shop-assistants, clerks and petits fonctionnaires earned extra family income by making lingerie at home.36 In the west of France, women might earn between 2.5 and 4.5 francs a day in the shoe factories of Fougères, but the Cholet region confronted international competition by developing a niche market in slippers, employing women at home for 1.50 or 1.75 francs a day.37

  Since labour legislation served only to drive exploitation underground, women had to take matters into their own hands. Although one attraction of female labour was its docility, women workers did occasionally go on strike. The sugar-workers of Paris struck in 1892, the corset-makers of Limoges struck for 108 days in 1895, the sardine-workers of Douarnenez, who were paid 1.5 francs for every thousand sardines cleaned and made a typical wage of 22 centimes an hour, struck in 1905, and a quarter of the striking shoeworkers at Fougères in 1907 were women.38 Jeanne Bouvier went to the Paris Bourse du Travail to join the union of dressmakers in 1897, and recalled that ‘at that time there were always debates about revolution, the general strike, expropriation, the abolition of capitalism and wage-labour. I didn’t really understand what it meant, but to appear a good trade unionist I applauded as vigorously and with as much conviction as those around me.’39 Few women actually joined trade unions, only 101,000 in 1911, in comparison to 1,029,000 men.40 In part this was because they put family before work and because they were less militant. They also faced great opposition on the part of male workers. Though working women made an indispensable contribution to the family budget, male trade unionists feared that women, working for lower wages, threatened not only their jobs but also their traditional role as breadwinners. ‘Women are beginning to invade the workshops,’ warned a delegate at the 1892 metalworkers’ congress. ‘If this continues, the heads of the family will be doing the cooking while the wife and children go out to work.’41 These fears were not totally without foundation. The introduction of linotype in 1895 led to an increase in the number of female typesetters, some of whom were used to break a printworkers’ strike at Nancy in 1901. At the printworkers’ congress in 1910 the general secretary, Auguste Keufer, took the Proudhonist view that ‘men’s wages must be sufficient for women to remain in the private realm and fulfil their natural function of mother and family educator.’42 Thus, when the printworkers Emma and Louis Couriau came to Lyon in 1912 and asked to join the printworkers’ union, Emma was refused entry and her husband, who had already joined, was expelled. Although Emma’s cause was supported by the South-East Feminist Federation, Parisian feminists and a number of revolutionary syndicalists, the union would not budge.43 The labour movement rallied to spokesmen of both the bourgeoisie and the Catholic Church who opposed female labour in theory, if not in practice.

  One way out of the trap of low-level employment in agriculture, industry or domestic service was to pursue an education, and the education of women took important steps forward at the end of the nineteenth century. Overall, the proportion of French departments which educated all girls aged six to thirteen rose from 58 per cent in 1872 to 88 per cent in 1881, when elementary education for that age cohort became compulsory and free, and to 99 per cent in 1906. Whereas for Jeanne Bouvier the end of schooling was signalled by first communion, increasingly it was marked by taking the certificat d’études. Only 25 per cent of girls took this exam in 1876, but 45 per cent did so by 1907, and in that period their pass rate increased from 70 to 85 per cent. Beyond that was the option of taking the brevet, which was awarded to 5,769 girls in 1876 and 18,194 in 1882.44 Such a qualification opened up the possibility of white-collar work for women which was more secure and respectable if not paid much more. In commerce and banking women had 25 per cent of the jobs in 1866 but 39 per cent of them in 1906, as the male clerk was replaced by the female typist or secretary.45 Even more attractive was the possibility of employment as dames employées, first in the telegraph service after 1877, away from the public, then after 1892 in the post office. This provoked a certain amount of resistance from male clerks, and debate about whether ladies should be working face to face with the public. Successful candidates were well qualified. As many as half of them had the brevet, perhaps even ten years’ experience as assistants to rural postmistresses or telegraphers, but they were paid a mere 800 francs per year, raised to 1,000 francs in 1892. In the first wave 86 per cent of the employees were unmarried, but many, particularly in Paris, married simply in order to pool two salaries.46

  The most obvious career opened by the brevet was elementary school teaching, which offered great opportunities for young lay women, as nuns were excluded after 1882 first from publicly maintained schools, then from private ones too. Écoles Normales or teacher-training colleges for institutrices, present in only major cities before then, were set up in every department under a law of 1879. The number of lay institutrices increased from 22,000, or 34 per cent of the elementary teaching body, in 1872, to 78,000, or 94 per cent, in 1906.47 A few teachers had brilliant careers. Pauline Kergomard, the daughter of a primary school inspector in Bordeaux, was brought up by her uncle, Jacques Reclus, a Protestant pastor, two of whose sons were exiled after Louis-Napoleon’s coup d’état of 1851. She graduated from the École Normale d’Institutrices of Bordeaux, went to Paris in 1861, moved in republican, liberal Protestant and feminist circles, married one of Garibaldi’s Thousand volunteers who had liberated Sicily and Naples, and was appointed chief ins
pector of nursery schools in 1879, a post she held until 1917, revolutionizing nursery education in France. In general, however, the career of institutrice was thankless and not well paid. They received 700–900 francs a year in 1875, rising to 1,200–2,000 francs in 1905, but significantly less than an instituteur and between 3 and 5 francs a day when a milliner might earn between 5 and 20 francs a day. Even more difficult was life in an isolated village, especially where nuns had formerly run the village school. Lay teachers might see the priest refuse to take their pupils for first communion, village children would jeer ‘la laïque’ or ‘la communale’ at them, or the locals would refuse them wood or groceries. Sometimes parents petitioned the authorities, alleging that the teacher called their children dirty, or thieves, or bastards, while allegations were made that the teacher was the mistress of the postman or living with a younger man. At worst, the lay teacher was considered a witch. ‘Her gifts are wickedness and ambition,’ complained parents in Normandy in 1881. ‘She is evil towards anyone who does not think like her.’48 In 1897 a public debate was triggered after a review of Léon Frapié’s Provincial Schoolteacher, which highlighted the sufferings of Louise Chardon, sent as an institutrice to a village in Berry where the local population, deprived of their bonnes soeurs, took their revenge on her. Now teachers wrote in with their tales of woe. One complained that the mayor, while drunk, had tried to kiss her and when she resisted suggested that she was a lesbian.49

  Career possibilities were further extended by the development of state secondary education under a law sponsored by Camille Sée in 1880. The girls’ lycées and colleges now set up did not break the older grip of the Catholic Church on the education of young bourgeois ladies, and recruited above all the daughters of teachers and civil servants who were still criticized as bluestockings. Most took the brevet to qualify for teaching, but an elite took the baccalauréat, which required Latin and Greek until an alternative combining Latin and modern languages was introduced in 1902.50 To staff these lycées and colleges a new profession emerged, that of the secondary school mistress. In the period 1880–1900 these originated not from bourgeois families who would have been able to provide them with a dowry to make a ‘good’ marriage, but from the milieu of teachers, civil servants, the military, or white-collar workers; 10 per cent of them (18 per cent at the teacher-training college for secondary-school women teachers, the École Normale de Sèvres) were indeed orphans. A quarter were drawn from the primary sector and the majority had the brevet supérieur; if they acquired the agrégation it was in post. A schoolmistress in Paris, with the agrégation, earned a respectable 3,000 francs at the beginning of her career, and 4,700 at the end, though less than the 3,200 and 8,000 respectively for a schoolmaster in the same position. Only 40 per cent of schoolmistresses married, and when they did they had the reputation of marrying ‘badly’, which was not necessarily the case if they came from the lower-middle class. Nevertheless they tended, if they did marry, to marry other teachers. Although or perhaps because the nuns were their rivals, they modelled themselves on the sobriety and decorum of nuns, and were expected to do so in the towns where they taught. Marguerite Aron, who graduated from Sèvres with the agrégation and went to teach in a provincial girls’ lycée, was told by her teachers ‘to behave at the age of twenty-four as a sedate woman of thirty’, only to be teased by the father of one of her pupils as being a member of an ‘authorized congregation’. There was, however, no place for scandal. One headmistress was dismissed for wearing trousers on a climbing holiday; the townsfolk complaining that they did not want a ‘George Sand’.51

  Very few women gained a university education in France before the baccalauréat reform of 1902. Even when they did, they were sharply over-represented in arts faculties, where in 1914 they formed 35 per cent of the student body. At that point women made up only 10 per cent of the students in medical faculties, 9 per cent of those in science faculties, and a mere 0.09 per cent of law students.52 Significantly, 43 per cent of those students were foreign, 54 per cent of them in the medical faculties. Two of those were Bronya Sklo-dovska, who came from Poland to study medicine in Paris, and her sister Manya, who followed her in 1891, studied science at the Sorbonne and married a physics lecturer, Pierre Curie, in 1895. Marie Curie, as she now called herself, passed the agrégation in 1896 and taught at the École de Sèvres while undertaking research to isolate radium, defending her doctoral thesis in June 1903 and winning the Nobel prize with her husband that December. Ironically, it was only as a result of the death of Pierre, who was run over by a horse-drawn cab in 1906, that it was possible for her, although with the inferior title of ‘course director’, to succeed to his chair of physics on a salary of 10,000 francs a year. As a woman she was rejected by the French Academy of Sciences in 1911, just before she won the Nobel prize for the second time, and was regularly attacked as a Russian, German, Pole or Jew who had come to Paris like an intruder and usurper.53

  The medical world was similarly well defended against women. ‘They want to become men!’ proclaimed one doctor in 1875, but they did not have the ‘virile qualities’ to perform dissections without fainting at the sight of blood. He was hostile to the enrolment of Elizabeth Garrett Anderson who was accepted by Paris having been refused enrolment in London and Edinburgh and became the first qualified woman doctor in Britain. Madeleine Brès, the first French woman to enrol in a medical faculty, was taken on as a provisional clinical intern at the Pitié hospital during the siege of Paris in 1870–71, but was turned down for a permanent internship after the siege ended. Women were not permitted to compete for clinical training as externs until 1881 and as interns until 1885. The number of women medical students in Paris duly crept up from five in 1870–71 and forty in 1881–2 to 114 in 1887–8, although of these 114 twenty were Polish, seventy Russian, eight English, and only twelve French. When women doctors did qualify they were forced into specializations where the advantage of motherly or female skills could be demonstrated, or into areas which were notoriously unpopular, such as mental health. A staunch opponent of women training as doctors was Professor Charcot of the Paris Medical Faculty who was best known in the 1880s for his experiments on hysterical women at the Salpêtrière hospital, which were also a theatrical display of the subjection of irrational females by the male scientist. One of his students, Blanche Edwards, nevertheless passed the examination for clinical training in 1886, and chose the option of specializing in children in care. She married a doctor and succeeded him on his death as director of the nursing school at the Salpêtrière.54 Madeleine Pelletier, the daughter of a fruit and vegetable seller in Les Halles, and educated by nuns till the age of twelve, studied on her own for the baccalauréat. She passed in 1897 and obtained a scholarship from the Paris municipal council to study at the Faculty of Medicine. She chose the specialization of mental health, obtained a doctorate in 1903, and worked as a medical assistant for the social services, dealing with very poor patients, until she was allowed to compete for clinical training in psychiatry, and worked at the Villejuif mental asylum.55

  Nursing was another area of medicine where women were allowed to contribute. Anna Hamilton, the daughter of an Irish Protestant father who speculated his fortune away, passed her baccalauréat at Chambéry and submitted her thesis on nursing reform at Montpellier in 1900. She saw herself as a French Florence Nightingale, who would sweep away the rustic and illiterate staff of French hospitals labouring under the eye of unscientific nuns, and replace them with highly trained young women. She secured the help of the mayor of Bordeaux to set up a nursing school at Tondu hospital, Bordeaux, in 1904. This new model was adopted by Blanche Edwards at the Salpêtrière hospital, but was otherwise resisted by conservative doctors and communities of nuns who demonstrated greater competence in retaining control over hospitals than they did in respect of schools.

  Slowly, women penetrated the liberal professions, but even more slowly in law than in medicine; in 1914 there were only eight female barristers. And yet even a
limited change provoked an outcry against this new model of bluestocking who sacrificed love and family life to knowledge and the pursuit of a career. Catching the mood were the novels of Colette Yver. In Les Cervalines (1902) a young doctor who wishes to marry complains that his problem is not with men-hating feminists who start to look like men but with female doctors and teachers who ‘remain charming but who… having let their life-blood flow to the brain, have no need of love’. Similarly, in Princesses de science (1907) an eminent doctor’s daughter, Thérèse Herlingue, marries a fellow medical student but refuses to give up her career. She builds up a respectable clientele but her own child, abandoned to a nurse, falls ill and dies. Her husband, finding the house cold and deserted, takes to drink and eats out. Finally, on the brink of losing him, she has a change of heart and declares, ‘I am all yours now. You will always find me here. You will love your home again. You have work to accomplish, Fernand, I will help you; you will triumph.’56 Whatever the achievements of women, the dominant opinion expressed in such works was that the traditional model was still the norm, and would win out in the end against female emancipation.

  WOMEN’S RIGHTS, POLITICS

  AND OPINION

  In the pursuit of civil and political rights, as in the battle for education and careers, women had to contend with the weight of opinion behind the dominant model of the wife and mother, which was defended not only by most men but also by many women. The Third Republic saw the emergence of organizations dedicated to women’s rights, but the suffragette was a marginal and uncomfortable figure. There was no militant suffragette movement in France on the scale of the Women’s Social and Political Union in Great Britain. The peculiar nature of French feminism was its attempt to put forward the demand for civil and political rights in a language that did not depart from the cult of motherhood, the family and indeed of femininity, and femininity did not sit well with physical force.