The Second Sex (26 page)

In spite of all these difficulties, progress in women’s work continued. In 1900, in France, 900,000 women worked from home making clothes, leather goods, funeral wreaths, purses, beadwork, and Paris souvenirs, but this number diminished considerably. In 1906, 42 percent of working-age women (between eighteen and sixty) worked in farming, industry, business, banks, insurance, offices, and liberal professions. This movement spread to the whole world because of the 1914–18 labor crisis and the world war. The lower middle class and the middle class were determined to follow this movement, and women also invaded the liberal professions. According to one of the last prewar censuses, in France 42 percent of all women between eighteen and sixty worked; in Finland, 37 percent; in Germany, 34.2 percent; in India, 27.7 percent; in England, 26.9 percent; in the Netherlands, 19.2 percent; and in the United States, 17.7 percent. But in France and in India, the high figures reflect the extent of rural labor. Excluding the peasantry, France had in 1940 approximately 500,000 heads of establishments, 1 million female employees, 2 million women workers, and 1.5 million women working alone or unemployed. Among women workers, 650,000 were domestic workers; 1.2 million worked in light industry,
including 440,000 in textiles, 315,000 in clothing, and 380,000 at home in dressmaking. For commerce, liberal professions, and public service, France, England, and the United States ranked about the same.

One of the basic problems for women, as has been seen, is reconciling the reproductive role and productive work. The fundamental reason that woman, since the beginning of history, has been consigned to domestic labor and prohibited from taking part in shaping the world is her enslavement to the generative function. In female animals there is a rhythm of heat and seasons that ensures the economy of their energies; nature, on the contrary, between puberty and menopause, places no limits on women’s gestation. Some civilizations prohibit early marriage; Indian tribes are cited where women are guaranteed a two-year rest period between births; but in general over the centuries, women’s fertility has not been regulated. Contraceptives have existed since antiquity, generally for women’s use—potions, suppositories, or vaginal tampons—but they remained the secrets of prostitutes and doctors; maybe the secret was available to women of the Roman decadence whose sterility satirists reproached.
²
But the Middle Ages knew nothing of them; no trace is found until the eighteenth century. For many women in these times, life was an uninterrupted series of pregnancies; even women of easy virtue paid for their licentious love lives with frequent births. At certain periods, humanity felt the need to reduce the size of the population; but at the same time, nations worried about becoming weak; in periods of crisis and great poverty, postponing marriage lowered the birthrates. The general rule was to marry young and have as many children as the woman could carry, infant mortality alone reducing the number of living children. Already in the seventeenth century, the abbé de Pure protests against the “amorous dropsy” to which women are condemned; and Mme de Sévigné urges her daughter to avoid frequent pregnancies.
³

But it is in the eighteenth century that the Malthusian movement develops in France. First the well-to-do class and then the population in general deem it reasonable to limit the number of children according to parents’
resources, and anticonception procedures begin to enter into social practices. In 1778, Moreau, the demographer, writes, “Rich women are not the only ones who considered the propagation of the species the greatest old-fashioned dupe; these dark secrets, unknown to all animals except man, have already made their way into the countryside; nature is confounded even in the villages.” The practice of coitus interruptus spreads first among the bourgeoisie, then among rural populations and workers; the prophylactic, which already existed as an antivenereal device, becomes a contraceptive device, widespread after the discovery of vulcanization, toward 1840.
⁴

In Anglo-Saxon countries, birth control is official, and numerous methods have been discovered to dissociate these two formerly inseparable functions: the sexual and the reproductive. Viennese medical research, precisely establishing the mechanism of conception and the conditions favorable to it, has also suggested methods for avoiding it. In France contraception propaganda and the sale of pessaries, vaginal tampons, and such are prohibited; but birth control is no less widespread.

As for abortion, it is nowhere officially authorized by law. Roman law granted no special protection to embryonic life; the
nasciturus
was not considered a human being, but part of the woman’s body.
“Partus antequam edatur mulieris portio est vel viscerum.”
⁵

In the era of decadence, abortion seems to have been a normal practice, and even a legislator who wanted to encourage birthrates would never dare to prohibit it. If the woman refused a child against her husband’s will, he could have her punished; but her crime was her disobedience. Generally, in Oriental and Greco-Roman civilization, abortion was allowed by law.

It was Christianity that overturned moral ideas on this point by endowing the embryo with a soul; so abortion became a crime against the fetus itself. “Any woman who does what she can so as not to give birth to as many children as she is capable of is guilty of that many homicides, just as is a woman who tries to injure herself after conception,” says Saint Augustine. In Byzantium, abortion led only to a temporary relegation; for the barbarians who practiced infanticide, it was punishable only if it was carried out by violence, against the mother’s will: it was redeemed by paying blood money. But the first councils issued edicts for the severest penalties against this “homicide,” whatever the presumed age of the fetus. Nonetheless, one question arises that has been the object of infinite discussion: At
what moment does the soul enter the body? Saint Thomas and most other writers settled on life beginning toward the fortieth day for males and the eightieth for females; thus was established a distinction between the animated and the non-animated fetus. A Middle Ages penitential book declares: “If a pregnant woman destroys her fruit before forty-five days, she is subject to a penitence of one year. For sixty days, three years. And finally, if the infant is already animated, she should be tried for homicide.” The book, however, adds: “There is a great difference between a poor woman who destroys her infant for the pain she has to feed it and the one who has no other reason but to hide a crime of fornication.” In 1556, Henry II published a well-known edict on concealing pregnancy; since the death penalty was applied for simple concealment, it followed that the penalty should also apply to abortion maneuvers; in fact, the edict was aimed at infanticide, but it was used to authorize the death penalty for practitioners and accomplices of abortion. The distinction between the quickened and the non-quickened fetus disappeared around the eighteenth century. At the end of the century, Beccaria, a man of considerable influence in France, pleaded in favor of the woman who refuses to have a child. The 1791 code excuses the woman but punishes her accomplices with “twenty years of irons.” The idea that abortion is homicide disappeared in the nineteenth century: it is considered rather to be a crime against the state. The law of 1810 prohibits it absolutely under pain of imprisonment and forced labor for the woman who aborts and her accomplices; but doctors practice abortion whenever it is a question of saving the mother’s life. Because the law is so strict, juries at the end of the century stopped applying it, and few arrests were made, with four-fifths of the accused acquitted. In 1923 a new law is passed, again with forced labor for the accomplices and the practitioner of the operation, but punishing the woman having the abortion with only prison or a fine; in 1939 a new decree specifically targets the technicians: no reprieve would be granted. In 1941 abortion was decreed a crime against state security. In other countries, it is a misdemeanor punishable by a short prison sentence; in England, it is a crime—a felony—punishable by prison or forced labor. Overall, codes and courts are more lenient with the woman having the abortion than with her accomplices. The Church, however, has never relaxed its severity. The March 27, 1917, code of canon law declares: “Those who procure abortions, the mother not excepted, incur excommunication
latae sententiae
, once the result has been obtained, reserved to the Ordinary.” No reason can be invoked, even the danger of the mother’s death. The pope again declared recently that between the mother’s life and the child’s the former must be
sacrificed: the fact is, the mother, being baptized, can enter heaven—curiously, hell never enters into these calculations—while the fetus is condemned to perpetual limbo.
⁶

Abortion was officially recognized, but only for a short time, in Germany before Nazism and in the Soviet Union before 1936. But in spite of religion and laws, it has been practiced in all countries to a large extent. In France, every year 800,000 to 1 million abortions are performed—as many as births—and two-thirds of the women are married, many already having one or two children. In spite of the prejudices, resistance, and an outdated morality, unregulated fertility has given way to fertility controlled by the state or individuals. Progress in obstetrics has considerably decreased the dangers of childbirth; childbirth pain is disappearing; at this time—March 1949—legislation has been passed in England requiring the use of certain anesthetic methods; they are already generally applied in the United States and are beginning to spread in France. With artificial insemination, the evolution that will permit humanity to master the reproductive function comes to completion. These changes have tremendous importance for woman in particular; she can reduce the number of pregnancies and rationally integrate them into her life, instead of being their slave. During the nineteenth century, woman in her turn is freed from nature; she wins control of her body. Relieved of a great number of reproductive servitudes, she can take on the economic roles open to her, roles that would ensure her control over her own person.

The convergence of these two factors—participation in production and freedom from reproductive slavery—explains the evolution of woman’s condition. As Engels predicted, her social and political status necessarily had to change. The feminist movement begun in France by Condorcet and in England by Mary Wollstonecraft in
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
, and followed up at the beginning of the century by the Saint-Simonians, never succeeded for lack of a concrete base. But now women’s claims would have ample weight. They would be heard even
within the heart of the bourgeoisie. With the rapid development of industrial civilization, landed property is falling behind in relation to personal property: the principle of family group unity is losing force. The mobility of capital allows its holder to own and dispose of his wealth without reciprocity instead of being held by it. Through patrimony, woman was substantially attached to her husband: with patrimony abolished, they are only juxtaposed, and even children do not constitute as strong a bond as interest. Thus, the individual will assert himself against the group; this evolution is particularly striking in America, where modern capitalism has triumphed: divorce is going to flourish, and husbands and wives are no more than provisional associates. In France, where the rural population is large and where the Napoleonic Code placed the married woman under guardianship, evolution will be slow. In 1884, divorce was restored, and a wife could obtain it if the husband committed adultery; nonetheless, in the penal area, sexual difference was maintained: adultery was an offense only when perpetrated by the wife. The right of guardianship, granted with restrictions in 1907, was fully granted only in 1917. In 1912, the right to determine natural paternity was authorized. It was not until 1938 and 1942 that the married woman’s status was modified: the duty of obedience was then abrogated, although the father remains the family head; he determines the place of residence, but the wife can oppose his choice if she advances valid arguments; her powers are increasing; but the formula is still confused: “The married woman has full legal powers. These powers are only limited by the marriage contract and law”; the last part of the article contradicts the first. The equality of spouses has not yet been achieved.

As for political rights, they have not easily been won in France, England, or the United States. In 1867, John Stuart Mill pleaded the first case ever officially pronounced before Parliament in favor of the vote for women. In his writings he imperiously demanded equality of men and women in the family and society: “The principle which regulates the existing social relations between the two sexes—the legal subordination of one sex to the other—is wrong in itself, and now one of the chief hindrances to human improvement; and … it ought to be replaced by a principle of perfect equality.”
^*
After that, English women organized politically under Mrs. Fawcett’s leadership; French women rallied behind Maria Deraismes, who between 1868 and 1871 dealt with women’s issues in a series of public lectures; she joined in the lively controversy against Alexandre Dumas fils,
who advised the husband of an unfaithful wife, “Kill her.” Léon Richer was the true founder of feminism; in 1869 he launched
Le Droit des Femmes (The Rights of Women
) and organized the International Congress of Women’s Rights, held in 1878. The question of the right to vote was not yet dealt with; women limited themselves to claiming civil rights; for thirty years the movement remained timid in France and in England. Nonetheless, a woman, Hubertine Auclert, started a suffragette campaign; she created a group called Women’s Suffrage and a newspaper,
La Citoyenne
. Many groups were organized under her influence, but they accomplished little. This weakness of feminism stemmed from its internal division; as already pointed out, women as a sex lack solidarity: they are linked to their classes first; bourgeois and proletarian interests do not intersect. Revolutionary feminism adhered to the Saint-Simonian and Marxist tradition; it is noteworthy, moreover, that a certain Louise Michel spoke against feminism because it diverted the energy that should be used entirely for class struggle; with the abolition of capital the lot of woman will be resolved.