“Impression, I was sure! "" Monsieur Braque reduced everything to cubes! "Impressionism and cubism, as we know, owe their name to the mockery of art critics who did not appreciate it ...

The curious and instructive history of the word "feminism"

Paris, February 2020 © Olivier Favier

Text by: Olivier Favier

6 mins

“Impression, I was sure!

"" Monsieur Braque reduced everything to cubes!

Impressionism and Cubism, as we know, owe their name to the mockery of art critics who did not appreciate its novelty.

The same was true of feminism, which first described, both literally and figuratively, the loss of virile characteristics in some men.

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The legend dies hard.

On the

computerized treasury of the French language

, we find as the first meaning of the word "feminism" a quote from the French philosopher Charles Fourier, dated the year of his death in 1837 and taken from a book by Marcel Braunschwig: "

D

octrine aiming at the extension of the role of women

”, a definition undoubtedly a little reductive, but close to the direction which one gives it today.

The study in question refers to other works or articles, none of which provides details on the source, and for good reason ... The bisontin philosopher, author of the

Theory of four movements and general destinies

, did not never employed and never had knowledge of it.

Utopian socialism and

feminism:

a complex link

Despite this, confusion is still found in relatively recent editions of Robert and in the Encyclopedia Universalis, which is content to cast doubts on this attribution.

However, several academic articles have done justice to this credible, but invented, origin.

Charles Fourier dreamed, it is true, of establishing a new order of love, loved neologisms and wrote many things in the genre of this famous quote, rather surprising from the pen of a thinker of the nineteenth century: "

The happiness of the a man, in love, is proportioned to the liberty enjoyed by women.

Nevertheless, if he really wanted "

the extension of the role of women

", he hardly imagined the men taking part in the domestic tasks and the day-to-day family life.

Despite its limitations, many women eager for emancipation often referred, at least until the Paris Commune in 1871, to its writings and to those of the thinker Saint-Simon, which were grouped together under the label of " utopian socialists ”.

On the other hand, they had to fight against a third thinker who is often associated with them, Joseph Proudhon, whose proverbial misogyny largely participated in the defiance of activists for women's rights towards other social movements, which sometimes turned out to be of concern to them. hardly less retrograde than their conservative or liberal opponents.

The arrival of Marxism, with figures like August Bebel or Friedrich Engels in Germany, or on the reformist side Anna Kuliscioff in Italy, saw some attempts to combine the struggle of women with that of the workers.

But the equation was also far from systematic.

Along the way, feminism learned to exist as an end in itself.

From medical to political

Let's go back to the origin of the term.

It does appear in France, but 150 years ago, in a thesis entitled

Du feminisme et de l'Infantilisme chez les tuberculaires.

The meaning of the word, it will be understood, is then not at all political or social, but medical and biological: it describes the "feminine" characteristics that appear in a man due to tuberculosis which disrupts growth (d 'where the curious use for us of the term "infantilism") and an incomplete "masculinization".

Ironically, the author of this thesis, published in January 1871, is a disciple of Charles Fourier.

He was to die on the barricades of the Commune in May of the same year, without knowing the curious fortune of his neologism.

The following year, all of Paris fell in love with the Du Bourg affair, a jealous and feminicide husband.

The man was sentenced to five years in prison and the sentence, however light, caused a scandal: in this kind of business, acquittal is the order of the day.

The humiliation of defeat and the massacres of the Commune are on everyone's mind.

It is fashionable to accuse the women of the moral decadence of the time, as well as the “oil women”, the supposed arsonists of the center of Paris during the Bloody Week, who in reality never existed.

The polemicist Alexandre Dumas fils prefers to call them "

females, out of respect for the women who they look like when they are dead

Faced with this very conservative “moral order”, activists for women's rights have drawn from the recent revolutionary episode a greater force of protest than they know how to make heard.

The outcome of the Du Bourg affair bears witness to this.

From feminicide to feminism

The reaction is all the more violent.

Alexandre Dumas fils, always him, then splits a pamphlet steeped in clichés and resentment, a staggering misogyny.

And this is where the word feminism takes on its current meaning: "

Feminists, give me this neologism, say

: All the harm comes from the fact that we do not want to recognize that women are equal to men. , that he must be given the same education and the same rights as he is.
(…) We will allow ourselves to answer the feminists that what they say does not make any sense.

It will be noted that for him the feminist is a man, or rather a

man-woman

to use the title of his pamphlet, in other words, someone who, morally, politically this time, would have lost the attributes of his sex.

The conclusion of the pamphlet, a "

Kill her

!"

»Addressed to present and future Du Bourgs, will make this bad dishcloth a scandalous success.

Ten years later, the term feminism, carried in particular by Maria Deraismes, becomes in common use among activists.

It crossed the Channel in 1894. In 2016 and 2017, it is the word whose definition is the most searched on the Internet in the United States.

It now sums up one of the greatest struggles for emancipation in human history, the only one, precisely, which will never have killed.

To read :

► On RFI Savoirs, the “Women: centuries and struggles” dossier.

► Bibia Pavard, Florence Rochefort, Michelle Zancarini-Fournel,

Don't free us, we'll take care of it.
A history of feminisms from 1789 to the present day
, La Découverte, 2021. 17.99 euros.

► Has just been republished by Gallimard, Édith Thomas' book, Les “Pétroleuses”, Edition prefaced and enriched by Chloé Leprince, Folio history collection (n ° 305).

The curious and instructive history of the word "feminism"

The curious and instructive history of the word "feminism"

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