“Calm, with a Grave and Serious Temperament, rather Male”: French Marxism, Gender and Feminism, 1882–1905

Abstract

SummaryThis article argues that historians have underestimated the importance and complexity of Marxists' engagement with feminism during the introduction of their doctrine into the French socialist movement before the First World War. It examines the ideological discourse of the Parti Ouvrier Français, the embodiment of Marxism in France from 1882 to 1905, in order to reveal the ambiguities and contradictions of the French Marxists' approach to the “woman question” – seeking to explicate the puzzling coincidence in the movement's rhetoric of a firmly feminist commitment to women's rights with an equally intransigent hostility to organized feminism.