DEROIN, JEANNE (1805–94)

DEROIN, JEANNE (1805–94)

Jeanne Deroin was a world pioneer in her campaign for votes for women in France. A seamstress with little formal schooling, in 1831 Deroin was introduced to the Saint- Simonian sect by her future husband, Desroches, the bursar of an old people’s home. All acolytes were required to sign a statement of their beliefs and most wrote a fairly standard single sentence. Deroin covered forty-four pages in a school exercise book in the cramped and variable script of someone to whom writing did not come easily. She asserted that gender inequalities were mere inventions of male-dominated society. Contemporary marriage consecrated their inferior status. ‘A slave can at least hope for freedom. A woman finds hers only in death.’ Saint-Simonianism restored her faith that universal fraternity could be achieved, with its opposition to privileges of birth, the call for the liberation of women and the moral, physical and intellectual progress of working people. On the other hand, even at the outset, she was alarmed at the hierarchical structure of the movement and disenchantment was swift.

In 1832 Deroin joined a number of former Saint-Simonian working women to run the first-ever newspaper for women, La Femme libre. She spent the rest of the July Monarchy raising her three children, attending evening classes, qualifying and practising

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as a teacher. Some of her fellow journalists became Fourierists and after the 1848 Revolution they reunited to run a feminist newspaper and club, La Voix desfemmes. They pressed for higher wages for women, nurseries and better education for girls but Deroin was almost alone in petitioning for votes for women to match male suffrage. She was not prepared to tolerate that half the nation be left under the domination of the other half. This demand and the attempt to restore the right to divorce were scorned by the conservative press. The Voix des femmes club and newspaper were attacked for their support for divorce with such force that the paper was suspended and both were shut down.

Deroin launched a ‘Course on Social Law for Women’ and she and Desirée Gay briefly set up the Association Mutuelle des Femmes and a new paper, La Politique des femmes . This was succeeded in August 1848 by Deroin’s L’Opinion des femmes, which was forced to close in August 1849 by an increase in caution money to 5,000 francs. The brief of L’Opinion des femmes was to secure political and full legal rights for women together with better working conditions. Deroin also founded an Association of Socialist Teachers, which included men and women.

Deroin stood as a candidate in the 1849 legislative elections. She tried to attend the hustings and the workers in Saint-Antoine were sympathetic. The Comité Démocrate Sociale added her to their list of candidates. However, the most well-known woman socialist, George Sand, continued to consider female suffrage premature. Apart from CONSIDÉRANT, few male socialists were supportive. PROUDHON was totally hostile.

Like most early socialists Deroin was convinced that the answers to social and economic problems were education and association. She gave classes in her Women’s Mutual Education Society. She started a Fraternal Association of Democratic Socialists of both sexes for the liberation of women. In July 1849 she and Gay were granted 12,000 francs to set up an association of women seamstresses making ladies underwear from the fund established by the National Assembly to encourage workers’ associations.

Her most ambitious project was the formation with Pauline Roland of an Association Fraternelle et Solidaire de Toutes les Associations. Linking together over a hundred existing workers’ associations, it aimed to provide tools, raw materials and interest-free loans for its members. Deroin hoped to add mutual aid benefits, nurseries and schools. However, after the June Days, 1848, the right of association was progressively withdrawn. In May 1850 the association’s offices were raided and forty-six members were arrested. Whilst in prison Deroin continued her political activities, in particular vainly defending the right of women to petition Parliament. When she was released in June 1851, she supported herself by teaching, and struggled to reunite her family. Her husband had developed a serious mental illness from which he never recovered. Warned that she was likely to be rearrested, in August 1852 she fled to England with her two younger children, one of whom was a permanent invalid. Fellow exiles found her work teaching and embroidering. Her husband developed typhoid fever and died before he could join her.

Deroin remained in London for the rest of her life. In 1861 she set up a tiny girls’ boarding school, but it did not survive. Deroin charged very low fees and gave free places to girls from poor families. When most of the exiles returned to France in 1870–1, they persuaded the new republican regime to grant Deroin a pension of 600 francs a year. Deroin maintained a lively correspondence with feminist reformers in France, sometimes

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writing during lesson time and occasionally submitting newspaper articles written on school exercise-book paper.

She published three women’s almanacs during her exile. The first was published in Paris in 1852, the second and third in London and Jersey in 1853 and 1854. All were published in French and the second also appeared simultaneously in English. The tone of her feminism became increasingly spiritual. Women, she asserted, had a crucial role as social evangelists in workers’ co-operatives and mutual-aid groups. She believed that women alone, reborn by the spirit of love, liberty and justice, could reform society and turn social science into a new universal religion uniting all of humanity in love.

Léon Richer, who founded the Association for the Rights of Women in 1870, publicized the almanacs in the National de l’ouest and other newspapers. Through him Deroin made contact with Madame Arnaud. In 1886 she corresponded with Hubertine Auclert (1848–1914), a leading young feminist, but socialist feminism meant very different things to Auclert. In her eighties Deroin became involved in WILLIAM MORRIS’s Socialist League. He gave the oration at her very well-attended civil funeral.