Garlic seller, garlic eater, garlic muncher (Click to see).
Persilleuse
Parseley-eater, To go down to the salad cellar (cunnilingus).
Puce travailleuse
Lesbian.
Rivette
Same as male homosexual "aunte" or "tant", but for lesbians.
Satin
Lesbian.
Suce-lentille , lécheuse
To go down upon.
Vrille
Tendril. Passive lesbian (gougnotte).
As with anything that is of a sexual nature, many more words and phrases
exist, of a more explicit sexual nature. The above glossary is of commonly
used terms.
The French Revolution and Women's Clubs
"On 30 October 1793 the National Convention outlawed all 'clubs and popular
societies of women.' Two weeks later the Paris Commune upheld Chaumette's
proposal to bar women from its sessions as well. ... Moreover, as Dominique
Godineau has argued, Jacobin leaders such as Fabre d'Eglantine, Amar, and
Chabot sought to suppress the Parisian women's club in part because the women's
political appeal for direct democracy was too radical for the Jacobin deputies,
who preferred representative democracy and who would move next to take power
away from male sansculottes. But although the political and economic dynamics
of the fall of 1793 certainly influenced the repression of women's organizations
by the National Convention and the Paris Commune, clearly this move was part of
a broader attempt to draw a clear-cut line between public and private and to
reestablish order in male and female roles and character. Order between the
sexes was necessary to reestablish sme social order within the republic.
Analysis of the reception of the provincial women's clubs helps to explain the
Jacobin move to exclude women from political power. For even the most docile
women's provincial clubs, which got along quite well with their male Jacobin
compatriots, faced a marked ambivolence, more than occasional satire, and the
continual suggestions of possible impropriety. Womens participation in public
poliitics, their appeal for the politicization of intimate relationships, and
their questioning of 'natural' female characteristics provoked corresponding
critiques of female disorder and irrationality, an appeal for women's return
to domesticity, and bitter attacks on female sexuality and morality.
Paradoxically, the moral power and sensibilité attributed to women were
both their strength and the source of the vulnerability that led to their downfall.
Generally, the assault on provincial women's clubs contained several dominant
characteristics. First, many men, and some women as well, viewed with mistrust
the public role of women and argued that women had no need or ability to
participate in the official creation of the republic. Rather they should stay
at home and raise their children as patriots, particularly since their apparent
proclivity for hysteria made them too irrational to be public political actors.
The left-wing journalist Prudhome, for example, in his Révolutions de
Paris attacked the Jaobin women's clubs of Lyon and Dijon in this way: 'Why
did they give themselves a president? Why hold sessions according to proper
procedures? Why keep a register of their deliberations in these sessions? ...
Why have they asked the departmental, district, and municipal administrators to
witness the holding of these sessions?' Calling the clubs a 'plague to mothers
of good families,' he urged women to stay home, otherwise 'there will be clubs
everywhere, and soon there will be no good housekeeping anywhere."
1
.
...
.
"In some cases critics of the women's societies warned that women were becoming
masculinized. In 1791 Pauline Siro of Pau organized an all-female festival
against the wishes of the municipality, which pointed out the 'anomaly of such
a ceremony' and denounced its potential 'danger...as cause and occasion for
disorder.' When the 'open war [between] the respectable amazons and the
municipality of Pau,' as one journalist put it, escalated into a pamphlet battle
raging as far away as Paris, Pauline Siro was subjected to endless sexually
loaded attacks about her illicit union with the Constitutional bishop. But one
anonymous pamphleteer in particular denounced this female 'grenadier' and
prolaimed that if all women folloed Pauline Siro, 'there will be no more women;
and in this case what will become of us?' The women of Pau, attacked by local
authorities and undermined by popular opinion, disbanded their club. At least
in the revolutionary archives, the women remained silent. But the questioning
of female virtue, with its threatening implication that women had become
masculinized, would be forcefully echoed two years later: Chaumette proclaimed
in the Paris Commune in November 1793, 'It is contrary to all the laws of
nature for a woman to want to make herself a man. The Council must recall that
some time ago these denatured women, these viragos, wandering through
the markets with the red cap to sully that badge of liberty....Since when is
it permitted to give up one's sex?' 2
Thus by 1791, the Bourgeois counter-revolution was firmly in the saddle, attacking
women's rights, especially women's clubs.
"...[O]ur notions of so-called progressive developments, such
as classical Athenian civilization, the Renaissance, and the
French Revolution, undergo a startling re-evaluation. For women,
'progress' in Athens meant concubinage and confinement of citizen
wives in the gynecaeum. In Renaissance Europe it meant domestication
of the bourgeois wife and escalation of witchcraft persecution which
crossed class lines. And Revolution expressly excluded women from
its liberty, equality, and 'fraternity.'" 3
"Italy was well in advance of the rest of Europe from roughly 1350 to
1530 because of its early consolidation of genuine states, the mercantile
and manufacturing economy that supported them, and its working out of
postfeudal and even postguild social relations. These developments
reorganized Italian society along modern lines ... Yet precisely these
developments affected women adversely, so much so that there was no
renaissance for women – at least, not during the Renaissance."
Women suffered a contraction of social and personal options of their
classes that men of their classes did not or did not experience as
markedly as the male boureoisie or the nobility. Criteria to guage the
relative contraction of women's rights: 4
Regulation of female sexuality compared to male sexuality.
Women's economic and political roles (kind of work performed).
Access to property, political power, education or training
(work, property, power).
Ideology (sex-roles).
Early feminists such as Christine de Pisan (1364-1430?) to Mary
Wollstonecraft (1759–1797) felt that the sexes are culturally,
not just biologically determined. Mary Wollstonecraft felt that
both men and women should be treated as rational beings and
imagines a society in which both men and women reason.
5
Mysogynous views expressed that women were rationally defective,
could not govern, nor could they be learned. 6
Who might suggest that women were inferior to men by nature
and by what authority? Christine de Pisan wrote her book on the
education of women for Margaret of Burgundy as she was about to
marry the French dauphin, and Mary Astell (1666–1731), well known
for saying "If all men are born free, how is it
that all women are born slaves?", directed her proposal for
a woman's college to the future Queen Anne, etc. Astell objected
to John Locke's deistic views, freeing scientific thought from
scripture and Church superstition. 7
Recall, John Locke's use of the bible as a foundation for amerindian
genocide, rejecting anthropological views of Freiherr Samuel von
Pufendorf (1632–1694). Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and Thomas
Jefferson were familiar with the views of Pufendorf, implimenting
the actual seizure of amerindian lands, using scripture as precedent.
8 Johann Gottfried von Herder
(1744–1803) parted ways with his teacher, Immanuel Kant: Herder felt
anthropological views were essential, Kant explicitly preferred racism.
Thus Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and Thomas Jefferson still preferred
amerindian genocide: the legacy of the United States. Wither women's rights
in the Unites States?
Thus women were placed into a position of economic dependency, but also
as cutural dependency by being denied legal redress as well as any
opportunity to be educated: women were viewed as incapable of
reason. This was the situation during the
Renaissance until the French Revolution. As pointed out, after the
French Revoltion, the counter revolution attempted to re-enslave
women. A little more detail after the French
Revolution.
A typical post French Revolution view of women is represented by the
views of Sylvain Maréchal: women should be prohibited from learning
to read or write as women were not able to reason, by nature.
9 In 1801, Sylvain Maréchal
published a pamplet "Projet d'une loi portant défense d'apprendre
à lire aux femmes" (Proposed law prohibiting women from learning to
read). The views presented were elaborated: Provision 7:
What was to be prohibited was Reading, writing, engraving,
chanting, singing, painting. 10
Provision 1: Reason desires a woman (unmarried,
married, or widowed) never have her nose in a book nor a pen in her hand.
11 Why? Nature.
Article 4: "with her first lesson a young woman is
forced to take her first step away from her nature." Article 5:
What is "nature"? "The intention of good and wise Nature is that women should
be occupied exclusively with domestic chores and should find honor in holding
in their hands, not a book or quill, but a distaff and a spindle."
12
Article 26: Reading is dangerous because it leads
directly to writing, thus novels, satires, political essays. All that a woman
may know is French grammar. Provision 4: Grammar
means nature, thus truth. Article 45: Public
culture was refused women as a means of precluding any rivalry between husband
and wife. 13, 14
Sylvain Maréchal felt that, aside from grammar (that would dull a woman's
mind, thus was acceptable), women could sew (use a needle), and weave (spindle
and distaff), and Maréchal's views were amended to include practice of
penmanship. 15
Woman has the right to practical reason, as Rousseau had already said, but not
to theoretical reason, pure reason. Kant's view is not very different: woman,
a dependent being, can have knowledge of means but not of ends.
16 As Rousseau, the Enlightenment
(sic!) figure said: The political woman citizen is shameless because, following
man's example, she participates in the body politic, votes, and is eligible for
office. The woman soldier would obviously be shameless as well. The "shamelessness"
is figurative: it does not stem from the act of revealing the body or displaying
loose morals but rather from appearing outside, in the public space.
17 Women must not be Gynographs.
18 Although "logic" might be viewed
as nothing but rhetoric, Maréchal's views are simply nonsense, not worth
refuting. However, how women were viewed and what rights women had is clearly
displyed here.
1
Ragan, Bryant, Jr.; Williams, Elizabeth; (Eds.),
"Re-creating Authority in Revolutionary France", pp. 30-31
2
ibid., p. 34
3
Kelly, Joan;, "Women, History, and Theory: The Essays of Joan Kelly", p. 3
4
ibid., pp. 19, 20
5
ibid., p. 67
6
ibid., p. 83
7
ibid., pp. 92, 93
8
Arneil, Barbara; "John Locke and America: The Defence of English Colonialism"
9
Fraisse, Geneviève; "Reason's Muse: Sexual
Difference and the Birth of Democracy", translated
by Jane Marie Todd, pp. ix, xi
10
ibid., p. 2
11
ibid., p. 6
12
ibid., p. 10
13
ibid., p. 11
14
ibid., p. 13
15
ibid., p. 14, 16
16
ibid., p. 17
17
ibid., p. 21
18
ibid., p. 23, Gynographs are women that write French novels.
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