Flora Tristan (1803-1844)—International Women’s Day 2025
Before Marx, there was Tristan
I call for woman’s rights because I am convinced that all the misfortunes in the world come from this neglect and scorn shown until now for the natural and inalienable rights of woman. I call for woman’s rights because it is the only way to have her educated, and woman’s education depends upon man’s in general, and particularly the working-class man’s. I call for woman’s rights because it is the only way to obtain her rehabilitation before the church, the law, and society, and this rehabilitation is necessary before working men themselves can be rehabilitated.
- Flora Tristan, L’Union ouvrière (The Workers’ Union), trans. Beverly Livingston1
With this 2025 International Women’s Day passing, yet another one, let us remember Flora Tristan (1803-1844), who preceded Marx in arguing for workers to unite in their collective interests against their exploitation. Five years before Marx and Engels’s 1848 Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei (Communist Manifesto), in 1843, Tristan wrote “Workers of the world unite!” in her L’Union ouvrière (The Workers’ Union). At this time, when he was about twenty-five, Marx remained a liberal democrat. In her work, Tristan conceptualized a labor union that would give the workers both political and economic power, where, together, their contributions could apply to any collective purpose in favor of their betterment. Although Marx was aware of Tristan’s work before him, he actually chose not to recognize her—perhaps due to her Christian theological perspective on socialism.
Flora Tristan saw in women the force which would either keep the whole working class back or lead it forward. She knew what a political deadweight a mass of ignorant women, brutalized by oppression, could be. She had on several occasions been insulted by such women, who resented her efforts to organize them, and her influence over their men.
- Marie M. Collins and Sylvie Weil-Sayre, “Flora Tristan: Forgotten Feminist and Socialist,” Nineteenth-Century French Studies, vol. 1, no. 4, Summer 19732
Excerpts from Flora Tristan, L’Union ouvrière (The Workers’ Union), 1843, trans. Beverly Livingston, 1983, 75, 77-80, 82-83.
Workers, you my brothers, for whom I work with love, because you represent the most vital, numerous, and useful part of humanity, and because from that point of view I find my own satisfaction in serving your cause, I beg you earnestly to read this with the greatest attention. For, you must be persuaded, it concerns your material interests to understand why when I mention women I always designate them as female workers or all the women.
* * *
What happened to the proletariat, it must be agreed, is a good omen for women when their “1789” rings out. According to a very simple calculation, it is obvious that wealth will increase immeasurably on the day women are called upon to participate with their intelligence, strength, and ability in the social process. This is as easy to understand as two is the double of one. But, alas! We are not yet there. Meanwhile, let us take a look at what is happening in 1843.
The Church having said that woman was sin; the lawmaker that by herself she was nothing, that she was to enjoy no rights; the learned philosopher that by her constitution she had no intellect, it was concluded that she is a poor being disinherited by God; so men and society treated her as such.
Once woman’s inferiority was proclaimed and postulated, notice what disastrous consequences resulted for the universal wellbeing of all men and women.
Those who believed that woman by nature lacked the strength, intelligence, and capacity to do serious and useful work, very logically deduced that it would be a waste of time to give her a rational, solid, and strict education, the kind that would make her a useful member of society. So she has been raised to be a nice doll and a slave destined for amusing and serving her master. In truth, from time to time some intelligent, sensitive men, showing empathy with their mothers, wives, and daughters, have cried out against the barbarity and absurdity of such an order of things, energetically protesting against such an iniquitous condemnation.
On several occasions, society has been moved for a moment; but when pushed by logic, has replied, “Well then! Let us suppose that women are not what the wise men have believed, that they have great moral strength and intelligence. Well, in that case, what good would it be to develop their faculties, since they would not be able to employ them usefully in this society which rejects them? What an awful torture, to feel one has force and power to act, and to see oneself condemned to inaction!” This reasoning was irrefutably true.
So everyone repeated, “It’s true, women would suffer too much if their God-given talents were developed, if from childhood on they were raised to understand their dignity and to be conscious of their value as members of society. Then never would they be able to bear the degradation imposed upon them by the Church, the law, and prejudice. It is better to treat them like children and leave them in the dark about themselves: they will suffer less.”
Follow closely, and you will see what horrible consequences result from accepting a false premise.
In order not to stray too far from my subject, even though it is a good opportunity to speak from a general standpoint, I am returning to the question of the working class.
In the life of the workers, woman is everything. She is their sole providence. If she is gone, they lack everything. So they say, “It is woman who makes or unmakes the home,” and this is the clear truth: that is why it has become a proverb. However, what education, instruction, direction, moral or physical development does the working-class woman receive? None. As a child, she is left to the mercy of a mother and grandmother who also have received no education. One of them might have a brutal and wicked disposition and beat and mistreat her for no reason; the other might be weak and uncaring, and let her do anything. (As with everything I am suggesting, I am speaking in general terms; of course, there are numerous exceptions.) The poor child will be raised among the most shocking contradictions—hurt by unfair blows and treatment one day, then pampered and spoiled no less perniciously the next.
Instead of being sent to school, she is kept at home in deference to her brothers and so that she can share in the housework, rock the baby, run errands, or watch the soup, etc. At the age of twelve she is made an apprentice. There she continues to be exploited by her mistress and often continues to be as mistreated as she was at home.
Nothing embitters the character, hardens the heart, or makes the spirit so mean as the continuous suffering a child endures from unfair and brutal treatment. First, the injustice hurts, afflicts, and causes despair; then when it persists, it irritates and exasperates us and finally, dreaming only of revenge, we end up by becoming hardened, unjust, and wicked. Such will be the normal condition for a poor girl of twenty. Then she will marry, without love, simply because one must marry in order to get out from under parental tyranny. What will happen? I suppose she will have children, and she, in turn, will be unable to raise them suitably. She will be just as brutal to them as her mother and grandmother were to her.
* * *
I repeat, woman is everything in the life of a worker. As mother, she can influence him during his childhood. She and only she is the one from whom he gets his first notions of that science which is so important to acquire the science of life, which teaches us how to live well for ourselves and for others, according to the milieu in which fate has placed us. As lover, she can influence him during his youth, and what a powerful influence could be exerted by a young, beautiful, and beloved girl! As wife, she can have an effect on him for three-quarters of his life. Finally, as daughter, she can act upon him in his old age.
Note that the worker’s position is very different from an idle person’s. If the rich child has a mother unable to raise him, he is placed in a boarding school or given a governess. If the young rich fellow has no mistress, he can busy his heart and imagination with studying the arts and sciences. If the rich man has no spouse, he does not fail to find distractions in society. If the old rich man has no daughter, he finds some old friends or young nephews who willingly come and play cards with him; whereas the worker, for whom all these pleasures are denied, has only the company of the women in his family, his companions in misfortune, for all his joy and solace.
The result of this situation is that it would be most important, from the point of view of intellectually, morally, and materially improving the working class, that the women receive from childhood a rational and solid education, apt to develop all their potential so that they can become skilled in their trades, good mothers capable of raising and guiding their children and to be for them, as La Presse says, free and natural schoolteachers, and also so that they can serve as moralizing agents for the men whom they influence from birth to death.
Are you beginning to understand, you men, who cry scandal before being willing to examine the issue, why I demand rights for women? Why I would like women placed in society on a footing of absolute equality with men to enjoy the legal birthright all beings have? I call for woman’s rights because I am convinced that all the misfortunes in the world come from this neglect and scorn shown until now for the natural and inalienable rights of woman. I call for woman’s rights because it is the only way to have her educated, and woman’s education depends upon man’s in general, and particularly the working-class man’s. I call for woman’s rights because it is the only way to obtain her rehabilitation before the church, the law, and society, and this rehabilitation is necessary before working men themselves can be rehabilitated. All working-class ills can be summed up in two words: poverty and ignorance. Now in order to get out of this maze, I see only one way: begin by educating women, because the women are in charge of instructing boys and girls.
Workers, in the current state of things, you know what goes on in your households. You, the master with rights over your wife, do you live with her with a contented heart? Say, are you happy? No, it is easy to see, in spite of your rights, you are neither contented nor happy. Between master and slave there can only be the weariness of the chain’s weight tying them together. Where the lack of freedom is felt, happiness cannot exist.
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Flora Tristan, L’Union ouvrière (The Workers’ Union), trans. Beverly Livingston, 1983 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 83.
Marie M. Collins and Sylvie Weil-Sayre, “Flora Tristan: Forgotten Feminist and Socialist,” Nineteenth-Century French Studies 1, no. 4 (Summer 1973), 234.