History of the women

The history of the women is a branch of the history devoted to the study of the women as a social group, appeared in the years 1970 and closely related to the fights Féministe S. Of many authors indeed note the absence of “historicity” of the studies on the women. What they analyze as a process of deshistoricisation is a phenomenon which tries to deny any historical process influencing the female condition and which is based for that on real and historical invariants. The history of the women should thus rest on what Pierre Bourdieu calls a “reconstitution of the history of the historical work of deshistoricisation”.

From the feminist point of view, until the middle of the 20th century, the Western companies grant a treatment supporting the men and fixing the women, as well from the point of view of the Droit as of the customs and habits. Indeed, traditions grant particular importance to social role of Housewife, which must be devoted to the pieces of housework, the reproduction and the education of the children, which does not exclude however the exercise from a Profession, in particular since the Industrial revolution.

The idea of the equality of the sexes is not essential like recently, but the women knew quite front to benefit from historical conditions to free itself from the constraints and differences which are imposed to them. One could not however speak about a continuous evolution of the female condition towards the emancipation, because its history is punctuated by the important ones of movements of beam, including during the revolutionary periods. Thus, the Reform, in the religious field, but also the French revolution and socialisms, in spite of their claims émancipatrices, will often try to return them to the hearth. This last contradiction explains according to Andrée Michel the birth of the Féminisme.

Origins

According to certain feminists, like Monica Walsh, the companies of the Préhistoire would have known forms to be able matriarcal, founded on the worship of the " Large Déesse". They are the women who would have invented agriculture. However, they would have suffered from the second Neolithic revolution , at the origin of the sedentarisation, but also of the war delivered to nature and to the other people. Especially, the Indo-European invaders would have carried a fatal blow to the matriarchy. Claudine Cohen notices however that the worship of the mother can exist in companies Misogyne S, and that nothing really makes it possible to say " what in the rare vestiges of prehistory arose with the activity of one or the other sex ". The anthropologist Francoise Héritier worked on this point.

The Mediterranean companies of the Antiquité gave to the woman a not very enviable fate, except for the Étrusques. With the IIe century a. J. - C. the emperor Marc-Aurèle delivers the Roman woman of the institution of the manus, which made some until there minor perpetual. Without enjoying any political right, it can from now on divorce and remarier, and it is entitled to the same share of the paternal heritage as her brothers. Names like that of " matrone" are the index of a social status without common measurement with that of the Greek woman, locked up in the Gynécée.

Openings and closing

The Christianisme confers on the woman an ambivalent statute. Like the Virgin Mary, it is necessary for him, at the bottom, to combine the purity and maternity.

They were their wives who converted the cruel kings with Christianity. Appeared at the 6th century, the Convent, guarantor of material safety, represent also the possibility of a spiritual and intellectual life. The abbesses exerted a power equal to that of the abbots, and sometimes of the bishops. However, the Church, as of the 11th century and the Gregorian reforms, endeavoured to limit the number of the nuns and to eliminate the capacity from the women in her center. If the crumbling of the empire Carolingien had made it possible a great number of noble women to reach the political power and economic, even military, the centralization of the State of the 12th century their farm this prospect, notes A. Michel. Éléonore of Aquitaine (1133-1204) played however in England and Aquitaine a political role, then cultural, essential.

Especially, of the 14th century at the 16th century, the women see themselves confiscating by the men the majority of the professions and functions to which they had access, in particular the exercise of popular medicine. The Guilde S of artisanes are eliminated. The Misogyny of the treaties of moral theology of the 14th century and 15th century is wild; persecution against the " sorcières" fact of tens of thousands of victims. Christine de Pisan (1364-1430) pleads in this climate the cause of the women, in particular that of Jeanne d' Arc. Neither humanism nor the reform improve the statute of the woman. Luther dissolves the religious communities. His own wife, Katherine von Bora, gives the example of the return of the housewife. In France, at the 16th century, the married woman becomes juridically unable. Marie de Gournay (1566-1645), adopted girl of Montaigne, expresses its anger in the Equality of the men and the women and the objection of the women .

The modern and contemporary period

Seventeenth with the nineteenth century, the increased importance attached to the family life and the child has contradictory consequences on the statute of the woman. Its role in education is clearly recognized. The topic of the Péché replaces that of the female nature, more carried to the feelings, the love, than with the reason. But that also means that the woman must confine herself with her role of wife and mother (Rousseau, Kant). In the Living rooms, the ladies of the aristocracy as the marchioness of Rambouillet reign on the intellectual life. Appears the type of the science or woman of letters, but also of the Bas-bleu or the invaluable one. Condorcet theorizes the equality of the sexes.

If the women take an active part in the French revolution, the claims of some, as Olympe de Gouges, author of the Déclaration of the women's rights , are not taken into account by the Conventional ones - it will finish besides on the scaffold. The Civil code French of 1804 will reflect this conservatism. Like G notes it. Strawberry, certain women will have however on the occasion to express a political will, to become aware of their own problems, at the same time as of their desire to belong to the new business in the capacity as active member. The Féminisme from now on will have left bound with the left, republican, socialist utopian then. However, the middle-class topic of the housewife is spread in popular environments. The trade unions appear especially anxious to prohibit any competition of the women on the job market. Leon Blum grants certainly in 1936 four secretariats of State to women, but not the right to vote. It is only as from the sixty-five years that the women make triumph in Occident the idea over the equality over the sexes; some estimate that the possibility of controlling their fruitfulness represented from this point of view the principal projection.

So certain feminists intend to radically dissociate the revolution of the manners impelled by the fight of the women as from the sixty-five years of the " revolution sexuelle" , there is, more generally, convergence of individualism and feminism.

In the third world, political women (often heiresses of some national hero) and écrivaines play an essential political role in the fight against the authoritarian regimes and corrupted, which take support on the army and the conservatism of manners. The statute and the education of the woman are one of the keys of the exit of the underdevelopment. More autonomous and educated better the woman will be able to control her fruitfulness, to educate her children, to take part more effectively in the economic life, where she almost always plays a crucial role.

It remains however much to make. In the world, 120 million children does not have access to the school; two thirds are girls. In the developed countries, the women are more graduate than the men (in 1996, one counted in France: 1133900 coeds for: 928000 students), without the disparities disappearing, so much with regard to the dies of studies than the professional life and the level of the wages. Since the beginning of the years 1970, the number of the active women increased of more than three million in France, but D. Kergoat notes that of 1962 to 1992 workmen and workers saw their qualification following movements opposite. Higher classifications are masculinisent, the categories of unskilled workers are feminized still more. In the other spheres of activity, however, the best education level initial goes hand in hand with the access to the stations of framing and command, in particular in Ile de France (Jacques Scheibling). Should it be concluded from it that it is enough, so that the women of country less developed have access to the positions of responsibility, to improve their formation? It is unfortunately less simple.

the woman, large forgotten development?

If, at the time of the decolonization, the development strategies of the lately independent countries were directed initially towards education, it is necessary to wait the years 1970 so that the international agencies and the administrations of the Third World countries become aware of the fundamental role of the labor force of the woman in the survival of the rural populations of these areas. “Essential Pivot of the life of the families, it is it which should be in the center of the formation”, Willy Randin considers. Many projects of abstract education (nonschool) bound for the rural women are limited to the domestic councils. The women however have all the more need for formation agricultural which they are often seen entrusting the fields most difficult to cultivate, in Niger for example. The woman must still ensure of the marketing activities or artisanal, complement all the more necessary as, sometimes, the husband uses for itself his own incomes, the woman having to buy only the goods for family consumption. The education of the women plays finally an indirect economic part. The woman is charged to educate the children, it can transmit to them a mentality adapted better to the modern economy, “the ideology of the individual success” (Anne Guillou). Hygiene will also make it possible to mitigate the economic consequences of too frequent diseases which decrease the productivity of the farmers. Contraception as the retreat of the age of the marriage will relieve the economy of the weight of demography. Thus, the political volunteer of Tunisia with regard to the women, started since 1966, their gave access to teaching and employment (according to the figures of UNESCO, the coeds represented in 1996 44,5% of: 121700 Tunisian students). That could contribute to the fall of fertility rate, now close to that of the Occident.

The load even of work which weighs on the woman makes particularly difficult the assiduous follow-up of a formation. The little girls are often regarded as an auxiliary labor force, domesticates in particular, even married precociously. Moreover the boy continues chalk-lining, when the cultural and professional capital of the girl belongs so to speak to her husband, i.e. with another chalk-lining. With Benign, one more easily tolerates the schooling of the juniors than that by the elder one, but only the boy will be financially constant. However let us note that it is with strongest Islamic wave than the elimination of illiteracy of the women knew progress fulgurating in the Maghreb, passing to Algeria, according to UNESCO, from 24% in 1980 to 49% in 1995 (Tunisia, 32% and 55%; Morocco, 16% and 31%). In 1998, the activity ratio of the Moroccan women of more than 15 years reached 33%. If the education of the women is made difficult by the heaviness even of the tasks of reproduction and of production which fall to them as of childhood, it can finally be facilitated by moderate investments: in Africa, construction of mills with millet or well. The defect of means of transport can obstruct the access to the formation as well as the engagement of the woman in gainful activities, commercial and artisanal. But according to Boseru Ester, to insist only on the traditional economic role of the woman could lead well to confine it in the least productive tasks and remunerative.

In the cities of the countries under-developed, the elimination of illiteracy of the women became currency. But the town young people seldom receive an education which offers to them professional outlets in the modern sector, except with regard to the commercial pursuits. The school hardly seeks to stimulate their interest for the matters related to the professional life, or if not directs them towards a restricted field of activities, like the secretariat, the medico-social teaching or trades. E. Boseru noticed that when the Universities open to the young girls, they gather initially in faculties of Letters, then in Medicine and in the related branches. According to it, the young girls would have interiorized the habit which wants that the women deal of the children and the patients. There are however countries, like the Thailand, where it is of tradition which the woman exerts a trade. It enters then directly in competition with the men on the general market of work. There are not in the final analysis a direct link between the level of study of the women and that of their activity, as the case of Greece shows it. Contrary to what occurred to France, female employment decreases in Greece since the turning of the Sixties. The Greek women constitute only one auxiliary labor force, with the lower costs. They will be also the laid off first. In Africa, the failure of the school system makes difficult the academic success of the young girls. Even well-read woman, the young girl will have only well little chance to find an employee job qualified, field monopolized by the men. According to Anne Guillou, the instruction marginalizes the woman compared to the traditional order. The class well-read woman is packed, but these women have great difficulty to be integrated socially and economically, because precisely of the underdevelopment like very traditional structure always of the company.

Feminism

Feminism indicates initially a current of ideas related to the denunciation of the oppression undergone by the woman. Because the claims of the women are inseparable from a total criticism from the company and representations, feminism since 1965 copied its rhetoric on that of the working parties or release of the colonized people (Women Movements). Currently, the feminist topics, very diffuse, are rather integrated into a democratic and liberal vision of the relationship between the individuals.

the Feminism and the Image of the woman.

The body of the woman constitutes the privileged ground of the confrontation of the feminists and their adversaries. In the feminist theory, for that which is regarded as paternalist, the woman would be at the bottom only the instrument of the reproduction, or the pleasure. For the feminists, the women had to assert and obtain, against this representation, some " droits" : right to cultivate themselves and work apart from the house, or to have their wages, freedom to have their body (right to the divorce, contraception, without forgetting the lifting of the restrictions concerning the affiliation, in 1993). They also fought so that the rape is systematically condemned.

According to Bourdieu, however, the alienation of the woman is made also in a more subtle way, when she believes for example to recognize herself in the activities of seduction, being thus defined by and for the glance of the other, and not as autonomous subject. More generally, does it act, as certain romantic German believed it, to release the characteristic of the woman, so that it nourishes finally the culture and the company as a whole, influence and civilizes the behavior of the men? (Différentialisme) Or is this alleged female nature only the by-product of the male domination? It is there the essential problems that contemporary feminism must solve, in practice as in theory.

the fight of the sexes?

In spite of sectarian radicalism that one lends to them, the feminists post-soixante-huitardes did not make of their movement a closed structure. They chose a multitude of very reactive small groups. It is that the women do not constitute an economic class, even less one nation. They cannot hope to build a company by exclusion of the men. It is rather a question for them of creating the social conditions of their blooming. This strategy allowed indisputably a good diffusion of the theses of feminist criticism in the parties, the trade unions and the whole company. Historically, the first feminists did not separate their action from the movements of emancipation like the Lights, then, with the nineteenth century, the republican political parties or the utopian socialisms and Marxist. Women as Louise Michel fought at the time of the Commune at the sides of the men. For certain feminists, it is the political left which was not with the height of its ideals universalists and egalitarians. According to Edith Thomas, the cause of the women brought together all the men, or almost, against it, including those of left; when they speak about it, the Marxist historians do not see in the " féminine" question; that an aspect of the " sociale" question;.

Sociologists and especially anthropologists as Francoise Héritier would consider rather than the domination of the woman by the man is not specific to a given time nor at a company. According to the latter, this domination enracine in the structures of the imaginary symbolic system, which does not want to in no case to say that the woman is by nature really lower than the man.

However, whatever the reality of these structural invariants, from the feminist point of view, distorts it obviousness of the male superiority would be inseparable from the operation of historical institutions, like the Church, the family, the school, which would intend to persuade the woman of her inferiority. The feminists consider that the success of the women in all the fields, since they have access there, is enough to show it. There would be thus well a fight between the sexes, which would constitute a constant of the history and anthropology, fights larval or open, sometimes bloody, fight which would be explained by the will of the men to maintain the woman in a perpetual state of supervision and to adapt the control of its fruitfulness. Thus, the men of the traditional companies would be much less open than the women to modernity: they would have many privileges to lose there.

Social emancipation of the women and its limits.

At least in Occident, the success of the feminist ideas is brighter than that of the political feminism, which finally appeared in the episodical modern history only of way. This success, even relative, is undoubtedly one of the reasons of the disaffection with regard to the feminist militancy. In addition to the militant action, the emancipation of the woman would be explained by the decline of the influence of the Church, by the generalization of paid female work and its by-effect on the family unit, by progress of the liberal designs of manners and the individual. In France, the women obtain the right to vote in 1944, the family planning is created in 1956 per Mrs. Dr. Lagroua-Weil-Market.

The law Simone Veil (January 1975) which dépénalise the abortion is definitively adopted in 1979. In 1992, Veronique Neiertz makes vote the law which penalizes the sexual harassment with work, violences family and the anti-I.V.G commandos. Let us mention finally the principle of the political parity, registered in the constitution in 1999. The law often gives the impression to run after manners, but also translated the political will to fight against the inequalities between the sexes, to promote the dignity of the woman, often first victim of violence.

But certain questions are more complex: guard of the children, generally allotted to the woman in the event of divorce, reproduced the traditional division of the roles. If the women have the right to work and have their wages, that does not involve an equal share of the domestic tasks, which weigh down their day and block in fact their professional path. Liberalism played a big role in the emancipation of the woman, but it also tends to restrict protections against wage discriminations or those which relate to employment and the career. Thus, part time is often constrained and tends to becoming the standard among women. The success of the women is done especially in fields which undergo a certain disaffection on behalf of the men, like the public office or teaching. On the other hand, the women occupy less than 5% of the management positions in science of the European Union, and approximately 2% of the stations of number one or two of the French companies of more than 500 paid. Certain professions were however feminized without losing too much of their " value sociale": right, medicine, journalism.

Elsewhere in the world, the access of the women to the higher learning did not always lead to the equality with the men, nor even with the questioning of the traditional statutes. In our areas, a certain worship of violence and virile conduits, in particular in popular environments, could according to the feminists lead to a questioning of the equality of the women and men.

See too

References

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