How Did the Woman Question Emerge in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century?

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How did the woman question emerge in the first half of the nineteenth century? Use one author or movement to illustrate your answer (2500 words). Up until the early nineteenth century women occupied an inferior position in society. Their rights were limited, if existent at all. Furthermore, the Civil Code of 1804 officially enshrined women to a life of domesticity (Foley, 2004: 118). Few women, however, challenged this denial, either it did not occur to them or they did not believe that they could do anything to change it. That was until, in the early 1800s, feminist movements began to emerge which sought to alter the relationship between the sexes. Some of those who attempted to do this were termed “utopian socialists” (Moses, 1982: 241). “The Saint-Simonians were the earliest and most popular of these utopian socialist feminists” (Moses, 1982: 241). In this essay I will discuss how the “woman question” emerged through the ideology of the Saint-Simonians and whether their aims and actions were to benefit women, as they claimed, or rather to satisfy the ego of their leader, Prosper Enfantin. I will also consider what measures the women involved in this movement took to ensure their own emancipation and to what extent this was due to their involvement in the Saint-Simonian movement. By the late 1820s interest in women’s issues had become part of the all-absorbing “social question” (Pilbeam, 2000: 76). Among the feminist movements which emerged during the early nineteenth century, two of the most noteworthy are Fourier and the Saint-Simonians, in fact, Fourier has been credited with having originated the word “féministe” (Goldstein, 1982: 92). The Saint-Simonians, and the Fourierists, were writing and being read during a period of enormous social ferment, a period in which a very wide variety of feminist ideas were “in the air”. The attention that they devoted
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