« C’est une urgence que de souligner
la condamnation à mort, par ce système
à l’agonie convulsive, de toute la planète
et de son espèce humaine, si le féminisme,
en libérant la femme, ne libère pas l’humanité
toute entière, à savoir,n’arrache le monde
à l’homme d’aujourd’hui pour le transmettre
à l’humanité de demain [1]»
One of the subjects that crosses our research work is that of care, as many of you know… Care provided, care received, free care as a gift of humanity … Today we would like to dwell on a figure of twentieth century feminism, co-founder of the Women's Liberation Movement (MLF), a woman who thought of feminism undoubtedly more as an universalism, than an act of women's liberation, like "gendered being". In her abundant writings about contraception, right to abortion, and such themes, one can also find contemporary political topics, such as de-growth, condemnation of limitlessness, destruction of biodiversity, anti-imperialism struggles, the condemnation of genocides, but also the abolition of wage labor and money...
Unlike certain feminists of the MLF, traumatised by the Meadows report[2] of 1972, (she develops what we would now name a deep eco-anxiety), d'Eaubonne advocates for the right to abortion in order to achieve a drop in the global birth rate and a reduction in the use of resources.
From 1974, she operates a synthesis between feminist struggle and ecological struggle, denouncing the exploitation of Nature by man and the domination of woman by man. Contested author, for her excesses, Françoise d'Eaubonne joins action with words by participating in the blasting of the pump of the hydraulic circuit of the Fessenheim power plant then, under construction. Admirer of Ulrike Meinhof, (radicalized after the defeat of the Prague Spring, and who organizes the attack on strategic enemy points without attacking the human life of those not concerned), d'Eaubonne finds to a certain extent a justification for the actions of the Rote Armee Fraktion. The faction of the Red Army, better known as the Baader Band, sees violent action as a form of resistance to the fascist tendencies of the capitalist state. Its aim seems to have been to highlight the vulnerability of the State while making the public understand that a reversal of the system is possible. Violence against State violence... If d'Eaubonne admired Ulrike Meinhof, the most astonishing is the support of a part of the population for the activists of the Baader Band, a part of the population who denounces the anti-terrorism laws of mass surveillance, put in place by the Republic Federal of Germany.
Sometimes forgotten, sometimes relegated to the background of contemporary authors because of its radical positioning - which gave rise to the slogan "loose the name, keep the focus" in the 1990s - certain themes that it addresses and more the intellectual genealogy in which it is inscribed are an important and constantly reviving branch of what today is called a radical feminism but which in reality is nothing other than the history of care through the ages and the times since the sedentarization of the human being, perhaps [3]. D'Eaubonne's intellectual genealogy is varied, of limitless curiosity, from Shulamith Firestone, a radical Canadian feminist wondering about "cybernation" or the processes of industrial automation which modifies the norms of work but also social relations, to Moscovici, Pierre-Samuel, René Dumont, the first ecological candidate for the 1974 election...
Denouncing the "capitalist patriarchy" which exhausts women, and the environment, she invents the neologism "phallocrat" entered in the dictionary, just as invents the term "ecofeminism" and that of "sexocide" whose idea is found today with the terminology of "feminicide". The fact that today's feminists only retain this term “femicide” is interesting because it highlights an important breaking point in the history of feminism. In reality, this focus does not deal with the opposition between proletarian feminism and bourgeois feminism[4], because, if the feminism of women from the bourgeoisie points the finger at a gendered war between men and women, oppressors and oppressed, proletarian feminism, carried by the workers, points the finger at capitalist domination, all kinds combined[5]. This point is central because it brings to light a fundamental break in the history of feminism: that of a separation between, on the one hand, the assumption of responsibility for social ills by women, care as a whole, and on the other hand, the defense by women of their own gendered condition. Splitting the proletarian movement into two rival camps, this separation diverted men and women from their common struggle against state violence and the excesses of a certain type of capitalism : that of assembly line work, infernal rhythms and dehumanization of being in the value creation chain. What the unisex workers' struggles posed as an underlying question was not the question of the labor value of man or woman, not that of the domination of women by men, but that of the domination of the proletariat by the capitalist ogre of the factories, the question of the value of the worker, as a degendered entity and creator of value in the economic sense of the term, a question already largely addressed by Graslin, in 1767, in his Essai Analytique sur la Richesse et sur l'Impôt[6].
Today, reality is catching up with some of her statements, with women becoming more and more the victims of global warming every day, one thinks in particular of the quest for water incumbent on women in sub-Saharan Africa[7]. What D'Eaubonne points to is in facts an unlimited exploitation of the planet by male leaders who are adepts of an unhindered liberalism. In this sense, it can be “registered” as a pioneer of the theory of de-growth as we know it today. She proposes neither more nor less than to rethink the totality of our current economic system at a time when the boom of the post-war boom marks a clear acceleration in the use of natural resources.
At a time when we note each year that the day of Earth Overshoot Day (EOD), is earlier and earlier, the writings of Françoise d'Eaubonne appeals to the reader. Working on all sides, on all fronts, her thinking is "outside the box" and cannot be reduced to a single common thread. We must therefore accept wanderings, digressions, sometimes paradoxes, in order to understand the global system of this extraordinary author who did not want to abolish the patriarchy and replace it with matriarchy, but to destroy a system, leading Humanity to its downfall. This idea of destroying the system is illustrated by a strong desire to dilute power in its centralized form. Visionary in her writings, she proposes a deconstruction of verticality in order to establish a horizontal system, a society of self-management, of non-power, both at the political level and at the interpersonal level by going beyond north-south dualisms, but also female/male binary identities. In this sense, d'Eaubonne could be part of the feminist current of the anarchist Communards. Her speech is not without echoing that of Louise Michel writing : « Je ne puis m’élever contre les candidatures de femmes, comme affirmation de l’égalité de l’homme et de la femme. Mais je dois, devant la gravité des circonstances, vous répéter que les femmes ne doivent pas séparer leur cause de celle de l’humanité, mais faire partie militante de la Grande armée révolutionnaire. […] Nous voulons, non pas quelques cris isolés, demandant une justice qu’on n’accordera jamais sans la force ; mais le peuple entier et tous les peuples debout pour la délivrance de tous les esclaves,qu’ils s’appellent le prolétaire ou la femme, peu importe [8]». Thought that she completes by writing: « Je revendique les droits de la femme, non servante de l’homme.[…] Nous sommes une moitié de l’humanité, nous combattons avec tous les opprimés et nous garderons notre part de l’égalité qui est notre seule justice [9]».
Unclassifiable in the "straitjacket" of academic categories, however practical it may be to superficially situate an author or a current, d'Eaubonne also acts more as an anarchist practitioner than as a feminist theorist, which no doubt explains the diffusion and the adaptation of his thought to the United States as well as to India. Convinced that people's reality must be the epicenter of theory, she articulates her thinking from the fields of investigation seeking to "re-establish society". In the same way that the anarchist feminists of the 19th century, d'Eaubonne, just like Greta Gaard, does not aim at the convergence of struggles, convinced that all struggles are only different facets of a single struggle. In the writings of Greta Gaard[10], there is the idea that ecofeminism must rethink feminism to complete the abolition of all forms of oppression. This idea of a unique struggle had already been brought to light in Britain in the 19th century, with feminists fighting for the rights of colonized peoples, the rights of children and even sometimes for animal rights, a discourse echoed today by antispeciesists. This fight for the establishment of the horizontality of interpersonal relations, traceable in history, is that of a certain part of the radical left.
Sometimes mistakenly classified as essentialist, d'Eaubonne explores the constructions of gender through the ages and refuses any relation to Nature in the definition of gender. Sometimes classified as Marxist, d'Eaubonne still escapes this reading because even if the issue of social classes is present, it does not allow us to understand all the forms of domination according to the author, who points to an incomplete Marxist analysis due to the non-theorization of the feminist part in Marxist thought. She broadens the subject, proposing an analysis revealing an overlapping reality, an intersectional reflective framework. Impregnated by her activist experience, she thinks politics outside institutional walls, fighting against structural inequalities, she calls for a return to emotions in order to avoid climatic and military disasters.
Strongly marked by his own family history, (a soldier father who returned from WW1 without State aid, and a mother pupil of Marie Curie who gave up her career to take charge of her family), d'Eaubonne writes : « le féminisme, c'est l'humanité toute entière en crise, et c'est la mue de l’espèce, c'est véritablement le monde qui va changer de base [11]». This correlation between social progress and women's rights is reminiscent of the writings of Charles Fourrier in The Theory of Four Movements, social progress and period changes taking place due to the progress of women towards freedom ; and the decadences of a social order occurring because of the decrease in women's freedom, according to the utopian.
For a long time relegated to the second plan, the texts of these radical feminist authors question the constitutive myths of our societies. These women disturb the system, the patriarchal moral order established by force and male domination. It is certainly no coincidence that these theses defended by these women always reappear at key historical moments, during Revolutions.
In facts, the condition of women is a powerful indicator of a society's human development index, an indicator so strong that food revolts, but also political revolutions, very often begin with the uprising of mothers seeing themselves in the inability to provide basic necessities to their families. However, once the crises passed, women were never able to mobilize violence as a tool of submission and rebalancing of their condition vis-à-vis men, matriarchal societies were more elegantly Machiavellian, more "negotiated", and perhaps that is where their strength lay, a strength that they lost while thinking of fighting men on their terrain... In other words, it is not by becoming, in turn, « the closet monster » that one fight « the closet monster », but by turning on the light... and as Guillaume Apollinaire said so well : « il est grand temps de rallumer les étoiles ». Shine the spotlight again on women who carry lights...
Olympe de Gouges[12] during the French Revolution, Désirée Véret[13] imbued with Saint-Simonian doctrine in 1830, Claire Démar[14] in 1833, Flora Tristan[15] in 1844, Eugénie Niboyet and her newspaper La Voix des Femmes which leads the fight in 1848, without forgetting of course Jeanne Deroin[16] who applied for the legislative elections in 1849, thus causing Proudhon to explode with anger, whose theory was attacked by Juliette Lamber in Les Idées antiproudhoniennes in 1858, Louise Michel during the 1870 Paris Commune, Hubertine Auclert who stressed that « restreindre le droit à l'égard de la femme, c'est restreindre le droit de l’humanité, c'est amoindrir le droit de l'homme [17]», Marguerite Durand and her newspaper La Fronde, in 1897, which interconnects philanthropy and feminism, Françoise d'Eaubonne in the 1970s in a France of workers' and student movements against the moral order and against the exploitation of workers, and more generally in a world denouncing Vietnam war.
These women question “violent utopianism”, in societies where the phenomenon of female violence is transgressive, both at the level of law and at the level of gender[18]. Yet this violence of women exists[19].
Ecofeminism questions essentialism, as a construction making the notions of sex and gender interchangeable. Sex being defined by ecofeminism as a biological concept linked to reproduction and gender as a fixed social construction at a given moment and, in this sense, a normative straitjacket. The recourse to nature carried by essentialism, far from being a tool for the liberalization of women from their condition, is in reality a form of domination involving an immutable state and implicitly recognizing a natural form of the law of the strongest. To this Simone de Beauvoir opposed her famous constructivist quote : « On ne naît pas femme, on le devient ». Philosophical essentialism supposes that the essence of a thing precedes its existence. Without denying or affirming the eventual free will of the individual, it makes him dependent on a few determinisms from which he cannot easily extract himself and which therefore define him in part. This is the basis of the critique of essentialism by existentialism. Is identity then just a role-playing game ? In Judith Butler's theory, to interpret is equivalent to becoming what the interpretation imposes and has repercussions on the being, its reality and its fulfillment[20].
Butler's analysis of the performativity of gender goes beyond the classical construction of gender, (role of civil, religious and socio-family institutions), studying gender as a process of social construction of sexual differentiation and production of categories (masculine, feminine) and, by the idem, social hierarchy. Women and men are thus differentiated by social characteristics inherent in the societal acculturation in which they evolve. The gender distinction is therefore not limited to the simple distinction of sex. Social and cultural distinctions must be taken into account as well as contextualization. Gender is manufactured institutionally but also culturally. Hence no doubt the difficulty in finding studies on the social perception of female violence. Our entire Western construction is based on the « fragility of the woman » and the « natural, encouraged », « need for male domination ». To get out of violence against women, it is therefore up to us to change social norms and to develop our overall conception of human relationships, both at the level of the family, school, business, political world, etc...
It is to re-inject humanity into otherness, whether this other is a man or a woman, to recognize the merits of his existence and the need for society to protect the weakest against the evils that afflict him. It is a fight against legitimized and accepted social violence, against surveillance societies, against injustices of all kinds which contribute to the emergence and periodic re-emergence of these radical theses. The fact that once again History is bringing these works back to the forefront should raise questions about the times we are going through, as the symptom of a general degraded climate perceived by some readers as illegitimate and allowing them to find in these writings advocating for civil disobedience, another way to "remake society". Outside of these key historical periods, radical feminist writings are most widely presented as eccentric, and gendered, defending "only" women's rights and gender equality, the eccentricity denounced making it possible to hide a complete and complex underlying universe.
Bibliography
- D'Eaubonne F., Le féminisme ou la mort, 1974.
- PDF] Limits to growth : the 30-year update | Semantic Scholar
- Liebart D., Manca M., La finance et le soin : gouvernance, systèmes mutualistes et répartition du risque | Zenodo
- https://www.facebook.com/Donneepensieropolitico/photos/a.125476075880652/610186887409566/
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-ydEzXv2Xo
- Essai analytique sur la richesse et sur l'impôt : 1767 / J.-J.-Louis Graslin ; publ. avec introd. et table analytique par A. Dubois | Gallica (bnf.fr)
- Accès à l’eau et santé des femmes étroitement liés en Afrique - AMREF
- Michel L., Mémoires, p.255.
- Michel L., Mémoires, p.396 .
- Gaard G,Ecofeminist Literary Criticism: Theory, Interpretation, Pedagogy ,
- D'Eaubonne F., Le féminisme ou la mort, 1974.
- Déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne | BNF ESSENTIELS
- Véret D., Lettre au roi, 1830.
- Demar C., L'appel d'une femme au peuple sur l'affranchissement de la femme, 1833.
- Tristan F., L'Union ouvrière, 1844.
- Deroin J., L'Opinion des femmes, 10 avril 1849.
- Auclert H., Question qui n'est pas traitée au Congrès international des femmes, 1878.
- Bugnon F., « La violence sans les femmes ? Feminisme et lutte armée en RFA », Raison présente, 2013, 186, pp.85-96.
- “Les femmes sont potentiellement aussi violentes que les hommes” | Sciences Po
- Butler J., Gender Trouble, 1990.
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