Jeanne Deroin

Jeanne Deroin was born in Paris in 1805 into a working-class family. She became a seamstress and self-educated, reading widely in philosophy and politics. In the 1830s she joined the Saint-Simonian movement, attracted by its advocacy of women's emancipation, but later broke away, finding its leadership too hierarchical and its views on women still limited. She then associated with Fourierists and with the emerging socialist currents that linked the 'woman question' to the social question. Her early writings, published in the 1830s and 1840s, argued that the liberation of women was inseparable from the liberation of the proletariat, a position that placed her at the radical edge of French socialism.

The February Revolution of 1848 opened a brief window of political possibility. Deroin, with Désirée Gay, founded La Politique des Femmes (later L'Opinion des Femmes), one of the first newspapers edited by women in France. The paper demanded not only civil rights but also the right to work and to organize. Deroin also helped establish the Association of Mutual Union of Workers, a cooperative that sought to unite male and female workers, and she campaigned for the right of women to join trade unions. Her activism drew the attention of the authorities, and she was prosecuted for her political activities, though she continued to write and organize.

In the elections of May 1849, Deroin announced her candidacy for the Legislative Assembly, even though women could neither vote nor stand for office. Her platform was explicitly socialist and feminist, calling for the abolition of the exploitation of labor and the full equality of the sexes. The authorities refused to register her candidacy, and she was arrested and imprisoned for her political activities. After her release, she was again threatened, and in 1852 she went into exile in London. There she continued to write and to support the cause of women's rights, corresponding with other exiled radicals and contributing to the international women's movement. She died in London in 1894.

Beyond her well-known candidacy, Deroin's life reveals several lesser-known facets. She was a pioneer of workers' cooperatives, helping to organize a cooperative bakery and a laundry in Paris, which were among the first experiments in producer cooperation. Her writings, collected in Le Droit des femmes (1852), are an early articulation of a socialist feminism that anticipated later debates. In exile, she maintained a correspondence with the Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Mazzini, and she wrote on the education of women, arguing for a curriculum that would prepare them for public life. Her later years were spent in relative obscurity, but her ideas influenced the next generation of French feminists, including Hubertine Auclert, who cited her as a precursor.

Saint-Simonianism

A French socialist movement of the early 19th century that advocated a planned economy and the emancipation of women, though often in a limited, paternalistic form.

Fourierism

The social philosophy of Charles Fourier, which proposed a utopian society organized into self-sufficient communities called phalansteries, and which championed women's rights.

Proletariat

The class of wage-earners who do not own the means of production, a central concept in socialist and Marxist theory.