The first signs of feminist restlessness are reverberating through Peru. Some feminist cells and nuclei now exist. The proponents of ultra-nationalism will probably think, "Here is another exotic, foreign idea that is being grafted onto the Peruvian mentality."
Let us calm these apprehensive people a bit. We should not see feminism as an exotic or foreign idea. We need to see it simply as a human idea--an idea that is characteristic of a civilization, peculiar to an epoch--and therefore, an idea with the right to citizenship in Peru, as in any other part of the civilized world.
Feminism has appeared in Peru neither artificially nor arbitrarily. It has appeared as a consequence of the new forms of women's intellectual and manual labor. The women with a real connection to feminism are the women who work, the women who study. The feminist idea flourishes among women with intellectual or manual professions: university professors, working women. It finds a propitious environment for growth in university classrooms, which attract more and more Peruvian women, and in the trade unions, where women from the factories join and organize themselves with the same rights and duties as the men. Apart from this spontaneous and organic feminism, which recruits its adherents among the different categories of women's work, there exists here, as elsewhere, a feminism of dilettantes, some a bit pedantic, others a bit mundane. Feminists of this type turn feminism into a simple literary exercise, a mere fashionable sport.
No one should be surprised that all women do not unite in a single feminist movement. Feminism necessarily has various shades and diverse tendencies. We can distinguish three fundamental tendencies, three substantive shades of feminism: bourgeois feminism, petty bourgeois feminism, and working-class feminism. Each of these feminisms formulates its demands in a distinctive manner. The bourgeois woman, as a feminist, solidarizes with the interests of the conservative class. The working-class woman combines her feminism with the faith of the revolutionary multitudes in the future society. The class struggle--a historical fact, not a theoretical assertion--is reflected on the plane of feminism. Women, like men, are reactionaries, centrists, or revolutionaries. They consequently cannot fight the same battle together. In the current human panorama, class differentiates individuals more than sex.
But this multiplicity of feminisms does not result from the theory itself. It depends. rather, on its practical deformations. Feminism as a pure idea is essentially revolutionary. The ideas and attitudes of women who consider themselves both feminist and conservative thus lack internal coherence. Conservatism works to maintain the traditional organization of society. This organization denies women the rights that women wish to gain. Bourgeois feminists accept all the consequences of the prevailing order except those opposed to women's demands. They tactically maintain the absurd thesis that the only reform society needs is feminist reform. The protest of these feminists against the old order is too exclusive to be valid.
It is true that the historical roots of feminism are found in the liberal sensibility. The French revolution contained the first seeds of the feminist movement. The question of the emancipation of women was then laid out in precise terms for the first time. Babeuf, the leader of the Conspiracy of Equals, was a proponent of feminist demands. Babeuf harangued his friends in this way:
Do not force silence on this sex, which does not deserve to be disdained. Rather, cultivate the better part of yourselves. If women count for nothing in your republic, you will make them lovers of the monarchy. Their influence will be such that they will restore it. If, on the contrary, they count for something, you will make of them Cornelias and Lucretias. They will give you Brutuses, Gracchi, and Scaevolas.
Polemicizing with anti-feminists, Babeuf spoke of "this sex that men's tyranny has always sought to humble, this sex that has never been useless in a revolution." But the French revolution did not wish to accord women the equality and freedom proposed by such Jacobin or egalitarian voices. The Rights of Man, as I once wrote, could better be called the Rights of the Male Sex. Bourgeois democracy has been an exclusively masculine democracy.
Born of the liberal womb, feminism has not been put into effect during the development of capitalism. It is now, when the historical trajectory of democracy is reaching its end, that women are gaining the political and legal rights of men. And it is the Russian Revolution that has explicitly and categorically granted to women the equality and freedom that Babeuf and the egalitarians demanded in vain from the French revolution more than a century ago.
But if bourgeois democracy has not implemented feminism, it has involuntarily created the moral and material conditions and premises for its realization. It has given women value as an element of production, as an economic factor, making increasingly extensive and intensive use of their labor. Work radically changes the female mentality and spirit. By virtue of her labor, woman gains a new idea of herself. Formerly, society destined woman to marriage or concubinage. It now principally destines her to work. This fact has changed and elevated the position of women in life. Those who impugn feminism and its progress with sentimental or traditionalist arguments claim that women should be educated only for the home. But, in practice, this means that women should be educated only for the role of female and mother. The defense of the poetry of the home is actually a defense of woman's servitude. Instead of ennobling and dignifying the role of women, it diminishes and lowers it. A woman is something more than a female and a mother, just as a man is something more than a male.
The type of woman that a new civilization will produce must be substantially different from that formed by a currently declining civilization. In an article on women and politics, I examined some aspects of this theme in the following way:
The troubadours and lovers of feminine frivolity have no lack of reasons to be upset. The type of women created by a century of capitalist refinement is condemned to decadence and decline. An Italian writer, Pitigrilli, classifies this type of contemporary woman as a sort of elegant breeder.
And this elegant breeder will continue to disappear bit by bit. To the degree that the collectivist system replaces the individualist system, feminine extravagance and elegance will fade. Humanity will lose some elegant breeders, but it will gain many women. The dress of the woman of the future will be less expensive and sumptuous, but the condition of this woman will have more dignity. And the center of female life will be displaced from the individual to the social. Fashion will finally not consist of imitating a modern Madame Pompadour dressed in a Paquín. Perhaps it will be the imitation of a Madame Kollontai. A woman, in short, will cost less but will be worth more.
This subject is quite vast. This short article merely aims to point out the nature of the first manifestations of feminism in Peru and to attempt a very quick and summary interpretation of the physiognomy and spirit of the international feminist movement. Men who are sensitive to the great passions of the epoch should feel neither foreign nor indifferent to this movement. The woman question is a part of the human question. Feminism seems to me, moreover, a more interesting and more historic subject than the wig. While feminism is a subject, the wig is merely an anecdote.