Women in the Paris Commune

“We have come to the supreme moment,
when we must be able to die for our Nation. No more weakness! No more
uncertainty! All women to arms! All women to duty! Versailles must be
wiped out!” These were the words of Nathalie Lemel, participant in the
Paris Commune of 1871, and member of the Union des Femmes pour la Defense de Paris et les Soins aux Blesses (The Union of Women for the Defense of Paris and Aid to the Wounded).

Such a bold statement is quite contrary to the demur and frailty that
is attributed to women of that time period. These were militant women
fighting for the gains of the working class in the Paris Commune. In
honor of International Working Women’s Day, we would like to highlight
the efforts and achievements made by the working women during the
Commune. Women like Louise Michel, Elisabeth Dmitrieff, André Léo, Anne
Jaclard, Paule Mink, and Nathalie Lemel, organized secular schools,
ambulance services, and work cooperatives, as well as taking up arms for
the revolution. The working women of the Commune fought for women’s
rights on a class basis, and defended the revolution with their very
lives.

The times leading up to the Paris Commune were difficult for all
workers, but especially for women. It was typical for a woman to work 13
hours a day, six days a week. Even still, the wages she received for
that work were woefully shy of the cost of living at the time, even if
her wages were added to her husband’s. This contradiction drove many
working women to prostitution. The Franco-Prussian war put further
strain on the French people, particularly during the months-long siege
of Paris, when they were completely blocked off from the outside. This
led to soaring inflation and to long lines to get bread that was scarce,
and often mixed with straw and paper. It was primarily the women who
had to stand in these lines and literally fight for the bread needed to
feed their families. This laid the basis for the militancy that was seen
amongst women during the Commune, who led the charge on many occasions.

After the French armies of Emperor Louis Bonaparte were defeated by
the Prussians, the Parisian workers rose up and declared a republic.
However, power fell into the hands of the right-wing representatives of
the bourgeoisie. On March 18, the reactionary leader of the new
government, Adolphe Thiers, sent troops to take cannons out of Paris in
the middle of the night. His aim was to disarm the workers and to sell
out to the Prussians. The women of the neighborhood of Montmartre awoke
and charged up the hill where they swarmed and fraternized with the
troops, placed themselves on the cannons, and stopped them from being
removed. The troops were so persuaded by the women and the people’s
militia of the National Guardsmen of Paris that they went over to the
people, arresting and firing upon their own commander.

With this, a situation of dual power developed. Thiers lost control
of Paris and had to flee with the bourgeois government to nearby
Versailles. The workers of Paris declared the Commune, the world’s first
workers’ republic. The most advanced elements in the Commune, including
hundreds of women, gathered to march to Versailles in an attempt to
stop the bloodshed and to “tell Versailles that the Assembly [the old
government] is not the law—Paris is!” But the leadership of the Commune
vacillated and the opportunity was lost. By allowing the forces of
reaction to regroup, by not decisively marching on Versailles to crush
the enemies of the revolution, the balance of forces eventually tipped
back in favor of the bourgeois and their representatives, with fatal
consequences for tens of thousands of Communards.

The beginnings of a new society

The Commune formed many clubs, which often commandeered churches to
hold their meetings. These meetings had open, heated discussions, and
used direct democracy. A main topic of discussion in the clubs was
anti-clericalism. The working women denounced the way the churches
controlled wealth, mistreated workers, controlled girls’ schools, and
invaded family privacy. It was also suggested by some that the nuns be
thrown into the Seine River, while others requested that all priests be
arrested until the end of the war.

Many of the workers in France were influenced by the proto-anarchist
Proudhon, who believed that the proper place for women was either as
“housewife or harlot,” and by no means as part of the workforce. He even
put forth a series of “equations” to illustrate that women were
physically, intellectually, and morally inferior, and should therefore
keep to child rearing and nothing else. This, along with the generally
backwards attitudes of many men at that time, including many advanced
workers, led to the French section of the First International presenting
a memorandum against women participating in the workforce. Nonetheless,
there were several women in France who belonged to the International,
and this line of thinking had nothing to do with the ideas of Marx and
Engels, its key leaders, who were doing their best to keep up with
events from London.

Louise Michel and the Montmartre Vigilance Committee

Another important group was the Montmartre Vigilance Committee, which
was divided into a men’s section and a women’s section. Louise Michel,
one of the most inspiring figures of the Commune, belonged to both. The
Vigilance Committee held workshops, recruited ambulance nurses, gave aid
to wives of soldiers, sent speakers to the clubs, and hunted draft
dodgers who refused to serve in the people’s militia. Louise Michel was
elected as its president, and served as a fighter and medical worker in
the 61st Battalion during the Commune.

Before the Commune was elected, Michel offered to go to Versailles to
shoot Thiers herself, but was dissuaded for fear of retribution.
Nevertheless, she went to Versailles just to prove she could come back
unscathed.

During the Commune, Michel sent a letter to the mayor of Montmartre
with a series of demands, including the abolishment of brothels, that
the Bell of Montmartre be melted down to make a cannon to defend the
workers’ neighborhoods, and to requisition abandoned houses and the wine
and coal within them to set up shelters and provide for the old,
infirm, and children of Montmartre. Some men in the Commune did not want
to allow prostitutes to be ambulance workers, saying “the wounded must
be tended by clean hands,” but Michel saw the necessity of involving
these women in the work of the Commune and recruited them to help in
this work. After the fall of the Commune, Thiers’ forces fought their
way through Paris and murdered tens of thousands of Communards over a
period of several weeks. Michel fought on the barricades at the cemetery
of Montmartre during the “Bloody Week,” and was subsequently arrested
and deported to New Caledonia along with Nathalie Lemel.

The Union des Femmes

Elisabeth Dmitrieff was born in Russia and co-founded the Russian
section of the First International. Active in the Narodnik movement,
Dmitrieff was sent to London to work with Marx and study the London
worker’s movement. After the declaration of the Paris Commune, the
London General Council decided to send Dmitrieff as one of two envoys to
the Commune.

After meeting with other working women active in the Commune, she saw
the need to organize the working women of Paris to defend the Commune
at the barricades, ambulance stations, and canteens, as well as to fight
for socialist measures that would emancipate working women from
exploitation. This led to the setting up of the “Women’s Union,” the Union des Femmes.

Nathalie Lemel joined the Union [4.] after its formation and, as a
book binder, had a wealth of experience in the Parisian labor movement,
in addition to being a member of the First International. The influence
of Lemel’s labor and strike experience is instantly recognizable in the
work of the Union.

The first meeting of the Union [6.] took place on April 11, after an
Appeal to the Women Citizens of Paris was put up on the walls of the
city and published in the papers. A provisional Central Committee was
appointed which included Dmitrieff and seven other working women. The Union des Femmes
was made up of working-class women and was part of the First
International. It was organized around citywide associations, with a
central committee and a paid executive committee. All positions were
democratically elected and recallable by the union members.

Each arrondissement (mayoral district of Paris) had Union
committees for recruiting militant working women, for finances, and for
summoning the members to defend the Commune at any given moment. The Union
financed itself with dues as well as money it received from the central
bodies of the Commune. After the executive committee was paid, they
used the remaining money to help support ill and/or impoverished members
of their union, as well as to buy weapons for defense of the Commune.

The Union des Femmes represented the most advanced layer of
the working women of Paris. They consistently showed their militancy and
willingness to fight to defend the gains of the Paris Commune. On May
3, a poster was put up throughout Paris calling for an armistice with
Versailles and signed by an anonymous group of “Citizens.” The Union responded days later with a militant manifesto decrying an armistice with the counterrevolution
and demanding the right of the working women of the Commune to take up
arms alongside the men in defense of the revolution, saying: “Women of
Paris will prove to France and to the world that they too, at the moment
of supreme danger—at the barricades and at the ramparts of Paris, if
the reactionary powers should force her gates—they too know how, like
their brothers, to give their blood and their life for the defense and
triumph of the Commune, that is, the People.” This manifesto flies in
the face of anyone who doubts the courage and ability of women in
revolutionary battle.

Because so many of the business owners had fled Paris, many working women found it difficult to find jobs. The Union
presented the Commission for Labor and Exchange with a request for
immediate work making uniforms for the National Guard militia, and a
long-term request to form a Federation of Women’s Associations. This
document, signed by Dmitrieff, clearly displayed the internationalist,
socialist character of the Union des Femmes while rejecting
bourgeois feminism: “An end to all competition between male and female
workers—their interests are identical and their solidarity is essential
to the final worldwide strike of labor against capital.”

The document also stated that every member was to be a member of the
First International. The Central Committee was to liaison with foreign
organizations for product exchange, and the Arrondissement Committees
would enroll women workers to keep track of occupations, as well as
women who work at home. The federation would be made up of five members
of each Arrondissement [16. italicize] Committee. On May 17, the Union
put out an appeal to working women to meet on the 18th with the
objective of setting up a Federal Chamber of Working Women. The final
drafting of the syndicate and federal chambers took place at the Hôtel
de Ville on May 21.

The Union des Femmes also fought for the working women of
the Paris Commune by demanding equal pay for women, the right to
divorce, education for girls, and much more. To help the worker
cooperatives that sprang up during the Commune compete with independent
businesses, the Union made an organizational plan for cashiers
and accountants of these cooperatives, to help them formulate price and
wage structures during the transition from capitalism to a socialist
future. They also fought to end the distinction between “legitimate” and
“illegitimate” children. A pension was enacted for wives or
“concubines” of dead National Guardsmen, as well as each of her
children—“legitimate” or not. Orphans were to receive an education at
the expense of the Commune. In short, many measures were enacted that
benefited the working women of Paris directly. On the day before
Versailles troops entered Paris to crush the Commune in blood, equal pay
for men and women workers was declared. But this advanced reform was
lost along with the Commune, and still remains unrealized in most of the
world to this day.

Bourgeois feminism

Bourgeois feminism analyzes the issue of women’s exploitation on a
gender basis, from the standpoint of the oppression of women at the
hands of men. They do not recognize that women workers are a
super-exploited layer of the working class. They applaud bourgeois women
for “breaking the glass ceiling,” or running for president, without
understanding or admitting that these women do not at all represent the
interests of working women—who make up the vast majority of women in
society.

The Union des Femmes had a very different approach. They
analyzed working women’s oppression on a socialist, working class basis.
They understood and explained that the only way to emancipate women
from their exploitative conditions was to reorganize their work and give
all workers ownership and control over the means of
production. The only way for working women to fight their exploitation
is on a class basis, inside the labor movement, and to link the
suffering of women to the suffering of the entire working class.

A U.S. labor party armed with a socialist program could fight for
legislation that would help working women and ease the burden of the
“second unpaid shift.” It would fight for universal, socialized health
care, child care, laundry services, cheap and nutritious community
restaurants, enforcement of anti-discrimination laws, equal pay for work
of equal value, and card-check legislation that would allow more
working women (and men) to organize and join labor unions. These reforms
would ease the dependence of working women on their also-exploited
husbands, giving them financial independence and the ability to escape
abusive partnerships. They would allow men and women to relate to each
other on a new basis, as workers, in solidarity, and in the best
interests of society as a whole.

As Marxists, we fight for any reforms that help working women, while
at the same time explaining that the only way to fully emancipate women
is to abolish capitalism. The achievements of the working women of the
Paris Commune cannot be overlooked when discussing women’s issues and
are an important tool in our arsenal.