Free Women, Resistance and Revolution by Sheila Rowbotham

the organization of crèches appeared in the paper on 3 April 1848. 22 The womensuggested large houses, built in large gardens, for the working population in the area. These would contain a reading-room, bathroom, communal dining-room as well as a crèche where the children would have ‘enlightened care’. There would also be a school. The training of young girls and a medical unit are emphasized as well. Evidently the women in Lyons were also discussing how to set up crèches. They wrote to the Paris women asking for news about the organization of work projects and offering information about their organization of crèches.
    The ideas about crèches, which were very new in the 1840s, came directly from the needs of women who were working. But they also arose from the intense faith in the educability of human beings, common both in the socialist and feminist movements at the time. The interaction between the practical needs of working women and theories about children’s education produced schemes which were very important indications of alternative forms of social living. This concern for education reappears in the Commune. In 1871 delegates from the Society for New Education brought a plan forward which resembled an earlier scheme worked out by the feminist socialist Pauline Roland in 1869. The idea was to make ‘young people ready for self-government through a republican education’. This implied not merely a secular education without the old patriotic indoctrination; it also implied experimenting with completely new methods of teaching. There was particular interest in women’s technical education and various workshop schools were organized. In some cases these provided homes as well as schools for girls with no families. Maria Verdure and Félix and Elie Ducoudray, representing the Société des Amis de l’Enseignement, had a plan too for reorganizing day nurseries. They should not just be places to leave the children but educative and entertaining. They should have lots of gardens and painted or carved toys representing animals, trees and flowers. They wanted bright colours everywhere and young women to look after the children, ten to every 100 children. Again medical supervision was to be provided. The prominence of women in these educational projects was very noticeable in 1848 as well as in the Commune. It was to be a feature of subsequent revolutionary movements, and was in fact a kind of public extension of the private role of women in the family. It does not seem to have aroused the antagonism provoked by ideas which challenged the basis of the family or by the action inwhich women broke out of the traditional confines which determined the scope of femininity.
    Sexuality was probably the most explosive of issues. The derision which Francis Wright and the Saint-Simonians encountered in the 1820s and 1830s tended to make the women of the 1840s very defensive about the connection between socialism, feminism and free love. There is little about free unions in La Voix des Femmes. Divorce was supported but in the interests of public morality. However, there was general criticism about the superiority of the man in marriage. A letter to all women from Henriette D., a working woman, appeared. She demanded that the woman ‘should not stay any longer under the power of her husband, [she should] be able to act, sell, buy, contract like him’. She wanted the revision of the Civil Code which stated women must submit to their husbands. She felt this was the most tyrannical of abuses. ‘No more slavery, no more masters, equality between married couples, let’s destroy abuses, it’s time we defended our rights.’ 23
    In the Commune various measures were passed which benefited women in the family situation. For example, wives, legal or not, received the pensions of National Guardsmen who had been killed. This was an implicit recognition of the structure of the working-class family and a blow against the authority of the