"Vive 'Mademoiselle'!" the politics of singleness in early twentieth-century French feminism.

IN 1911, THE FEMINIST JOURNALIST and activist Arria Ly generated extensive controversy in the French national press with the publication of her article "Vive 'Mademoiselle!'" Ly's piece quickly became the subject of public opinion surveys in a Toulousain and a Parisian newspaper, and her argument ultimately confirmed many commentators' belief in the sexual and political dangers posed to French society by the women's movement. At the crux of the debate was Ly's suggestion in "Vive 'Mademoiselle'!" that a new class of single, professional women practice permanent sexual abstinence and adopt the title "Mademoiselle" as an exalted expression of the "purity, independence, and pride" attached to the state of virginity. Ly insisted that only by breaking the psycho-sexual chains that bound them to men could women hope to achieve sociopolitical and legal autonomy. Emphasizing the relevance of celibate singleness for the French women's movement, Ly affirmed that "more and more, we will recruit the elite of our adepts and militants from these noble freethinkers, these inspiring rebels" who were not legally "under their husbands' authority" or otherwise restricted by familial obligations. (1)

Given the early twentieth-century context of heightened national fears about France's flagging birth rate and the degeneration of the French "race," Ly's argument for political spinsterhood hardly encountered a popular reception, either within liberal or feminist circles. The threat her ideas on sexuality posed to Third Republic France led some contemporaries to categorize the militant suffragist as aberrant, "unnatural," and marginal to the cause of "true" feminism. (2) Although Ly certainly distinguished herself from moderate activists through her radical behavior and her extreme stance on the sexual question, her ostensibly bizarre proposal for singleness was part of a broader dialogue in the mainstream and feminist press about an acutely felt demographic and cultural "problem" during these years. Debate over Ly's particular brand of feminism exposes growing public apprehension in prewar France about a "surfeit" of unwed, middle-class women and the attempt to shape these individuals' sociopolitical and sexual identities.

Many excellent works have been written on the experience and cultural imagery of singleness in the "long" nineteenth century, when the infamous public cry was raised against "surplus" or "redundant" women in industrialized Western countries. (3) Framed largely as a middle-class problem, the "redundant" woman spoke to broader financial and social anxieties experienced by bourgeois families in the second half of the century, suggesting concerns that virginal daughters would fail to accomplish their nationally significant marital and maternal roles. What is often overlooked in this scholarly discussion, however, is the extent to which the politicized issue of the female surplus has been framed principally as a British phenomenon. Much interest has centered on the English suffrage campaign after the turn of the twentieth century, when a cadre of prominent and vocal unwed women were present in the movement. Sheila Jeffreys and Susan Kingsley Kent have revealed that in this era, a group of self-proclaimed "spinsters" in the Women's Social and Political Union embarked on a conscientious public campaign against "male lust." Proclaiming their celibacy a political decision, these individuals waged a strike against all sexual relations with men until women were granted equal rights. (4)

This scholarly focus on the vanguard of unmarried English activists has profoundly colored our current view of turn-of-the-century feminism. The English movement has functioned as a gauge against which all other European feminisms in this period have been measured. Historians of suffragism in France, in particular, have refuted earlier characterizations of French republican feminism as more "moderate" than militant English activism by highlighting the Third Republic's volatile political landscape and by emphasizing the practical and theoretical difficulties French campaigners faced when attempting to incorporate women into national conceptions of liberal citizenship. Citing passionate fears of female political activism and the New Woman against an anxious background of nationalistic and conservative revival, scholars have underscored the French movement's need to present a nonviolent and "feminine" image to the public, one that did not openly challenge women's primary sexual, marital, or reproductive roles. (5) Historian Karen Offen has most notably argued that the majority of feminists in France emphasized women's "maternal and nurturant functions" and stressed the notion of "equality-in-difference" rather than espousing a more individualistic Anglo-American philosophy. (6)

Although maternity and sexual difference were certainly dominant tropes in French feminist discourse, focusing on the question of single women allows us to view the French movement from a different angle. The campaigners' familial rhetoric, fashioned consciously in opposition to that of the English suffragettes, covered up the reality of a significant number of unwed women of varying social situations in France. By 1900, there were 4.1 million single adult women (femmes majeures) and 2.4 million widows and divorcees in this nation compared to 7.9 million married women. (7) These striking figures led French feminists to take the issue of the female surplus seriously. Although suffragists in France did not adopt "spinsterhood" as a political basis from which to wage a campaign, they engaged in an ongoing discussion about how to create an acceptable public identity for these considerable numbers of unmarried women.