The International Congress of Women's Rights (1878), organized by Léon Richer, was a milestone in the early organization of women’s rights activism. In Simone de Beauvoir’s account, it gave an international platform to a movement that was beginning to name itself, but remained cautious in its French campaigns and divided over how women’s freedom could be achieved.

Organizing for women’s rights

In 1869, Léon Richer launched Le Droit des Femmes and organized the International Congress of Women's Rights (1878). The congress belonged to a period when activists were pressing primarily for civil rights; the right to vote had not yet become the movement’s central demand. Its international scope signaled an effort to organize beyond isolated individual protests, although the account does not describe the proceedings or enumerate the congress’s resolutions.

The congress followed a gradual build-up of public advocacy. In the preceding years, Maria Deraismes had addressed women’s issues in public lectures, while Hubertine Auclert began a suffrage campaign and created a group called Women’s Suffrage and a newspaper, La Citoyenne. These initiatives indicate that the demand for political participation was developing alongside the more limited civil-rights program associated with the congress.

A cautious and divided movement

De Beauvoir characterizes the French and English movement of this period as timid, and says that women’s groups achieved little. She attributes this weakness in part to divisions of class: bourgeois and proletarian women did not share identical interests, and socialist feminists differed from reformers seeking new rights within existing society. The congress therefore stands not as proof of a unified campaign, but as one organizing effort within a movement whose constituencies and strategies remained unsettled.

The congress also belongs to a broader history in which organized pressure could matter without giving women control over political outcomes. De Beauvoir observes that collective demonstrations, including suffrage activism, exerted pressure when men were willing to yield to it. The congress’s significance in her account is thus both institutional and limited: it helped give women’s rights claims a public, organized form, while the structures governing legal and political change remained largely in male hands.

Place in the history of women’s rights

The event forms part of a longer chronology of campaigns for equality. Earlier democratic advocates such as John Stuart Mill had argued for equality in family and society; later, the 1879 Socialist Congress proclaimed the equality of the sexes. De Beauvoir presents these developments not as a smooth or inevitable advance, but as distinct interventions shaped by political interests, class divisions, and women’s restricted access to authority.

Her broader argument places the congress within a history written predominantly by men. Women’s movements could press claims and organize collective action, yet women did not thereby become an autonomous political force able to determine their own condition. The 1878 congress accordingly represents a meaningful step in public organization, but not the resolution of the conflict between formal claims to equality and the unequal power that governed their realization.