Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon appears in Simone de Beauvoir’s history of feminism as a forceful opponent of women’s emancipation from within nineteenth-century reform politics. Rooted in support for small property owners and hostility to Saint-Simonian mysticism, he made women’s confinement to the home a principle of social order. His intervention mattered not simply as an individual antifeminist position: it broke an alliance between feminism and socialism just as industrial work was beginning to alter women’s material circumstances.

Political Position and the Domestic Ideal

De Beauvoir describes Proudhon as the notable exception to a nineteenth-century reform movement that generally sought justice through equality and was favorable to feminism. He objected to the socialist women’s banquet presided over by Leroux and attacked Jeanne Deroin. His formulation of women’s social options was stark: “Housewife or courtesan.” Rather than treating women as equal participants in a shared political and economic life, he placed them within a choice bounded by domestic dependence and sexualized social status.

The disagreement had consequences for political organization. Until Proudhon, conservatives had led much of the public opposition to women’s claims; his attack broke the connection between feminism and socialism. The split exposed the limits of assuming that a general appeal to social reform would automatically include women. Women’s demands could conflict with the interests and assumptions of men who otherwise opposed conservative politics.

The Argument in Justice

In Justice, Proudhon treats man as the social individual and denies that a couple is a partnership, since partnership would imply equality. He argues that women are inferior physically, intellectually, and morally, assigning them two-thirds of men’s physical force and then expressing the supposed intellectual and moral difference through a numerical comparison: women are worth 8/27 of the stronger sex. The calculation gives a veneer of precision to a conclusion that confines women to dependence; it makes hierarchy appear measurable rather than politically chosen.

Two women, Mme Adam and Mme d’Héricourt, answered him, one firmly and the other less emphatically. Proudhon responded with La pornocratie, ou Les femmes dans les temps modernes. De Beauvoir places this exchange within a broader pattern: antifeminist argument could denounce women’s capacities while simultaneously praising an idealized “real woman” who serves as a mirror to men. Proudhon’s own domestic life complicated that ideal. De Beauvoir notes that the life he gave his wife did not make her happy, and that Mme Proudhon’s letters form a sustained lament.

Industrial Change and the Conflict over Work

The political dispute unfolded alongside a material transformation. As industrial production expanded, machinery made women’s labor increasingly useful and reduced the importance of differences in physical strength for many jobs. Employers welcomed women workers in part because they accepted lower wages, but the same cheap labor intensified male workers’ hostility toward them as competitors. De Beauvoir records that, in France, a woman doing a day’s work equal to a man’s received only half his pay according to an 1889–93 survey; the wage disparity helped make women’s economic participation both necessary and precarious.

This conflict complicated the claim that women and workers were automatically united by a shared experience of oppression. De Beauvoir argues that women could be used as cheap competition against male workers, just as oppressed racial groups could be set against other workers. Integration into unions offered women a means to defend their interests without being cast as a threat to labor as a whole. Against Proudhon’s confinement of women to domestic dependence, industrial production opened a route—unequal and contested—toward economic participation and emancipation.

Significance in De Beauvoir’s History

Proudhon’s position illustrates how claims about women’s supposedly inherent inferiority can serve an established social arrangement. His numerical hierarchy recasts women’s exclusion as a consequence of nature, while his ideal of domestic dependence aligns with the broader defense of the family and property. De Beauvoir’s account instead connects women’s status to changing economic conditions: the growth of industrial employment challenged the household role he prescribed, even as wage discrimination and labor conflict restricted the gains.

His episode therefore marks a fault line in nineteenth-century reform. Equality could be endorsed in general and withheld from women in particular; socialist opposition to one hierarchy did not necessarily abolish male authority. De Beauvoir uses Proudhon to show that women’s emancipation depended not only on arguments about justice but also on access to productive work, collective organization, and recognition as social subjects.