Jules Michelet’s Woman is a work of moral argument rather than fiction, a sustained essay on the nature, education, and social position of women, translated into English by J. W. Palmer from the last Paris edition and issued in New York and Paris in the 1860s. It belongs to the same project as Michelet’s earlier Love, and it was written as a direct intervention in what he saw as a widening rift between the sexes in modern France. The book is arranged in three movements — Education, Woman in the Family, and Woman in Society — framed by an introduction that asks why people no longer marry.
“Woman is conservative, she requires solidity ; and that is natural.”
The Core Argument
Michelet’s starting point is a diagnosis of separation. Men and women, he writes, no longer travel the same road: the man races ahead on a train of inventions and discoveries, while the woman is left behind in a past she scarcely understands. The result is not open conflict but something colder — a divided parlor, a silent table, a frozen marriage bed. Unless something is done, he warns, there will soon be not two sexes but two peoples.
His remedy is faith, and he insists that woman needs a faith she receives from man in order to raise a child, since no education is possible without belief. He argues that the time is finally ripe for such a faith to be stated plainly, because conscience now has two supports it lacked in earlier centuries: history, the conscience of the human race, and natural history, the instinctive conscience of nature. Where these three — conscience, history, and natural history — agree, he says, one may believe.
The book also sets itself against two rival camps. Against the novelists, whom he compares to the old casuists for losing sight of marriage and writing rules for libertinism, he claims to demonstrate his problems by straight lines and to leave curves to others. Against the Utopian socialists Saint-Simon and Fourier, who trust in passional attraction and a low view of human nature, he insists on effort — art, labor, and daily self-creation — as the core of what it means to be human. His studies of anatomy, especially of the brain, convinced him that the brain is the organ of work and the incarnation of daily life, and he is untroubled by the charge of realism, distinguishing a vulgar realism from one that reaches the Idea through the Real.
Inside the Book
The Translator’s Preface and Michelet’s Argument
Michelet opens by clearing ground. He has left aside two subjects that drew censure upon L’Amour, handing them over to the literature of the day, and he insists on straight lines where others prefer curves. Novelists wander love’s bypaths, he says, but never strike its grand highway—impregnation enduring unto death in elevated passions. Clever storytellers resemble the old casuists Escobar and Busenbaum, each reaching fifty editions like Balzac, who forgot the foundation of their own doctrine; modern writers lose sight of marriage and lay down rules for libertinism. He separates himself too from the Utopians Saint-Simon and Fourier, who invoke a low nature, trust passional attraction and debased inclination, and try to suppress effort. Effort belongs to man as energetic creator and artist; art, labor, and effort rule us, and what we call nature in ourselves is mostly self-made, created daily. His anatomical studies, especially of the brain, showed him the organ of work and the incarnation of daily life—most perfect flower and most touching beauty in nature, affecting in the child, sublime in man. He is indifferent to being called Realist: one realism is vulgar and vacant, the other attains the Idea through the Real. If prudery is shocked by his poetry of truth, he does not care; in L’Amour he broke the barrier between literature and science without consulting those shame-faces who would be chaster than Nature and purer than God.
Woman needs a faith, and expects it from man to bring up her child, since there can be no education without faith. The day has come when faith may be laid down in a formula; Rousseau could not do it because his age was unripe. Conscience is the test of truth but needs two controlling influences: history, the conscience of the human race, and natural history, the instinctive conscience of nature. Neither existed formerly; both were born between 1760 and 1860. When Conscience, History, and Natural History accord—Believe.
Why People Do Not Marry
From social, religious, and economical circumstances, Man lives apart from Woman, and increasingly so. They are not merely on parallel paths but two travellers from the same point, one at full speed, the other sluggish, following divergent routes. Man, however morally weak, rides a train of ideas, inventions, and discoveries so rapid that sparks dart from the burning rail. Woman, hopelessly left behind, remains in the rut of a past she little knows; distanced, she will not or cannot go faster. Worse, they seem not to desire reunion—nothing to say to each other, a cold hearth, silent table, frozen couch. People say one is not bound to put himself out in his own family, yet do no better in society where politeness commands it. A parlor divides into two parlors, men and women. In a friendly reunion of a dozen, if the hostess gently forces the circles to mingle, silence succeeds; no more conversation. They have no ideas or language in common; they do not know how to speak of mutual interests, having lost sight of each other. Soon, unless care is taken, despite casual meetings there will no longer be two sexes but two peoples.
The book combating these tendencies—a little book of the heart without literary pretension—was sharply criticised on all sides. L’Amour threw itself naively into the breach, invoked good-nature, and said “Love again.” Sharp cries followed, for the diseased core was touched: “No, we will not love, we will not be happy. There is something under all this. Under that religious form which deifies woman, he attempts to strengthen, to…”
The Female Operative
The excerpt opens mid-question about why peasants abandon fields to die of hunger in towns; the answer given is that it is the workwoman herself, or her mother, who came and became a domestic, and who, though unmarried, bore a child—that child being the operative. The narrator then addresses a “dear Sir,” asking whether he knows how terrible, excessive, and severe country life is in France. Women do not till in England; they are miserable but have sheds against wind and rain. Germany, with forests, prairies, slow labor, and national gentleness, does not crush woman as France does. The durus arator of the poet has reality scarcely anywhere but in France, because he is a proprietor of little or nothing and in debt; by furious, blind labor and unskilful agriculture he struggles with the vulture, and the land threatens to escape him. Rather than lose it he will bury himself in it, but first certainly his wife. He marries to have a workman: in the Antilles they buy a negro; in France they marry a wife. A woman with small appetite and slender figure is preferred, from the idea she will eat less (a historic fact). The poor French woman has a great heart and does as much or more than required: she drives the ass in light soil while the man holds the plough; she has the hardest part. He prunes the vine at ease; she scrapes and digs. He has respites, festive occasions, friends, goes alone to the tavern; she goes a moment to church and falls asleep. If he returns drunk at night she is beaten and often, worst of all, made pregnant. She endures a year of double suffering, chilled by wind, drenched by rain. Most die of consumption, especially in the north (see statistics). No constitution can withstand their mode of life. Then forgive the mother if she desires her daughter to suffer less, sending her to the factory where at least she has a roof, or making her a domestic in town where she partakes of the amenities of the bourgeoisie. The girl is eager for that; every woman has in her little needs of elegance, finery, and aristocracy. She is at once punished: she no longer sees the sun.
The Child’s Amorous Sensibility
Michelet opens this stretch with a claim that startles him as much as it might his reader: amorous sensibility runs stronger in a child’s nerves than in an adult’s. Love lies dormant in the sexual organs, yet it seems already awake in the spinal marrow that governs them, so that the body gives its premonitions at the first call. Hence the innocent coquetries, the sudden timidities, the bashfulness that arrives without cause. The child is infinitely mobile and infinitely sensitive; harshness destroys her, but so can tenderness. Passionate, fitful mothers who smother their daughters in violent transports force and enervate so tender an organism, which asks only for mild, gentle, serious love and pure harmonies. The little creature, already amorous in her very organization, is endangered as much by furious caresses as by undue severity.
Against Madame Necker de Saussure
Madame Necker de Saussure held that a girl and a boy are almost the same until ten. Michelet calls that “almost” an incalculable, infinite difference. Little girls are more staid and tender, rarely hurting a little dog or plucking a bird. He remembers lying indisposed on a sofa, half covered with a cloak, when a lovely little girl visiting with her mother tried to tuck him in better. Such creatures must be loved, but not fondled too much. The boy differs: he will not long play peacefully with a girl; if they build a house, he wants a carnage, a wooden horse to whip and manage. She then plays alone, and he vainly makes believe to be her brother or little husband; even if younger, she despairs of him and resigns herself to solitude.
The Doll as First Love
Chiefly in winter by the fireside, after being scolded, she wraps some object—perhaps a bit of stick—in linen and a piece of her mother’s new gown, ties it with thread to mark waist and head, embraces it tenderly, rocks it, and says low: “Thou, thou lovest me; thou wilt never scold me.” This is serious play. The new person is her child. It is not simply imitation of maternity or a wish to rule a little daughter; the precocious organism adds another instinct, even in those who never had a mother for a model. It is First Love: its ideal is not a rude, noisy brother but a gentle young sister like herself who may caress and console her. It is also the first attempt at independence, a timid essay of individuality, a feeble desire to withdraw, feminine opposition and contradiction. She begins her role as woman: subject to authority, she murmurs at her mother as she will later at her husband. She needs a tiny confidant with whom to sigh—perhaps for nothing today, but something in the future. The mother should join in and kindly receive her daughter’s child; far from despising the doll, she should insist the capricious girl always be a good mother to it, keep it properly dressed, neither spoiled nor beaten, but treated reasonably as she herself is. Fathers, brothers, cousins should not laugh; they resemble her, since in grave affairs a memory returns and they smile, half-avowing they have played with a doll. The more the doll is her own, of simple, elementary, personal manufacture, the more her heart is set on it and the more danger of distressing her.
The Little Girl of the North
In the north of France, in a poor hard-working region, Michelet saw a discreet little girl wise beyond her years. She had only older brothers, born long after her parents expected more children, and they seemed to take it amiss that she had come. Her laborious, severe mother kept her always near at work while the others played; the elder boys, with selfish levity, rarely joined her sports. She tried to make a little garden, but they laughed and trampled it. She made a little friend from cotton rags, to whom she related her brothers’ tricks or her mother’s scoldings. Her tenderness was lively and extreme; the doll was sensible, replied intelligently in the sweetest voice; by tender effusions and touching recitals it was equally affected, and embracing each other they wept. One Sunday it was discovered and much laughed at; the boys tore it from her arms and threw it into the topmost branches, where it remained. Her tears and cries availed nothing. She refused ever to make another. All winter she thought of it and wept to think it was out in snow and storm. In spring, when the tree was cut down, she begged the gardener to look for it; long before, her poor sister had been carried away by the northern blasts. Two years after, as her mother bought clothes for the boys, the shopwoman, who also had toys, noticed the little one looking at them and gave her a little man doll. She trembled and tottered with surprise and delight, hardly able to carry it. This doll, pliant and obedient, lent itself to her every wish; it was fond of dress, and its mistress thought only of making it beautiful and brilliant, but that was its ruin—the boys danced her to death: her arms were torn out, and she fell so ill she was put to bed and nursed. The little girl sank under these new blows of grief. Fortunately a young lady, touched with pity, found among her trumpery a splendid doll that had been her own. Although defaced by time, it was much more real than the modern one; its form was perfect—even naked, it seemed alive. Her friends often caressed it; already it had preferences in friendships and showed gleams and first signs of a precocious passionate character. During a short illness confining her, the mother, watching beside her, learned to know her daughter’s heart.
The Black Woman and the Future of Race
Michelet rejoices that in Haiti, liberty and intelligent culture are refining the black woman without amalgamation—her features growing delicate, her hair changing—so that she becomes the true black woman rather than the coarse figure produced by Africa’s burning coasts, where warm floods rot in the valleys and ferment everything like dough in an oven. Petty wars, the slave trade, and American slavery add their own disfigurements. Yet even unrefined she keeps a supple, childlike charm that Greek gymnastic beauty never knew, and she differs from the proud Greek lady by a gentle humility, never sure of pleasing, ready to do anything to displease less. Loved, she will learn and do anything; in her race the woman must first be elevated, and through love elevate man and child. Her education must run contrary to ours: cultivate rhythm first—dancing, music—then through design lead her to reading, science, and the agricultural arts, so that Africa’s red Isis gives way to America’s black Isis. A drop of black blood revives everything, a fountain of youth; the noble Spanish Republicans, first to abolish slavery, might be restored by beneficent Africa. From this race, gay and loving, comes a man of irresistible powers—the best machinist and most vivid dramatist since Shakespeare.
The black race offers unknown beauty, as art multiplies the single red rose into numberless tea-roses; Prud’hon painted nothing more lovingly than the dark woman in the Louvre, her deep eyes like Night shrouded in Passion. Michelet recalls a young Haytian lady of magical charm, and honors “the black France,” urging Haiti to cultivate her free genius through her women and to organize schools, with a rigid normal-school for governesses after Froebel’s method. France was deeply loved: the tribes of North America welcomed the French and preferred them for their daughters, though the Englishman and German, less generative, die out abroad. The red woman’s love is more surprising—stern, haughty, sombre—yet she saw the French as brave and kind, fraternizing with her warriors; from these amours remain the scattered, dying Franco-Indians, perhaps soon only Préault’s bust perpetuating the noble woman Chateaubriand caricatured. Ten years earlier an American speculator exhibited a family of Iowas in Europe: the men magnificent and regal in bear claws, a ten-year-old child like an Egyptian statue of red marble, consoled only by their scorn of the crowd. The wife of a warrior named “The Wolf” drooped and died; France could offer her only a tomb. Antiquity never dreamed anything so sad—a superior being accursed in not being left to his race’s expansion, while old Europe laid before him guns and fire-water. The woman looks on like a sphinx, yet has a mother’s heart; her life was as mute as her death.
The Blending of Races
Love’s earthly plan, Michelet argues, is to blend all races in one universal marriage, forming a single clan like the Scotch Campbells—but not too soon, for mingled blood would run pale and colorless, losing its charming characteristics. An able book on race-mingling is needed, since indiscriminate mingling degrades or ruins. Between negro and white there is no anatomical opposition; the mixed race lives and is strong. Between French and English, seemingly related, there is marked skeletal difference, and offspring are short-lived, dwarfed, or discordant. French-German results vary: the man gains moral freshness, music, nature, amiability, though perhaps monotonous; the child is frail and charming, neither French nor German, becoming European. An intelligent young man who taught birds to read and calculate said his birds were of pure race, unimpaired by combining. Michelet reflects on the tendency toward mingling and the often-incorrect belief that mixed race is inferior.
The Mother Choosing a Son-in-Law
A mother arranging her daughter’s marriage is at her most interesting and beautiful, moved by restrained emotion, self-abnegation, and sacrifice; her daughter is the visible virtue and purity of the mother, who has confined herself to the domestic hearth between God and her husband. Tempted to use her power—since charming the young man depends wholly on herself—she might become absolute mistress of the future household and make him an obedient husband. Unwilling to trust him with her cherished idol before she is sure of him, she plunges into dangerous coquetries, thinking she can stop at will; consequently he loses his wits, forms mad schemes, or withdraws, while the announced marriage compromises the young lady. Michelet has seen this more than once, and such cases are frequent; the mother, loving her daughter so much, submits to strange conditions, leaving all three overwhelmed with sadness and mortification.
Even the wisest make this mistake: they choose a son-in-law to suit themselves, not their daughters, consulting their own fancy according to a romantic ideal. This double ideal is always false: they admire masculine energy but select destroying energy rather than creating force; strangers to grand achievements, they understand valor only as short-lived daring that serves on the battle-field. The man of brave speech has the advantage; they pooh-pooh the true warrior who holds his tongue. Their judgment of gentle characteristics is equally unsound: they find charm in a man resembling them, a puppet of no sex, weaving sentimental romances over a good-for-nothing, girlish page—Cherubino, Nemorino, more a woman than Stella. In their novels, Proud’hon observes, they never create a man with genuine masculine character; their hero is always a woman’s man. In real life they prefer the woman’s man, the nice young fellow of “correct principles,” flattered to be more energetic than he, thinking they can govern him; but the amiable, insipid character is often a mask for success, and the man at heart is selfish, to-morrow harsh, unfeeling, false.
The Great Legend of Africa: Woman the Goddess of Goodness
Michelet turns from the synthetic grandeur of antiquity to Egypt, the highest expression of the African race. In the Rameses of Ipsamboul, Memphis, and Turin he finds goodness joined to power in sublime repose—an expression that reveals a whole people. Egypt was a moral festival, the joy of the deep African world. Even the fellah, ground down from Joseph to Mohammed Ali, remains intelligent and dexterous, gentle and docile, longing to love and be loved. That tenderness grows amid cruel immolation: premature death from toil, children snatched by military razzia, unbroken tears. Isis seeking Osiris is lamented everywhere, painted and sculptured on every wall. The care to preserve the body, the fillets inscribed with prayers, express the most ardent aspiration ever shown—to cherish the beloved and follow in death.
Egypt is a land of toil and tears, yet a feast and a land of joy: in burning Africa a valley of promise opens to the north breeze, and the traveller dying of thirst reaches the great oasis. Here the first word and last is Isis; Woman reigns. Diodorus says Egyptian husbands swore obedience to their wives. Isis is the lofty genius of Africa, her throne decked with the attributes of fecundation—the lotus sceptre, the insatiate vulture, the fruitful cow signifying maternity. This maternal goodness glorifies and purifies the hearts of Africa, and death, mourning, and eternal sorrow sanctify them. Religions spring not only from nature, climate, race, and country but from the needs of the heart, from the sufferings of the wounded soul. No faith bears clearer witness than old Egypt’s: a poor laborious people, toiling without respite and fearing death because family was everything, sought alleviation in immortal nature, trusted its resurrections, and prayed for hope. Nature swore they should never die. The soul, earth, and heaven associated their triple drama with the year, which dies only to rise again; Love caught this idea and believed in eternal renaissance.
From the universal mother, Night, were conceived Isis and Osiris, who loved each other in the womb and were so utterly one that Isis became pregnant before she was—bearing Horus, no other than his father, another Osiris of goodness, beauty, and light. Mother, father, son: same age, same love, same heart. Behold them at the altar—woman, man, and child—living beings, not the fantastic trinity of India nor the scholastic trinity of Byzantine subtlety, but life itself. Until then gods were fierce: Indian Siva keeps his eyes closed lest the world perish under his glance; the Fire of the Persians hungers for all that exists. Here nature herself stands on the altar under the sweet aspect of Family, and the great god is a mother. One feared the black race, governed by the beast and impressed with terrific images of lion and crocodile, would produce only monsters; instead it is softened, humanized, made feminine. The loving African has exalted the most touching object of all earthly religions: a good and faithful woman. All innocent, joy bursts forth—the joy of exhausted Africa, a deluge of water, a prodigious sea of sweet water overflowing the land, infiltrating the least veins so not one grain of sand complains of thirst.
How Woman Excels Man
A singular and charming man could do nothing blindly and needed a beloved hand to bandage his eyes, completing the blindness that rendered him productive; yet he lived with judicious reflection ever at his side, solitary in the inspired moment, yielding to the pressure that checks inspiration. Women have more delicate ears and more time. Michelet advises a woman not to be perfect but to keep faults enough to console a man, since nature intended him to be proud. When a man is dejected, the best remedy is for the woman to be downcast herself, more a woman, younger—even a child. And a second maxim: do not divide your heart. At Hyeres he saw a garden of orange trees planted at suitable distances, with only borders of strawberries along the walks; the orange trees drooped and sickened, and the gardeners never suspected the innocent strawberry vines. The robust trees did not complain—they only died. At Cannes they dig the ground eight feet deep, three times over, before planting, to ensure no forgotten root claims its share of sap. The orange tree desires to be alone—and so does love.
Love differs among nations. The French woman is an admirable partner in business and ideas; if not employed she may forget her husband, but in difficulties she recollects her love and sometimes dies for him. The English woman is reliable, courageous, indefatigable, following anywhere—”Lucy, to-day I set out for Australia.” “Well, only give me time, dear, to put on my bonnet.” The German woman loves always, humble, obedient, fitted only for boundless love; with her one can emigrate to the ends of the earth or live in profound solitude. Stendhal, an ultra Frenchman opposed to Germany, remarked that the best marriages are those of Protestant Germany. True love kills all other passions: pride, ambition, coquetry disappear. Lover and mystic blend; humility becomes excessive, a desire to abase themselves to exalt their god. A devotee said: “If I could only have been the dog of St. Pauline.” Lovers say: “If I were only her dog!” But such excesses love should not indulge; its effort should elevate her who loves, cultivating equality. When two souls are disproportionate, no blending is possible.
Two things are dangerous. First, magnetic power: women’s facility of submitting is a disease, aggravated by cultivation. A man not beloved assumes unlimited power over a woman’s will; she becomes his slave, disclosing humiliating secrets, following fatally, surrendering under pretext of medical treatment or society’s amusement.
The Prisoner’s Wife
A man who knew prisons from the inside once explained to Michelet the true nature of Tartarus — not a myth but a bottomless pit of despair. The effects of confinement differ by sex: a man can be broken so thoroughly that a child makes him tremble, while a woman hardens into a fury. Walls and bars solve nothing; they produce only shameful suicide, the cripple, the idiot. What the prisoner needs is air and exhausting labor. For the married prisoner, marriage itself must be restored. Michelet presses the question to the lawyers of the Academy of Moral Sciences: when the law imprisons a man and suppresses the civil effects of his marriage, does it mean to condemn him to celibacy? He thinks not. Many prisoners cling to their families and make honorable sacrifices — at Mont-Saint-Michel he saw a convict, a skilled hatter, who deprived himself of everything to maintain his wife and waited only to be reunited with her. The Church calls marriage indissoluble, so its rights should be permanent; why, then, has the Church not spoken out in the name of religion, morality, and pity? Practical difficulties remain, and a wise caution is needed so that a perverse husband is not introduced to the prisoner. An administration burdened with generalities cannot gather minute information or sustain the delicate correspondence one woman requires. Here a woman of kind heart and approved virtues becomes necessary. If the prisoner is in a great city or not too far off, she should procure work for her husband there, so he may have the pleasure of visits on days the intelligent superintendent indicates. Woman is love itself; give that back to her and she may become all one wishes. Women retain great elasticity — sometimes exalted and capricious in loving, but never cast down like men, never ignobly pusillanimous. She who bestows one ray of happiness on this weak flock would be so beloved she could lead them at will. Madame Mallet understands this; it is her great means of discipline and regeneration. She advises employing it, admitting the husband to the prisoner, but imposes so many fetters and restrictions that seeing him thus might cause still more suffering. If bestowed at all, it should not be grudgingly. Surveillance should not be exercised by officials and mockers whose very faces would freeze the prisoners’ raptures. It should be left to the sagacious goodness of a reliable and respected lady, responsible only to God.
Madame Lortet and the Healing Art
Dr. Lortet of Lyons owed his vocation to his mother. Her father, Richard, a Lyons manufacturer and a grenadier, learned mathematics in his regiment, taught officers, and on returning home and marrying, gave his daughter a similar education. She began like Froebel’s babies with geometry, which children delight in, while arithmetic fatigues them. She married a manufacturer. During the civil convulsions of Lyons she risked her safety for both sides, saving sometimes royalists, sometimes jacobins, forcing the doors of authorities and extorting pardons. Towards 1800 the world seemed to be ending; Senancour wrote his desperate Obermann, Grainville his Dernier Homme. Madame Lortet sank amid the universal ruin, and a nervous malady took possession of her at thirty. The learned Gilibert told her nothing was the matter and sent her to collect plants at the gates of Lyons. She could scarcely walk but obeyed; each day he increased the distance, until in less than a year she had become a botanist and walked eight leagues a day with her child of twelve. She learned Latin to read botanical works and teach her son, and studied chemistry, astronomy, and medicine for him. She sent him to study in Paris and Germany. During the fighting at Lyons, mother and son nursed, concealed, and served the wounded of both sides. Had she lived in a great medical community, she would have pursued medicine and been the physician of the poor rather than their herbalist.
The Physician of the Poor
Michelet writes from the banks of the Gironde, where neither there nor in neighboring villages is there a physician; all are gathered in a small, non-central town with almost nothing to do. Before one can be obtained and his expensive journey paid, the poor patient dies. Diseases like fever or croup, if attacked in time, would be trifles, but the child dies. Where is Madame Lortet? An American lady with an income of a thousand livres, rich in heart and information, with the delicate mind and timid reserve of English modesty, resolved to give her daughter a medical education. In that land of action and immigration, if her daughter married a manufacturer on a western river, the thousands of operatives and laborers would have medical aid on the spot rather than die waiting for a doctor a hundred leagues off. In severe winters no aid is expected, and less in countries like Russia, where muddy grounds interrupt communication for six months. In the United States, lectures on anatomy are attended by both sexes indiscriminately; if prejudice debars them from dissection, they have the admirable models of Auzoux, who said he made as many for the United States as for all the rest of the world together. Supposing equal knowledge, the best physician is the one who loves most. This saying of a great teacher suggests woman is the true physician. So she is in all barbarous nations, where she knows and applies the secret virtues of simples. So has she been in Persia, guardian of all sciences and mother — a sister tending plants, watering them, covering and protecting them in winter, heaping fallen leaves and flowers around them so they shelter and nourish the plants, and taking from them only with thanks. If she gathers fruit from a peach or cherry tree with her still-beautiful hand, she smilingly tells the tree to lend it to its sister, promising that when her turn comes she will restore it with all her heart.
Children Light the Future
Cradle impressions are omnipotent on our death-beds.
Key Ideas
Several named ideas carry the argument. The first is the claim that effort, not nature, makes us what we are: what we call our nature is largely self-made, created daily. The second is the double foundation of belief — history and natural history as the two controlling influences on conscience. The third is the distinction between the two sexes as “harmonious opponents,” whose differences should shape not only method but subject matter in education: history for the boy, nature for the girl, since nature is itself a woman and repeats herself in serene cycles while history drives forward from battle to battle.
A fourth idea is the doll as first love. Michelet reads a small girl’s wrapping of a stick in linen as something more than imitation — a first essay of individuality, a confidant, a rehearsal for the role of woman. He urges mothers to enter into the game rather than despise it. A fifth is the argument that floriculture cures love, because the flower becomes not a lover but a daughter, and that the child should be taught the flower as a stage of the plant’s existence rather than as an ornament. A sixth is his account of race and love: love as the mediator and redeemer of races, Africa as feminine, the black woman as the most loving and generating, and the warning that mingling must not come too soon, since indiscriminate crossing degrades what it blends.
Themes
The book’s deepest theme is the isolation of modern marriage and the fear that the sexes have lost a common language. Michelet writes as a moralist of reunion, and his recurring image is of two travellers who started from the same point and now follow divergent routes. Running alongside this is a theme of sacrifice as the substance of love: the mother who gives not of abundance but of her own life, the bride who leaves her father and mother, the wife who is asked to be the happiness and salvation of many. The book reads, in this light, as a spiritual argument about what one person owes another.
Another recurring theme is the education of the body as well as the mind. Michelet studies brains at Clamart, notes the delicacy of women’s muscles and nerves, and argues that anatomy is moral because it tempers character and humanizes the heart. He is preoccupied with the physical cost of women’s lives — the peasant woman who dies of consumption, the seamstress with chilblained hands, the servant girl driven into the street — and treats these as evidence of a social order that has forgotten what it is dealing with. A third theme is the necessity of truth-telling between parents and children, especially about sex, which he believes must be revealed by the mother through the ordinary observation of plants and insects rather than left to chance and corruption.
Why It Matters
Woman matters less as a settled doctrine than as a document of a particular moral imagination at a particular moment. Michelet writes with the confidence of a man who believes the sciences of his day have finally made belief possible, and he draws on ovology, brain anatomy, and statistics with the same assurance he brings to Correggio and Andrea del Sarto. The result is a book that is by turns tender and severe, and often strange to a modern reader — its racial speculations and its assumptions about woman’s vocation will strike many as dated. But its central complaint, that men and women can come to share a house and nothing else, remains recognizable, and its insistence that love is not a trivial subject but the most real thing in the world is the conviction that holds the whole argument together.
