The chaotic 'Manifestation Des Femmes', represents a critique of the women's emancipation movements of the era, depicting their demonstrations as the workings of hysterical women. Organised movements of women in France were mooted amongst St-Simonians in the 1830s, but the flourishing of such movements, and their independence from masculine guidance was more a feature of 1848 then at any time previously. The chaotic 'Manifestation Des Femmes', represents a critique of the women's emancipation movements of the era, depicting their demonstrations as the workings of hysterical women. Organised movements of women in France were mooted amongst St-Simonians in the 1830s, but the flourishing of such movements, and their independence from masculine guidance was more a feature of 1848 then at any time previously. In breaching the norms of patriarchal structures of the nineteenth century, a common trope used against female intellectuals was the de-feminised women. Disputing women’s aims to be involved in the political and public sphere through an educated presence, they were seen to lack womanly virtue. These women were critiqued for ignoring their duties as daughters, wives and mothers, and often played on the idea of the subordinate husband, forced to take up the role of the woman of the house. We can see this in the theme of neglect that is apparent in both prints. In the 1848 French satire ‘Women leaving their husbands to look after children while they go to their club’, the print captures the emerging salon culture and female literary spaces that were seen to distract women from their duties. A wife, holding a text on a discourse of women is in conversation with her husband. She instructs ‘Take care of the pot to the fire and my daughter to bed early. If she screams, give her to suckle… With what, missus? With the bottle, you idiot!’. In confronting and challenging their expected duties, the representations offers an insight into the subversion of traditional roles that was becoming more apparent in the nineteenth century.

La Tribune des femmes, and its earlier iterations, La femme libre, Apostolat des femmes, La femme d’avenir, La femme nouvelle Affranchissement des femmes, was founded and edited by the Saint-Simonians Jeanne-Désirée Veret (1810-1891) and Marie-Reine Guindorf (1812-1836) between August 1832 and April 1834, when it ceased publication. The newspaper was based at Guindorf’s first-floor apartment in the rue du Caire, and printed and distributed by August Auffray. The newspaper’s founding coincided with the female members of the Saint-Simonian movement being removed from its hierarchy as its leader, Prosper Enfantin (1796-1864) and the male members of the movement shifted toward an increasingly theoretical and mystical understanding of their mission and withdrew to an all-male commune of about forty men at Enfantin’s family home at Ménilmontant in the outskirts of Paris. Veret and Guindorf saw the La Tribune, which operated as a co-operative, as complementing the more theoretical and mystical work of the male members of the movement by publishing articles written by women offering practical and pragmatic responses to the pressing social, economic, and political problems of the day. La Tribune was written and managed by women who were themselves mostly from the working and artisan classes. It combined socialist and feminist concerns, seeing the two as indivisible, and thereby making it one of the first working-class feminist newspapers of its kind. The newspaper’s cosmopolitan perspective meant that it was concerned with the state of women’s and working-class emancipation throughout Europe, and not just in France. Between 1833 and 1834 it published numerous articles on the state of female emancipation in England and France and engaged in a lively debate with the English Owenite newspaper, The Crisis. At the heart of La Tribune’s feminist critique of established social relations was a democratic ideal of equality, and most arrestingly, an ethic of care that emerged from the experience of women. The Wollstonecraftian inspired feminist critique – that private vice corrupts public virtue – was the compass to La Tribune’s editorial orientation. La Tribune argued for the independence of women from men, equality in marriage, including rights over property and decisions over children, the establishment of nurseries and universal schooling for children as ways of promoting female independence and equality between the sexes and classes. It saw the neglect of education was one of the important sources of women’s misery, and, in a direct response to lacunas in the July Monarchy’s 1833 law on public education, argued for the establishment of public schools for girls, especially working-class girls. La Tribune offered a wide-ranging and inspiring critique of established domestic and social relations that its authors contended were defined by a base selfishness and crude instrumentalisation of social relations that were the root causes of a ‘moral decrepitude that threatens to annihilate in humanity all ties, and fellow feeling’. Against this, the women writers for La Tribune developed ideas of solidarity between both women of different classes, and between men and women workers, championing ‘universal association’ – a term with Fourierist connotations – as the means by which they would attain their goal of achieving ‘a unified’ and equal society and polity.

In the age of revolutions, the eighteenth century pioneered a movement of female intellectuals. The movement was respected for its learned women and female authorship, and was led by figures Elizabeth Montagu and Elizabeth Verna. The Bluestockings salon as a literary institution, was an environment that enabled enlightened conversation amongst women. In the words of Hannah More in ‘Bas Blue- or conversation’ the exchange of tastes and education was meaningless without conversation.'  The literary salon became a quasi social project and a mean of entering the public sphere. However, by the start of the nineteenth century literary women faced increasing mockery and criticism. Depicting them as parading under the guise of learning, they were seen as encroaching on male spaces, and their hosting of salons and readings clubs became a major cause for concern and as far too revolutionary by the 1800s. Thomas Rowlandson’s 1815 caricature ‘The breaking up of the bluestockings club’ encapsulates the fear of female spaces, with the lack of male guardianship resulting in a descent into chaos. Its publication coincided with the announcement of the publication of Hannah More’s Essay on the Character and Practical Writings of St Paul (1815), and this may have instigated Rowlandson onto create the piece as a reactionary critique of female intellectuals. The male figure in the print epitomises the trope of a moralistic guide to the immoral women who reject their female duties. The representation signifies the fear that  gender boundaries will be transgressed and women will invade the physical, intellectual, but above all moral and political space of male intellectuals.

The occasion for the print was the emergence of a number of Female Reform Societies in several towns in the North and Midlands in the summer of 1819. These societies were certainly novel and nothing similar had been seen before. At the same time, as Paul Custer points out, their rhetoric –  replete with references to home, hearth, loom, cottage and children –  was not so distinctive. There were groups and meetings of ‘Female Reformers’ organised in Blackburn, Stockport, Manchester, and Leigh. In the latter case, the reformers held a meeting five days before Peterloo at which those on the platform took turns to don a cap of liberty. The reaction of elite observers was uniformly hostile, but the presence of women in Northern communities and their involvement in the industries hit hard by the end of the war meant that they were regarded as a natural component of the protest scene. For example, they appeared alongside Henry Hunt on the platform in Manchester in January 1819, and caps of liberty (included in the image here, though satirised by the inuendo associated with the pole on which it is displayed) became a common feature of meetings. J Lewis Mark’s 1819 satire ‘Much wanted a Reform among females!!!’, depicts female reformists as hyper-feminised and hyper-sexualised. It is demonstrative of the popular attitudes towards female emancipation and the undermining of their visibility in popular politics. Depicting both an elderly husband’s abusive attitude towards his wife, and a younger man’s sexual advances towards one of the women in the audience, it intends to undercut the aims of the reformers to use their ideas of reforms to aid both themselves and their husbands. By 1817 Parliament had passed the Habaeus Corpus Act to counter the rising tide of the radical working class movements. Those imprisoned were predominantly from industrialised towns in the Midlands and the North. The emergence of women as leaders in the radical working class movements between 1817 and 1818, as male leaders were imprisoned, is illustrative of their entry into the public sphere and popular politics.Demonstrating the intersections between class and gender that became apparent in the radical class working class movement, the 'political domesticity' amongst working class women’s activism, is apparent as they used their positions as wives and mothers to support the patriarchs of their family. In manoeuvring between the domestic sphere of their home and the public sphere in their political activism, they could appeal to the wider political field with far less scrutiny. NOnetheless, Marks attempts to subvert their claims throug none too subtle innuendo:   ‘Though we should be start [sic] naked, we could make the whole Army Stand!—It is our duty as Wives to assist our Husbands in every Push and Turn, by that means we shall Increase, and Multiply, in our under takings’. And, as in the elderly man abusing his wife in "Come home and get Dinner ready you Old Baggage I'll Reform you.", there is a consistent reduction of women to sexual objects and undermining of their political activism. The context of the print was based in a period of summer 1819, where there was an emergence of a number of Female Reform Societies in several towns in the North and Midlands.