This book is in homage to Flora Tristan, the great pioneer of the first years of the 19th century. She was more than the first feminist, she was the pioneer of the worker's demands against the injustice of the factorie's owners in the industrialization er

Flora Tristan, A Forerunner Woman

By Magda Portal

Trafford Publishing

Copyright © 2012 Magda Portal
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4669-3414-6

Chapter One

THE WOMEN'S SITUATION IN PERU

I consider it a duty to expose in this preface the actual status of women in Peru, though brief, up to where she shows herself in her diverse vital connotations and within the technological advancements and great socio-political changes.

I believe that I am not mistaken in saying that the vast majority of women in Peru continue to be relegated to the situation of minors, under male guardianship and subject to restrictions that coerce her liberty, yielding to the imposition of obsolete laws that impede them from discovering new horizons that could raise her level within society. Her identification is revealing: "Profession: Housewife", which define her by the limits of her existence as being solely dedicated to the obligation of serving in the home, caring for children and the husband within conventional activities.

Nevertheless, it should be pointed out there exists a good percentage of women of legal age who have achieved the breaking of obstacles and prejudices that tie them to ignorance, leisure and conformity. It is obvious that at this time, all of the education centers—universities, academies, colleges, etc.—are populated by girls, who invade their classrooms with the desire to broaden in their knowledge, as per their economic abilities, since the State does not promote free higher level studies nor any other than primary school.

If the class based society in which we find ourselves, stimulated the many young women, anxious to continue their studies, it would be easy to note that they make up more than 50% of the female students and that most of them finish their studies and find a place in professional institutions, although they are not offered the best positions.

But in Peru, it isn't just the capital city. Our country with its 25 departments, with a population close to 20 million of which 51 % are women, still determines the normal development of the feminine element, under pressure by the demands they face in the struggle for life without relying on the protection of the farsighted State.

The provinces lack the facilities that the capital can offer and although in the main departments there are universities because of the population and economic abilities, these are not as complete as in the capital, from whence comes the exodus of most of the students. Generally, the provincial girls reach middle studies and for economic reasons, they are not able to gain access to upper education. From there, family obligations and age throw a woman into marriage, cutting outright any enthusiasm for education, intellectual or professional overcoming. The few who do reach it, do so thanks to their economic situation. Women, therefore, remain in a lesser valued situation in which she has to develop a future that is free from economic tutelage and has broader horizons.

INDIGENOUS WOMEN

The Peruvian population is made up of a high percentage of ethnic groups that are considered inferior, coming from the mountains and the jungles. Indigenous women are accustomed to misery and the indifference of public powers. They withstand their abandonment with philosophical resignation, yet they do not seem to lose hope for a better day. Hardworking women who are peasants, social workers, midwives, do not get adequate time off and continue to be subjected to an abnormal situation, verging on the age of feudalism or slavery. Cases still exist where girls from the mountains or the jungles are imported so that they come `down' to the capital to serve in Lima homes or in provincial capitals, where they are subjected to inhuman treatment without any law that they know of can reach them.

A good part of this social group now makes up what we call the `pueblos jóvenes' `young towns' who emigrated from their own lands because geological phenomena pushed them to the cities in search of better opportunities to help them survive. Women come with their husbands, children, and even animals to invade unoccupied faraway lands and remake their precarious lives with the security that things will improve. They are all united by the same expectations and the harshness of their destiny, seemingly abandoned by the authorities. This is how they survive. In her desperate struggle to come out ahead, women's work is as self-sacrificing as men's or more.

The intelligence of these human groups is well-known. They are undaunted and show courage, and even audacity to fight for their place in the invaded areas or in the locations where they have settled in order to become temporary traders, a profession that is unknown to them in their provinces, except during the fairs when in some festivities, they offer their meager products in exchange for what they need.

And in this drama, women play a spontaneous role as worker and defender of her rights. A dark sense of survival sharpen intelligence and the impression awakened in the Lima population is well-known because of the assuredness with which she assumes her role, not of a recent arrival but a veteran of these times of crisis. This confirms the race's abilities, its sense of dignity when it is not subjugated but can behave freely, even if it is in difficult conditions of her new standard of living.

The marginal neighbourhoods, the belt of misery that surrounds Lima and that has already stretched past its limits, introducing itself into the capital city, signify an inability to withstand the overwhelming provincial misery, punished by nature's events and the authorities' laziness for not foreseeing these calamities, until they are obliged to emigrate in search of less inhumane living conditions.

These women, who have already make contact with the people of Lima, easily how much is offered to their curiosity and worries, and many of them are being instructed about matters that concern them with respect to their rights as human beings and the place that they should occupy within society.

FLORA TRISTAN'S FEMINISM

It is not just in "Women's Freedom or the Pariah's Statement" published after her death that Flora demonstrates her profound feminist calling but in all of her career as a social fighter and especially in her book "Worker's Union" in which she remarks that the cited international organization should be based on a constituency of `male and female workers' since she never excludes women from those expressed by her nominated in whose context "should appear only those workers who do not have any property of their own, only their arms" including women workers to those whom she considers as the other half of the force involved in the WORKERS UNION.

Researching the roots of her feminism, her biographers concluded that it is found in her own marital experience, when she endured the hard condition of knowing what it is like to be a diminished being, without rights, who is ordered about and told what to do by her despotic husband and from whom she suffers humiliation, beatings, and slanderous insults. Her experience is also found in her contact with the working women of France and England, where women's work is undervalued and badly paid, and also, from her knowledge in Peru of the discriminatory treatment given to Peruvian women based on their social class, or as slaves or as objects of pleasure.

Flora says: "The most oppressed man can oppress another human being, which is his wife. Women are the female proletarians of the same male working class". And she warns that the...