Flora Tristan Quotes

The most oppressed man finds a being to oppress, his wife: she is the proletarian of the proletarian.

In London you breathe melancholy in the air, it enters you through all your pores. There is nothing more lugubrious than the appearance of this city on a foggy day or in the rain and dark. It makes you feel profound despair, disgust for everything, and an irresistable desire to end your life by suicide. On such noxious days, the Englishman is under the spell of his climate and behaves like a brute.

Lo que ha ocurrido con los proletarios, [...], es un buen augurio para las mujeres cuando les llegue su 89.

The contribution of women to the art and literature of the July Monarchy (and the social and economic obstacles most of them faced) is a subject that has yet to receive serious and systematic consideration. There are, for example, the novels of George Sand, the essays of the social reformer Flora Tristan, the paintings of the young Rosa Bonheur, and the sculpture of the Princess Marie d’Orleans to be studied. The July Monarchy also saw the origins of a small French feminist movement, or “the emancipation of female thought” as it was then called. An early leader, Claire Demar, warned her sisters away from the romantic idea of “love at first sight.” As she observed: I have the misfortune of not believing in the spontaneity of [this] feeling, or in the law of irresistible attraction between two souls. I do not believe that from a first meeting, a single conversation, can result certainty, on all points, and (I believe) it is not until a long and mature self-examination, serious thought, that it is permissible to admit to oneself that at last one has met another soul that complements one’s own, that will be able to live its life, think its thoughts, mingle with the other, and give and take strength, power, joy, and happiness. Demar contended, “It is by the proclamation of the LAW OF INCONSTANCY that women will be freed; it is the only way.