L'émancipation des femmes à l'épreuve de la philanthropie

Around the mid XIXth century, France and Great Britain faced a deep social crisis. Because of industrilisation, the "poors" moved to the cities where they stood as a threat to the urban dwellers. The condition of the poors, half-way between imprisonment and charity, endured by the destitues already, is unseemly to the middle and upper classes. A better handling of poverty was required through philanthropy, a benevolent and secular endeavour, implemented to create "happy and natural" bounds with lower classes. Men of privileged classes became aware of the fact that their wives and daughters, symbols of family happiness and ladylike sweetness, were the most suited to smooth off classes relationship. Philosophers and thinkers endowed those women with relevant "special qualities" intended "naturally" to fit the benevolent task. From then on, philanthropic societies which had been thought to ease women's emancipation, turned out to be imbuded with paternalism, subtle in Great Britain and blatant in France. The expected women's movement forward will not come from that edge but from other high-minded women, acting plainly away from their so-called "nature" and "womanhood", for their rights rather than for their virtues, committed by their straightforward humanity to be "women without qualities". The war of 1914, with its patriotic slant, brought in an additional hindrance to a drastic emancipation of women.