Flora Tristan, Utopian Feminist: Her Travel Diaries and Personal Crusade by Doris Beik; Paul
Beik
Review by: Hoda Zaki
Utopian Studies, Vol. 6, No. 1 (1995), pp. 115-118
Published by: Penn State University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20719371 .
Accessed: 28/08/2013 13:48
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].
.
Penn State University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Utopian
Studies.
http://www.jstor.org
This content downloaded from 198.40.29.76 on Wed, 28 Aug 2013 13:48:34 PM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Book Reviews
115
present size of my collection is the result of absorbing other collections but
even more so, scouting in any kind of place that has books for sale. There
have been my efforts and those of a handful of talented bookscouts. After
consumate research, only lacking complete perusal of London Times Liter
ary Supplements from 1902 to present, I find myself lacking some dozen or
so U.K. titles and five American imprints. These are: Arthur, Andrew J.
From Behind the Veil Salem, Mo. 1901?a pre-Columbian pseudo-histori
cal Fantasy; Johanson, B.U. The Adventures ofHintala. Seattle, Wa. 1922?
Gulliver-type dystopia. Possibly published only in paper covers; Lewis,
. .Linwood, Kan. 1912, 96
DeWitt A Trip to theNorth Pole & Beyond.
Leo
A
Novel
St.
Neale
Pub. Co; Wa. 1903, 47 pp.
Clans;
Clair,
pp., paper;
. . .Beadles;
Frederic
The
Arctic
cloth,
LR; Whittacker,
Grizzly Hunters
1871, paper. Feel I should take this opportunity; you never know....
Perhaps I should also add that I have been a bookseller formost of my
adult life. I have bought and sold all kinds of older fiction. One must exam
ine all kinds of fiction to segregate the fantasy, and there are always discov
eries to be made. Recently Rollo In Hawaii (1908) (of all things), proved to
be of LR interest. On the same trip I obtained a boy's series novel that I
have sought for over a decade entitled The Red Diamond by S. Scoville
(1925) that features Alexandrian Greeks in S.E. Asia.
I have issued nearly 100 annotated catalogues of fantasy, including a
specialty catalogue of LR fiction with some 500 titles. Perhaps it is obvious
that I should produce a survey of the field and such being the case, this is a
"grudge" review. I sincerely feel that this is not the case. I trulyprefer LWR
were a much better book. I have probably read more than half of the books
inmy collection and continue to enjoy a surprising diversity, novelty and
ingenuitywithin the old form.
N.Y.
Stuart A. Teitler
Doris and Paul Beik, eds. and trans.Flora Tristan, Utopian
Feminist: Her Travel Diaries and Personal Crusade.
Bloomington: IndianaUP, 1993. xxi + 195 pp. $12.95 (paper) $29.95 (cloth).
Flora Tristan's life and works are so remarkable thatboth are worthy of
much more critical scrutiny than they have been accorded to date. Born in
1803 to an aristocratic Peruvian father and a French mother, Tristan grew up
in straightened circumstances and suffered the indignities of sex as well as
class exploitation. She married one of her employers, a painter named
Andr? Chezal whom she leftwhile pregnant with their third child. Chazal
stalked her for thirteen years and finally attempted to kill her. During their
separation, Tristan worked and travelled to a number of countries, including
Peru where she attempted to obtain her patrimony from her relatives. Her
writings drew heavily upon her varied experiences as a working woman, a
writer, an intellectual, a traveller, a political activist and an aristocrat. She
published a novel, pamphlets, and travelogues, and was a recognized
This content downloaded from 198.40.29.76 on Wed, 28 Aug 2013 13:48:34 PM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
116 UTOPIAN
STUDIES
member of theParisian intellectual community. Although her account of her
travels in Peru, Peregrinations of a Pariah was burned publicly in that
center there which bears her name.
country, today there is a woman's
Tristan died an untimely death at forty-onewhile on a tour she undertook to
organize theFrench working-class.
In this volume, the Beiks provide extended excerpts from a number of
Tristan's writings as well as translating some of her work into English for
the first time. Tristan was a committed social critic, feminist, socialist,
democrat and internationalist. She was a Christian who like many French
radicals, was strongly anticlerical. Tristan used her marginal class position
in society to critique the conditions of working-class men and women in
Europe and Latin America. Her anger at the conditions of working men and
women is infectious, and Tristan's observations provide a feminist and
socialist record of the consequences of industrial capitalism. Tristan antici
pates many of the points made later byMarx and Engels in such writings as
The Communist Manifesto and Condition of theWorking Class inEngland.
One of the longer excerpts of this edited volume is from The Tour of
France. Tristan's private diary of her travels and travails as she tried to con
vert the French working class to her ideas bymeeting with them and urging
them to unionize and establish workers' palaces. For example, she records
what she witnessed outside her room at N?mes, which overlooked the
town's fountain. This fountain was used as a public laundry. Tristan
describes the following:
Picture
square....
descends
a hole, dignified with the name basin, scooped out of the middle of a
This hole is sixty feet wide, 100 feet long and forty feet deep. One
to it by a stairway consisting of two boards?Down
there one sees
two washplaces
running the whole length of the basin but less than a foot in
.. Ah, but here is the best part!?As
it happens, what has been con
width?..
In all the others the stone
structed is just the opposite of all other washplaces.
works slopes into the water so that she can scrub
is on her knees or standing (as in the
washwoman
and in thatway washes the linen on the sloping stone. This
on which
the washerwoman
the linen in the water?The
in Paris)
is so simple that all the country women arrange washing places for themselves
on the bank of a river or brook, by putting down a slanting stone behind which
at N?mes things are done backwards?It
is not the linen that
they kneel?Well!
washboats
is in the water, no, it is the woman who is in thewater up to her waist?and
the
washerwoman
washes on a stone whose sharp
linen is out of the water?the
are thus
N?mes at least 300 to 400 washerwomen
end is out of the water?in
to spend their lives with their bodies in the water up to theirwaists,
since it is filled with soap, with potash, with
that is poisonous
soda, with bleaching liquid, with grease, and lastly, with all sorts of dyes like
to earn a living, many women are
indigo, madder, saffron, etc., etc.?There,
condemned
and in water
to
to uterus disorders, to acute rheumatism, to painful pregnancies,
doomed
ask: has there ever been
in a word to all ills imaginable!?I
miscarriages,
known to exist, in even the most barbarous country, a more revolting atrocity
. . .
of N?mes!?.
than the one committed against these poor washwomen
My
must be fulminating, must arouse the press and all
article on this washplace
generous hearts against this cursed city that dares to condemn brave women
workers
to a slow and terrible death!
(166-167)
This content downloaded from 198.40.29.76 on Wed, 28 Aug 2013 13:48:34 PM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Book Reviews
117
An observant and daring traveller, Tristan's travelogues are stringent
criticisms of the political economies which form the foundation for the
social conditions of the working classes. In her book Peregrinations of a
Pariah, she provides an account of Peru's sugar refineries and her encounter
with slavery, and in another piece, she tells of Indian women camp follow
ers, who, although ostracized, are exposed to greater hardships than the
soldiers and whose work enables the soldiers to conduct wars. Tristan's
book describing her travels in London, Promenades in London, was well
received. She visits factories and prisons, writes of prostitutes, argues for
women's right to education, and observes the Irish and Jewish Quarters. Her
visit to theHouses of Parliament can only be done in disguise as a Turkish
man because women were not allowed entry. Tristan makes comparisons
between the conditions of women in various societies, sees the connection
between the oppression of different national working classes, and compares
theiroppression to those of the slaves she observed inPeru.
Tristan was influenced by a number of Utopians, such as Saint-Simon
and Owen. She knew Fourier and his disciple Victor Consid?rant, and met
Owen. Like theUtopians she advocated nonviolence, but she went beyond
them to advocate the organization of theworking class as theway to reform.
The Beiks include a substantial portion of her book, Workers' Union, where
she lays out her program for theworkers. Tristan urged theworking class to
organize themselves into an economically powerful union to ensure two
new, radical rights: the right to work and the right to organize labor. She
states: "[The working class possesses its] own property, the only one that it
can ever possess, is its arms. Yes, its arms! They are its patrimony, its
unique wealth! Its arms are the only instruments of labor in its possession.
They therefore constitute itsproperty, and the legitimacy, and above all the
utility, or this property cannot, I think, be contested, for if the earth pro
duces, it is thanks to thework of people's arms . . .And as for the guarantee
of this property, it consists of a wise and equitable ORGANIZATION
OF
LABOR. The working class has therefore two important claims tomake: (1)
THE RIGHT TO WORK; (2) THE ORGANIZATION OF LABOR" (109),
emphasis in the original). This work, published in 1843, antedates The
Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels, and anticipates many of the
points theymake, such as the consequences of the division of labor under
capitalism on workers. The intellectual debt owed to Tristan by Marx and
Engels, as well as a more critical examination of some of her ideas have
been recently explored by Sandra Dijkstra's new book on Tristan, Flora
Tristan: Feminism in theAge of George Sand (London: Pluto P, 1992),
Other selections from Tristan's work are excerpts from her pamphlet on
women travelers; and fromM?phis, her novel. The Beiks provide an intro
ductory chapter on Tristan's life, brief substantive headers preceding each
selection, and an annotated bibliography of Tristan's work and the works
about her. This volumeis a useful introduction to Tristan's life and work,
and provides an English translation to some of Tristan's work for the first
This content downloaded from 198.40.29.76 on Wed, 28 Aug 2013 13:48:34 PM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
118 UTOPIAN
STUDIES
time. Its value lies in allowing a wider audience access to large portions of
Tristan's writings for thefirst time.
Hoda Zaki
Hood College
Elizabeth Bohlken-Zumpe, Torches Extinguished: Memories of
Communal Bruderhof Childhood inParaguay, Europe, and the
USA. 2nd ed.
San Francisco: CarrierPigeon P, 1993. 300 pp.
This book is one of a "Women in Utopia" series (no indication of what
number in the series), edited by Gertrude Enders Huntington, and is
sponsored by the Peregrine Foundation of San Francisco, "a charitable,
educational and research public foundation created to assist families and
individuals living in or exiting from experiment social groups" (KEEP IN
TOUCH Newsletter) (KIT).
The title of the book in itself is instructive, since it follows the first two
official interpretations of themovement, Torches Together (1963) written
by Emmy Arnold, wife and co-founder with Eberhard Arnold of theBruder
hof, and the second official book, Torches Rekindled, written by Merrill
Mow (1989) "to go public, warts and all" (Bohlken-Zumpe). Several other
books have already been written attempting to "tell the whole story" and
others are in theworks.
These books, along with KIT, a monthly newsletter sponsored by the
Peregrine Foundation, which prints letters and other communications from
former Bruderhof members (most of whom are highly alienated from the
Bruderhof), book reviews, news regarding Bruderhof activities, and other
events such as papers presented at a variety of scholarly conferences where
both defenders and detractors of the Bruderhof were present and actively
engaged, all point to a very highly emotionally and ideologically charged
sociological phenomenon.1
In Torches Extinguished, Elizabeth Bohlken-Zumpe, a granddaughter
of Emmy and Eberhard Arnold, presents a personal biography of her experi
ences in the Bruderhof. Born in Germany, during the beginning of the
oppression of Nazism (1935), she moved with her parents to Liechtenstein,
then spent 1937-40 inEngland in theCots wold Bruderhof. In 1941 she went
with her family to Primavera, Paraguay, where a major Bruderhof was
emerging, later the scene of great accomplishments and great troubles and
conflicts. In 1952 she was sent toWheathill, England to serve as a nurse
with her family but without her mother, who was having serious health
problems, and was eventually excluded.
In 1960 she was sent toWoodcrest inNew York, during the years of
the "Big Crisis." After years of increasing conflict, including the growing
tension between Elizabeth's father,Hans Zumpe, and the leadership, espe
cially Heini Arnold, son of Eberhard and Emmy, who had become the
This content downloaded from 198.40.29.76 on Wed, 28 Aug 2013 13:48:34 PM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions