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
© Copyright 2024 Paperzz