Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

Introduction To Socialism's Muse, Naomi J. Andrews

History

The disappointment of feminist aspirations in 1848 nevertheless demands more thoroughgoing explanation than its impracticality in politically charged times. We must not lose track of the fact that during the July Monarchy a truly remarkable intellectual revolution took place. For the shy twenty years of Louis Philippe’s reign the formerly unthinkable became relatively commonplace: women’s equality came to be a central tenet of the most avant-garde intellectual and political movement of the day, romantic socialism. Given its integral importance to the earliest pronouncements of socialist philosophy, the totality of feminism’s neglect during the moment of political opportunity afforded to socialism …