Flora Tristan: Forgotten Feminist and Socialist

Flora Tristan was an early French feminist of the 1830s and a socialist prophetic of Karl Marx. Her Union ouvrière (Workers' Union; 1843), published four years before the Communist Manifesto, called for an international organization of all workers. Influenced by the English Chartists, she was the first to attempt to organize the French proletariat on the national level. Her feminism sprang from her personal experience as a woman who had to earn a living for herself, her mother and later, her children after she separated from her husband. Her concern with women's right to work and to a decent salary was quite innovative at a time when most feminists were bourgeoises and detached from such issues. (SWS & MC)