Women In History: Flora Tristan (1803-1844)

Women in History: Flora Tristan (1803-1844)

Portrait of Flora Tristan, unknown artist.

Born Flore Célestine Thérèse Henriette Tristán y Moscoso in Bordeaux to a Peruvian-born Spanish aristocrat father and a French bourgeois mother through an unrecognized marriage, her family soon fell into a poor financial state after her father's death.

As a young woman who was unhappy in her own marriage, Flora would become involved with the women's journal, Gazette des Femmes, that primarily spoke of divorce.

Tristan documents her solo-travel to Peru in 1833-4 in attempt to claim her father's inheritance,in hope of supporting herself and mother, at a time when European women didn't travel alone.

Her journey would prove unsuccessful, as she was denied the financial support of her father's family. Despite her many hardships and untimely death from illness in 1844, she made several contributions to uniting the causes of socialism and feminism throughout her life.

She would go on to denounce the marriage laws in both Peru and France and viewed the lack of female autonomy within the nations' social institutions to be its own form of slavery.

In 1837, she published the Petition to Reinstate Divorce. She used observations from her time in Peru to help bolster her argument and display the consequences and tragedies faced by women that were denied the right to divorce their husbands. In the same year, she published another petition, Petition of the Abolition of the Death Penalty, in the Journal du Peuple. In this work she states that the injustices committed by the people are born out of necessity and created by an unjust society.

Her most famous work, L’Union Ouvrière (The Worker’s Union), was published a few years later in 1843. In the book, she declared that the only way for socialism to succeed was for women to achieve liberation and be incorporated into the socialist movement.

Source