Recovering Lost Voices: French and Chinese Anarcho-Feminism in the Early Twentieth Century*

WANG Lang

Abstract: French anarcho-feminism greatly influenced Chinese anti-statist feminist discourse in the early twentieth century. Chinese anarchist Li Shiceng launched the organ journal Xin Shiji on June 22, 1907, in Paris under the influence of Elisée Reclus. It soon became the bridge between French anarchists and Chinese anarchists in Tokyo who inaugurated Tianyi on June 10, 1907. The interwoven genealogical roots of French and Chinese anarcho-feminism constitute a rich case for transnational inquiry. Scholarship of first-wave feminism often centers on the suffragist achievement, neglecting the anti-statist discourse in the two countries.However, the rich legacy of first-wave feminism can only be understood by exploring the counter-discourse that anarcho-feminism poses. This project brings together a close analysis of articles published in anarchist journals such as Le Libertaire, L’Idée libre, L’Anarchie, Xin Shiji, and Tianyi, and historical materials to reconstruct anarcho-feminist conceptions on women’s sexuality, education, and labor. This study supplies an important chapter in the history of global feminism. It offers a liberating paradigm that allows for a decentralized power structure and stands as a counter-discourse that dismantles power, hierarchy, and state.Challenging the principles of aggression, competition, and independence that underlie masculine culture, it fosters a philosophy of love and peace that builds on equality, mutual aid and care, and interdependence. It is a vision that continues to nourish present-day feminist politics.

Keywords: Anarcho-feminism; free love; He-Yin Zhen; Proudhon; Tianyi

Anarcho-feminism foregrounds the abolition of hierarchical and coercive institutions in an effort to achieve gender equality and women’s liberation. It is essentially an anarchist discourse attentive to the feminist cause that emerged in late nineteenth-century Europe and has been celebrated and practiced in European, North American, and Asian countries ever since. Quite a few British women embraced anarchism and contributed to feminist struggles in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain before the First World War, while in France, women like Anne Mahé adopted an anarchist vision and practiced free love and anarchist pedagogy in the

milieu libre

. In Spain, nearly thirty thousand women joined the anarchist organization

Mujeres libres

, which launched in 1936. In the United States, self-avowed anarcho-feminists Voltairine de Cleyre(1866–1912) and Emma Goldman (1869–1940) actively invested in militant activities. In Tokyo,the Chinese anarcho-feminist He-Yin Zhen 何殷震 (1884–1920) inaugurated

Tianyi

《天義》(

Natural Justice

) on June 10, 1907, as the organ of

Nüzi fuquan hui

女子復(fù)權(quán)會 (Society of Vindication of Women’s Rights). The decidedly international character of anarchism facilitated the dissemination of major anarchist ideas to multiform anarchist organizations worldwide. As a consequence, it also mobilized transnational efforts from anarchists of all genders to combat the hierarchical relationship between the sexes. Anarcho-feminists became a non-negligible presence within their own national borders and on the international scene.Chinese anarchism is deeply inspired by the French anarchist tradition. Li Shiceng 李石曾(1881–1973), son of the eminent late-Qing scholar-official Li Hongzao 李 鴻藻(1820–1897),launched

Xin Shiji

《新世紀》 (

New Era

) on June 22, 1907, in Paris. He came to believe in anarchism under the influence of French anarchist-geographer Elisée Reclus’s family. Jean Grave,anarchist friend of Kropotkin and editor of

Les Temps Nouveaux,

helped publish and edit

Xin Shiji

. 路哲：《中國無政府主義史稿》，福州：福建人民出版社，1990年，第86頁。[ LU Zhe, (Historical Materials on Chinese Anarchism), Fuzhou: Fujian People’s Publishing House, 1990, 86. ]Jacques Reclus, nephew of Elisée Reclus, gave lectures at the Shanghai Labor University founded by Chinese anarchists in 1928.Chinese anarchists in Paris soon became a bridge between French anarchists and Chinese anarchists established in Tokyo at the time. Like other anarchists,Chinese anarchists in Paris aimed at the decentralization of power and the dismantling of authority.This ideal united French and Chinese anarchists in Paris and Tokyo. In spite of their differences on the practical level, their close affinity on the theoretical level influenced the anarcho-feminist visions of the three camps. The genealogical roots of anarcho-feminism in both France and China in the early twentieth century are intricately interwoven into many points of convergence and divergence, resulting in a rich comparative study of radical feminism.

Scholarship of first-wave feminism acknowledges the achievement of women’s suffrage worldwide, neglecting anti-statist and therefore anti-parliamentary discourse that emerged from anarchist circles. However, the complexity and legacy of first-wave feminism can be understood only by retrieving the lost features of anarcho-feminism. This project supplements an important chapter in the scholarship of first-wave feminism. Anarcho-feminism’s desire for the ultimate equality and inalienable liberty of everyone, as well as its attention to the underclass, render it relevant to contemporary feminist initiatives that are still divided by race, class, and nationality.Anarcho-feminism affords current feminist movements the possibility of overcoming these divisions. Recuperating anarcho-feminist insights of a century ago provides feminist foundations for current theories and activisms.

This project relies on a close analysis of articles published in journals such as

Le Libertaire

,

L’Idée libre

, and

L’Anarchie

on the French side and

Xin Shiji

and

Tianyi

on the Chinese side, as well as historical materials of anarcho-feminists to reconstruct their diverse conceptions on women’s sexuality, education, and labor. It intends to understand the unique contribution of French and Chinese anarcho-feminism to the cause of emancipation from a comparative perspective. It is also attentive to the theories of influential anarcho-feminists from other locales, like Emma Goldman,and of male anarchists like Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Mikhail Bakunin, and Peter Kropotkin, who invariably influenced global anarchist circles. The questions that guide this project are: What are the universalities that unite anarcho-feminists beyond geographic boundaries? What differences set them apart? What are the internal conflicts in their theorizations, and how are they relevant to contemporary feminist debates? By answering these questions, this article exposes the rich legacy bequeathed by anarcho-feminism in the first wave, and restores a precious intellectual history.

The Anarchist Tradition and Its Synthesis with Feminism

In order to grasp anarchism’s compatibility and incongruity with feminism, the parameters of the debate on the woman question inside anarchist circles, along with a general discussion of the anarchist tradition, must be set forth.

On the level of social relations, anarchists called for free love and communal living as an alternative to heterosexual marriage sanctioned by the state. Since marriage officially endorses the inferiority of women in legal terms, free love should replace marriage and family. Ideally, a statefree society organizes itself as freely united men and women who live communally; both Proudhon and Kropotkin proposed such a social organization founded on mutualism. Proudhon defended a form of communism committed to decentralized associations, communes, and mutual-aid societies. Andrew Fiala, “Anarchism,” , ed. Edward N. Zalta,https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2018/entries/anarchism/, [ July 28, 2020 ].Kropotkin endorsed Proudhon and extolled the benefits of mutualism: “The nucleus of mutual-support, habits, and customs remains alive with the millions; it keeps them together; and they prefer to cling to their customs, beliefs, and traditions rather than to accept the teachings of a war of each against all, which are offered to them under the title of science, but are no science at all.” Peter Kropotkin, , https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/ kropotkin-peter/1902/mutual-aid/ch07.htm, [ April 8, 2020 ].Kropotkin spoke against the antagonism provoked by competition and distanced himself from social Darwinists. In his anarchist imaginary, care and reciprocity form the basis of the ideal society, free from self-interest, hostility, and hierarchal interpersonal relations. The mutual aid principle challenges normative masculinity, characterized by competition and aggression, in three ways: first, it replaces hostility from social competition with restorative care; second, it destabilizes power and domination and recenters a mutuality based on equality; and third, it defends interdependence instead of independence, which has coexisted with masculine reason as pillars of individualist values since the Enlightenment. In that sense, the mutual aid principle identifies with the feminine.

On the theoretical level, the synthesis of anarchism and feminism seems natural at first glance.As Thomas Matthew has put it, “Many of the central beliefs of anarchist ideology—individual liberty, the responsibility to refrain from limiting the freedom of others, and the rejection of all hierarchy—provided a unique opportunity for women who felt restricted by conventional gender roles.” Thomas Matthew, “Anarcho-Feminism in Late Victorian and Edwardian Britain, 1880–1914,” 47, no. 1(2002): 2.Fiore makes a similar observation: “in fighting against all oppressions and in the desire to restore autonomy, anarchism is a pertinent heritage for feminism.” Gabriella Fiore, “L’anarcha-féminisme” (Anarcha-feminism), 38, no. 1 (2014): 75.Its promise of an equal society freed from all hierarchical institutions and uneven power relations mobilized women to a significant extent.

Nevertheless, just like the uneasy union between feminism and Marxism, the synthesis of feminism and anarchism is equally controversial. If anarchism has a gender, it is overwhelmingly masculine from its outset. A scrutiny of male anarchists’ theories related to the woman question reveals misogyny and anti-feminism in the origins of anarchism. Proudhon openly opposed the emancipation of women and held notoriously patriarchal views. And in the anarchist project the emancipation of woman is often obscured by other priorities. Admittedly, in its ideal design,anarchism parallels the interest of women with all oppressed groups. However, in the fusion of anarchism and feminism, identity remains masculine. According to Nicole Beaurain and Christiane Passevant:

There is not a specific feminine question for the anarchists: the liberation of women is conceived and comprised in the more general issue of the liberation of the human being. The application of these principles remains problematic in the militant terrain as much as in private life; like many other currents and political parties, anarchism also witnessed a gap between theory and practice. Nicole Beaurain and Christiane Passevant, “Femmes et anarchistes: De Mujeres Libres aux anarchaféministes”(Women and Anarchists: From Free Women to Anarcha-Feminists), () 123, no. 1(1997): 75.

In other terms, the woman question was not the one topic that all anarchists sought to tackle, but only one of the many issues that certain anarchists wanted to address.

The concern for overturning all coercive institutions and restoring the autonomy of each individual overshadowed the feminist preoccupation with gender equality and emancipation. This was also true for Chinese anarchists in Tokyo. As mentioned in the previous section,

Tianyi

was the organ and mouthpiece of

Nüzi fuquan hui

, whose goal was to publicize gender revolution and women’s revenge against patriarchy. Zhang Ji 張繼 (1882–1947), an influential Chinese anarchist in Paris, wrote a letter to

Tianyi

, suggesting that it was better to revise wordings like “women’s revenge” and that free love fit the journal best. 曹世鉉：《清末民初無政府派的文化思想》，北京：社會科學(xué)文獻出版社，2003年，第104頁。[ CAO Shixuan, (Cultural Thoughts of Anarchism in the End of Late Qing Era and Beginning of the Republic), Beijing: Social Sciences Academic Press (China), 2003, 104. ]However, “as time goes on, the feminist color (of the journal) fades more and more, and at the same time, anarchist concerns outweigh everything else.” 劉慧英：《從女權(quán)主義到無政府主義：何震的隱現(xiàn)與〈天義〉的變遷》，《中國現(xiàn)代文學(xué)研究叢刊》2006年第2期，第195頁。[ LIU Huiying, “Cong nüquan zhuyi dao wu zhengfu zhuyi: He Zhen de yinxian yu Tianyi de bianqian” (From Feminism to Anarchism: He Zhen’s Disappearance and Presence and Change of ), () 2 (2006): 195. ]Feminist preoccupations gave way to anarchist priorities in

Tianyi

and toward its very end,anarchism replaced feminism completely. In the journal launched by Liu Shipei 劉師培(1884–1919),

Hengbao

《衡報》

(

Equity

)

,

which came to replace

Tianyi

, feminism ceased to be a concern. For feminists who embraced anarchism, the important question was how to appropriate the theoretical basis of anarchism to the advantage of the feminist cause and resist the anarchist tendency that trivializes the woman question at the same time.

On Female Sexuality

Free love and marriage are two opposing ideas concerning female sexuality in anarchism.While anarchists overwhelmingly subscribed to free love, marginal support for monogamous marriage within anarchist circles should not be neglected. In fact, the coexistence of two drastically different ideas within anarchism reveals the contradictions as well as the plurality of anarchist thought. But more importantly, it exposes the controversies surrounding female sexuality and broader social relations. The anarchist response to heterosexual relationships and the marriage institution was always mixed from the outset. Proudhon’s anarchist vision of the family, for example, builds on the subordination of women and the rigid restriction of women to the domestic sphere. Ironically, his equality is equality between men, and his liberation is confined to masculinity. It is not surprising that Proudhon’s position was the target of criticism in his time.

Two oppositions from the anarchist camp fell in place to defend the emancipation and equality of women. French individualist anarchists and Chinese anarchists in Paris attacked civil marriage and related it to a legalized form of prostitution that greatly undermined love. Meanwhile, Chinese anarchists in Tokyo, notably He-Yin Zhen, contested gender inequality and sought reform within the framework of marriage. With an emphasis on emancipation and development at the individual level, French anarchists in the early twentieth century incorporated the liberation of women. It is worth noting that French anarchists underscored the emancipation of the individual woman,whereas Chinese anarchists in Tokyo represented by He-Yin Zhen stressed the equality of women.

Albert Libertad (1875–1908), founder of

L’Anarchie

, influenced the individualist anarchofeminist tradition. He identified two sources of impediments to the obtainment of liberty: “It is necessary for us to struggle against two currents that threaten the conquest of our liberty; it is necessary to defend it against others and against oneself, against external and internal forces.” Albert Libertad, , https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/albert-libertad-freedom, [ April 18, 2020 ].For Libertad, the engrained ideas surrounding religion, nation, private property, and family are the greatest enemies that obstruct individual liberty. As a result, French individualists called for an end to national boundaries, private property, the family, and belief in God. As a logical correlate to their opposition to the family, they disparaged marriage while supporting free associations between women and men in the mode of communal living.

Two aspects of the bourgeois family were vehemently attacked: the utilitarian nature of marriage, which prioritizes social status over love, and the exploitative function of marriage, which tends to abuse and misuse the sexuality of women. Albert Libertad, in “Obsession,” condemned marriage as the legal prostitution of women. Albert Libertad, , https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/albert-libertad-obsession, [ April 28, 2020 ].Individualists held that marriage repressed women’s sexuality and constituted a hideous form of injustice. Free love was tantamount to free expression of individuality and a rebellion against the hegemony of marriage and family. Sexuality represented the critical site of oppression, and free love the point at which revolution could begin.

A group of French women concurred with principles of free love and participated in the

milieu libre

, the most famous of whom include Anne Mahé, Emilie Lamotte, Rirette Ma?trejean, and Jeanne Morand. Anne Steiner, “De l’émancipation des femmes dans les milieux individualistes à la Belle Epoque” (From Women’s Emancipation in Individualist Environments to the Belle Epoque), () 24, (2010): 21.Anna Mahé, for instance, became the companion of Albert Libertad in October of 1902. The call for free love in France was echoed on the other side of the Atlantic by Emma Goldman, who argued, “Love, the strongest and deepest element in all life, the harbinger of hope,of joy, of ecstasy; love, the defier of all laws, of all conventions; love, the freest, the most powerful moulder of human destiny; how can such an all-compelling force be synonymous with that poor little State and Church-begotten weed, marriage?” Emma Goldman, , https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/goldman/works/ 1914/ marriagelove.htm, [ June 18, 2020 ].Sexual freedom beyond the framework of marriage would be the point of departure for new relationships between men and women. It promised a new political future which took shape in the immediate experience of the personal and the everyday, thus resonating with the second-wave belief that the “personal is political.” The practice of free love constituted in itself a political act.A shared belief in free love and the evil of family united French anarchists and Chinese anarchists in Paris. Ju Pu 鞠普, in his famous article published in

Xin Shiji

, alleged that:

At the beginning of humankind, there was no such a thing as family. There were only tribes. With the appearance of the family, every husband made his wife private property, and then there began rights of the husband. It also resulted in the privatization of sons, and then there began rights of the father. What came with the privatization of property was endless antagonism, what came with endless antagonism was wars. To end the wars, the rights of kings must be established. Therefore, the hegemony of husband, father, and kings is one of the strongest powers, which is at odds with the One World. If we trace back, we will find that family is the source of all evil. （清）鞠普：《毀家譚》，《新世紀》1908年第49期，第4頁。[ JU Pu, “Huijia tan” (On the Abolition of Family), () 49 (1908): 4. ]

Ju Pu traced the relationship of dominating/dominated to the family model and compared dominations inside the family to that of the state. The family should therefore be superseded by loose associations between the sexes. He even took it to the extreme: “If one does not intermingle sexually with one another, one would never make progress; one would never be strong, wise, and good.” （清）鞠普：《男女雜交說》，《新世紀》1908年第48期，第3頁。[ JU Pu, “Nannü zajiao shuo” (On the Intermingling of the Two Sexes), ) 48 (1908): 3-4. ]

Anarchists did not invent the insistence on free love and the abolition of family. The utopian socialist Charles Fourier affirmed loose associations between the sexes as a means of selfdisentanglement from the clutches of state and family in the 1820s. A decade later, Prosper Enfantin, pioneering the Saint-Simonian school, concurred with Fourier and reaffirmed the prevalence of the release of sexual passions. Free love, as Enfantin asserted, has the “demonstrated capability of undermining the institution of legal and indissoluble marriage and thereby eroding the monogamous familial structure.” Karen Offen, “Ernest Legouvé and the Doctrine of ‘Equality in Difference’ for Women: A Case Study of Male Feminism in Nineteenth-Century French Thought,” 58, no. 2 (1986): 463.Marx and Engels subscribed to Fourier’s conception of the abolition of the family and advanced the theory of individual sexual relationship in a communist future. Kang Youwei 康有為 (1858–1927), a renowned Chinese reformist in the late Qing era,enunciated total disbelief in the institution of family in

Datong Shu

《大同書》 (One-World Philosophy), a monograph released posthumously. Liang Qichao, Kang’s disciple, embraced the erasure of family as a strategy, even though he upheld nationalist ideals. Free love and the dissolution of the family, two ideas dear to anarchists, become a potent site of political and cultural change.

Unlike most French and Chinese anarchists, He-Yin Zhen did not embrace free love and abolition of the family. Instead of demanding the same measure of sexual freedom as afforded to men, she called for the same level of sexual restriction for men:

The third argument one often hears is that since men have many wives, why shouldn’t women have multiple husbands as a form of redress? . . . But polygyny is a major male transgression. If women choose to emulate them, how are we to defend ourselves when men accuse us [of transgressing]? A woman who has multiple husbands is virtually a prostitute.Those women who are now advocating multiple husbands use the pretext of resisting men, but their real motivation is to give full rein to their personal lust, following the path of prostitutes.These women are traitors to womanhood. HE-YIN Zhen, “The Feminist Manifesto,” in , eds. Lydia H. Liu, Rebecca E. Karl, and Dorothy Ko (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 183.

He-Yin Zhen’s views on sexual equality were based on equal chastity instead of equal access to diverse sexuality. Far from promoting sexual liberation, she argued for limited access to sexuality on an equal basis for both men and women. The opposition to free love reflected a fear of moral degeneration and constituted a warning against sexual debauchery and promiscuity. Whereas French anarchists foregrounded individual freedom by endorsing free love, He-Yin Zhen emphasized sexual equality by defending the principle of equal chastity.

He-Yin Zhen’s affirmation of equal chastity is particularly unique in the anarchist milieu. Her husband Liu Shipei sympathized with free love and

gongfu gongqi

公夫公妻 (sharing of husband and wife). He argued: “With the appearance of family, every one serves his own interest. With the appearance of family, women are enslaved by men day by day.” 劉師培：《毀家論》，萬仕國、劉禾主編：《天義 · 衡報》，北京：中國人民大學(xué)出版社，2016年，第348頁。[ LIU Shipei, “Huijia lun” (On the Abolition of Family), in (Natural Justice & Equity), eds. WAN Shiguo and Lydia H. Liu, Beijing: China Renmin University Press, 2016, 348. ]He-Yin Zhen and Liu Shipei were both supporters of free love, but their understanding of free love differed greatly. He-Yin Zhen understood free love as a way in which young lovers had the freedom to decide whom they married in opposition to arranged marriages, whereas Liu Shipei’s more radical interpretation amounted to plural love. In He-Yin Zhen’s formulation of free love, women and men are given the liberty to determine their marital partners on the one hand, but they are bound to the same intensity of marital chastity on the other.It is easy to mistake Liu Shipei’s position for He-Yin Zhen’s, and it is equally easy to take the former’s opinion as the one that governs

Tianyi

. The Chinese scholar of feminist movements Liu Jucai has mentioned that

Tianyi

supported the abolition of the family. 劉巨才：《中國近代婦女報刊小史(1898—1918)》，《新聞與傳播研究》1986年第2期，第142頁。[ LIU Jucai,“Zhongguo jindai funü baokan xiaoshi (1898-1918)” (A Concise History of Chinese Women’s Movements [1989–1918]),” () 2 (1986): 142. ]A Korean scholar of Chinese anarchism during the Qing dynasty, Cao Shixuan 曹世鉉, also overgeneralized the stance of Tokyo Chinese individualists by asserting they were unanimously against the family. （韓）曹世鉉：《清末民初無政府派的文化思想》，第80頁。[ CAO Shixuan, (Cultural Thoughts of Anarchism in the End of Late Qing Era and Beginning of the Republic), 80. ]However,these arguments obscure the opinions on family of He-Yin Zhen, the de facto chief editor and founder of

Tianyi

.

It is my argument that although He-Yin Zhen opposed the injustices inflicted on women within the structure of a traditional family, castigated Western-style monogamy for its hypocrisy,and championed divorce based on free will, she still defended a gender revolution within the framework of the family and never called for an end to the institution. In her “Feminist Manifesto,” she established the principles of sexual equality within a family. She noted that women need to strive for monogamous marriage; a woman should never take her husband’s surname; sons and daughters should be valued and raised equally; man and wife can separate, but before they do so, they should not take up with someone else; first-time grooms should be paired with first-time brides; and all brothels should be destroyed.If she had opposed marriage, she would not have insisted on monogamy. The gender revolution under her terms did not aim to overthrow marriage and family. Her principles call for a sexual equality strictly applicable to both sexes in marriage.

He-Yin Zhen’s reservations about plural love and the abolition of family are not ungrounded.While it is arguably true that women’s sexuality has been used, repressed, and denied, it is questionable whether a simple unleashing of sexual energies and articulation of sexual expressions will lead to the equalized gender relations that individualist anarchists desire. In some contexts, free love framed by individualist anarchists increases women’s likelihood to become victims of male inconstancy. To overemphasize free love as a means to end sexual inequality is to neglect the material and ideological basis of gender inequality. Free love may be a step away from the grips of arranged marriages, but it does not solve the woman question wholly. If women are financially powerless, are denied access to quality education, and are pushed out of professional development and opportunities, will gender revolution be possible? As Sonja Red has suggested: “Unless concrete change in the material production relations occurs, even raised consciousness of sex relations will not stand to the weight of economic realities.”Gender inequality is a complex issue,which can only be solved with a total and complete transformation of economics, politics,education, ideology, and culture.

To make it worse, with the societal stigmatization of sexual freedom and disproportionate emphasis on women’s chastity, involvement with free love could have negative implications and inflict social stigma. For He-Yin Zhen, monogamy based on equal chastity protects women from unnecessary injury and emotional costs under the current circumstances and living conditions.Some female anarchists fear free love makes women defenseless prey and the object of social ridicule, and warn of the sexual dangers to which free love exposes women. That which figures as a prerogative for men might constitute a social disadvantage for women given the double standards of sex. In fact, some French anarchists remained suspicious of the intentions and implications of free love. Madeleine Vernet and Madeleine Pelletier debated in

Le Libertaire

whether free love was profitable for women or primarily an advantage for men. Irène Pereira, “Féminisme, anarchisme et fédéralisme. L’exemple de l’organisation alternative libertaire entre 2006 et 2012” (Feminism, Anarchism and Federalism: With the Organization Alternative Libertaire between 2006 and 2012 as Example), 24, no. 2 (2016): 194.Vernet argued that, according to common views, female sexuality “does not exist or is subordinated to the sexuality of the male companion she chooses—whether legally or illicitly.” Madeleine Vernet, (Free Love), http://www.marievictoirelouis.net/index.php?id=121&auteurid=,[ March 17, 2020 ].Vernet believed that in its affirmation of female sexuality beyond maternal instinct, free love asserted female pleasure and thus emancipated women. However, a freedom conceived on the level of sexuality brought with it some easily expected perils and limitations. Anarcho-feminists like He-Yin Zhen and Madeleine Pelletier raised the question of whether it was possible to liberate women through sexual freedom. In the same vein, the abolition of the family figured as a weighty issue which required legal reformulations and could entail considerable consequences.

On Women’s Education

Education represented one of the most important anarchist projects; the anarchist aspiration for autonomy at the communal and eventually the individual level is predicated on the intellectual development of every human being. The first general educational plan expanded on by French individualist anarchists and then echoed by Chinese anarchists in France called for the unlearning of the prejudices, received ideas, and traditional customs deemed antithetical to the autonomous development of the individual. Subjects internalized these “inner tyrants,” as individualist anarchists like Libertad called them, born of a culture subservient to authority. Anarchists thus proposed a simultaneous de-educating and re-educating process during which the individuals unlearned respect for authority and relearned the autonomy of the self.

These anarchists aimed at the ultimate political goal of transferring the centers of history previously located in the State and God to each individual. Their correlative educational objective sought to cultivate individuals capable of delivering this political promise. Anarchists wanted to dismantle the intense centralization of power and the hegemonic control over history by state and religion, to restore legitimacy to each individual and to afford each person the agency to act in history. They issued a call for the co-making of and co-existence in history. In this respect,anarchism verged on an individualist romanticism and heroism that demanded that every commoner become co-author of the narrative of history. This philosophy allowed each person access to greatness and sublimity, arguing that the great and the sublime should not be reserved for the privileged few. It also advocated resistance to the mundane and trivial. This yearning indicated a resentment of the marginalization and alienation in history that so often characterize the underclasses.

However, caution should be applied in evaluating this goal. It is my argument that anarchists conceived of an ideal “human” and a society free from flaws. This faith in the perfect human arose from belief in the universal educability and inherent goodness of human beings, and predisposed anarchism to utopian propensities. As Feng Qing argues, the most fundamental problem of Chinese anarchists, including Cai Yuanpei 蔡元培 (1868–1940), lies in “a lack of accurate apprehension of human nature. This theory does not care about people in real life, but human beings in conceptual form.” 馮慶：《“勞工神圣”的思想溫床——以蔡元培的社會關(guān)懷和教育理念為核心》，《探索與爭鳴》2016年第12期，第130頁。[ FENG Qing, “‘Laogong shensheng’ de sixiang wenchuang—yi Cai Yuanpei de shehui guanhuai he jiaoyu linian wei hexin” (The Hotbed of the Thought “Labor is Holy”—A Case Study of Cai Yuanpei’s Social Care and Educational Ideals), () 12 (2016): 130. ]That is to say, the anarchist ideal of cultivating fully developed individuals proceeded from an abstract conceptualization instead of an empirical knowledge of humankind.

Notwithstanding its fantastical visions, the merit of anarchism lies in its integration of women in its educational project. In order for each individual to gain and exercise agency, full development of the faculties in a society free from statist, religious, and proprietary authorities was essential.Complete individual development comprised the second general emphasis of the anarchists. They argued that the same educational principles should be applied to women so that every subject in society could be free enough to achieve autonomy of the self. This is where the synthesis of anarchism and feminism became possible and where the educational project figured. Although individualist anarchists tended to believe that women were irrational beings and prone to religious influences, they also held as truth that every woman was educable, and therefore capable of participating in history.

In particular, Madeleine Pelletier (1874–1939), an anarcho-feminist pedagogue, wrote a short book,

L’éducation féministe des filles

, elaborating on the feminist education of girls. She organized her work in four chapters, the first chapter emphasizing the value of education, and the remaining three elaborating on different aspects of girls’ education: the building of body and character,intellectual education, and sexual education, respectively. The highlight of this essay was the valorization of physical education for girls, which was deeply associated with the anarchist emphasis on labor. Anarchists opposed a fragmented view of the body and the mind and intended to stress the union between hands and head. Kropotkin, among others, held that labor was holy.Madeleine Pelletier extended this emphasis on the physical as an indispensable element of the feminist education of girls. With regard to the cultivation of the intellect, Pelletier identified the difficulty of an intellectual education when it ran counter to the views of the majority in her social milieu. She asserted that an anarchist feminist education would always face resistance and risked marginalization. The discussion of sexual education, in line with her reservations toward free love,discouraged girls from sexual initiation at a young age and warned them of successive maternities,evincing an affinity with anarchism and neo-Malthusianism.

L’éducation féministe des filles

is at once theoretical and practical. Apart from its lengthy argumentations, it also serves as a detailed manual for feminist mothers, ranging from how to dress girls to how to choose their books. Pelletier wished to transform the everyday life of girls and believed in a social change that began with education in the familial milieu. The ambition of anarchists like Pelletier was self-evident: they wanted to dis-inherit the old educational methodologies or curriculums and launch a completely different education for all humankind. Arif Dirlik has argued that Chinese anarchists also conceived of culture socially and believed in education as a process of transformation of everyday habits. Arif Dirlik, (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991),29.Anarchists in both cultures sought to replace the previous education that favored the cultivation of docility and submissiveness to the authority and power of the state and the church. Anarchists were suspicious of the education born of a culture which prescribed respect for authority and believed in the interconnectedness between the educational and the cultural: the cultural was fundamentally implicated in the educational and the transformation of the educational needed to begin with the reconstruction of the cultural.

Chinese anarchists like Li Shiceng and Wu Zhihui 吳稚暉 (1865–1953) were receptive to French individualist anarchist influences. They echoed French anarchists’ educational proposals on the promotion of science and literature and emphasized labor and integration of mind and body.Moreover, they cited science and morality as primary means to reinvent a new generation of humankind: “On the cultural level, they used science as an effective weapon to fight against Chinese traditional culture.” 張全之：《從〈新世紀〉到〈新青年〉：無政府主義與五四文學(xué)革命》，《中國現(xiàn)代文學(xué)研究叢刊》2005年第5期，第12頁。[ ZHANG Quanzhi, “Cong Xin shiji dao Xin qingnian: wu zhengfu zhuyi yu wusi wenxue geming (From to (): Anarchism and Literature Revolution of May Fourth), () 5 (2005): 12. ]According to Wu Zhihui, “anarchists should awaken the social morality in the people, highlight the reciprocity of individual and society, abandon all rights, and pursue common happiness . . . After education takes effect, people will get rid of old habits and embrace a new life.” 吳稚暉：《無政府主義以教育為革命說》，《新世紀》1908年第65期，第308頁。[ WU Zhihui, “Wu zhengfu zhuyi yi jiaoyu wei geming shuo” (Anarchists Use Education as Means of Revolution), () 65 (1908):306-10. ]The kind of public morality that Chinese anarchists in France had in mind was based in equality, freedom, and mutual aid. Old habits were invariably located in the quotidian and the immediate. Through a reform on the everyday level, a new humankind would be created.

This new life did not exclude women. If anything, the woman question was central to the design of Chinese anarchists in France. As Cao Shixuan summarizes, “the

Xin Shiji

anarchists associated women’s emancipation with educational equality and maintained at the same time that financial independence is the key to women’s emancipation.” （韓）曹世鉉：《清末民初無政府派的文化思想》，第150頁。[ CAO Shixuan, (Cultural Thoughts of Anarchism in the End of Late Qing Era and Beginning of the Republic), 150. ]In order to cultivate self-reliance in women, women must be educated, not with the old curriculums rooted in state ideology and religious tenets, but with anarchist ones. Li Shiceng commented that in order for women’s revolution to take place, one must rely on four methods: the cultivation of truth, school learning,economic revolution, and political revolution.The Chinese anarchist branch in Tokyo represented by He-Yin Zhen called for a gender revolution that required a whole recasting of education. Zhen criticized scathingly the education practiced in Europe and Japan: “Religion creates God’s image based on men instead of women.Therefore, women will submit to men permanently. If women receive religious education, it is inevitable that they remain content with their humbleness.” 何殷震：《女子教育問題》，萬仕國、劉禾主編：《天義 · 衡報》，北京：中國人民大學(xué)出版社，2016年，第194頁。[ HE-YIN Zhen, “Nüzi jiaoyu wenti” (On Women’s Education), in (Natural Justice & Equity), eds. WAN Shiguo and Lydia H. Liu, Beijing: China Renmin University Press, 2016, 194. ]She criticized women’s education in Japan for following the tenet of

xianqi liangmu

賢妻良母 (good wives and wise mothers), which aimed to cultivate traditional womanly virtues of blind fidelity. For the same reason, she castigated women’s education in China for creating either slaves for the family or slaves for the state.In order to create a free woman, He-Yin Zhen asked that

jiazheng

家政—domestic management, in other terms—must be eliminated to the extent that the learning of domestic management is in and of itself an acknowledgment of women’s subservient role in relation to men. To replace

jiazheng

,women should learn practical skills to make a livelihood. For more details, please see WANG Lang, “Nationalist and Anti-Nationalist Feminist Discourses in Late Imperial China,” 3, no. 3 (2020): 478.

Although the anarchist design of education seemed idealized and utopian, French and Chinese anarchists were greatly motivated to participate in educational projects. French individualist anarchists organized lectures and discussions in universities, and printed and distributed brochures and pamphlets to propagate their anarchist educational views. French anarchists were also enthusiastic about opening educational institutions anchored in their educational visions. Toward the dawn of the twentieth century, Paul Robin (1837–1912) directed the Prévost orphanage at Cempuis from 1880 to 1894. A close friend of Mikhail Bakunin, Robin embraced a libertarian discourse and foregrounded an anarchist vision in his educational methodologies. His anarchist expressions were translated into pedagogical methods along three dimensions: integral education that stresses the unity between physical and intellectual education, moral education that seeks to replace religious learning, and scientific education.

Paul Robin’s direct contribution to the feminist cause is his implementation of coeducation of boys and girls. His orphanage figures as one of the first experimentations with coeducation in France, a mixing of the sexes that has become commonplace in contemporary education. The significance of coeducation lies at once in the formal dismantling of sexual segregation in terms of education, and in the acknowledgement of girls’ intellectual capacity on an equal footing with boys. Robin insisted on abandoning the previous education of girls focused on their domestic function, and instead applied the same curriculum as was taught to boys, which incorporated moral,intellectual, and physical education in one package, holding fast to the belief that girls were no lesser than boys. This insistence originated from the anarchist preoccupation with the fullest development of faculties for each individual, regardless of sex. A second example of the anarchist effort in education is founded by Madeleine Vernet (1878–1949).Sébastien Faure (1858–1942) established the boarding school of La Ruche close to Rambouillet in 1904. The general process of libertarian schools is coeducation and attention to children from underclasses.

An eminent example of Chinese anarchists’ educational endeavors was

Aiguo Nüxue

愛國女學(xué) (Patriotic Girls’ School) founded in Shanghai by Cai Yuanpei, a renowned educator and revolutionary at that time. It is noteworthy that He-Yin Zhen was a student in the school before she went to Japan with her husband. The philosophy of the school was to cultivate female pupils who adhered to anarchist principles instead of the principles of

xianqi liangmu

賢妻良母 (good wives and wise mothers). The history of the French Revolution and the Russian nihilists, chemistry,physics, and techniques of bomb-making were taught in the school.In a speech he delivered at the school, Yuanpei affirmed that it was important for both women and men to cultivate a fully developed personality. The anarchist and feminist echo audible in his educational principles, which privileged the full development of personality and the emancipation of women, reverberated easily with Robin. On top of this, the first decree that took effect in 1912 when he served as minister of education,

Putong jiaoyu zanxing banfa

《普通教育暫行辦法》 (A Temporary Principle for Popular Education) mandated that girls study in the same classroom with boys in primary schools. 錢斌：《從經(jīng)正女學(xué)到蔡元培的愛國女學(xué)》，《紹興文理學(xué)院學(xué)報（哲學(xué)社會科學(xué)）》2010年第2期，第27頁。[ QIAN Bin, “Cong Jingzheng Nüxue dao Cai Yuanpei de Aiguo Nüxue” (From Jingzheng Girls’ School to Patriotic Girls’School of Cai Yuanpei), ( [ ]) 2 (2010): 27. ]

On Women’s Labor

Women’s labor holds the potential for socio-economic and political transformation which must begin with a reformulation of labor division in the family and beyond. A redefinition of the sexual division of labor triggers important social and economic changes, such as gender relations,social appraisals of domestic work, and the creation of opportunities for women in public life.However, within branches of French anarchism, the anarchist treatment of women’s labor either reinforced the male/exterior and female/interior division, or never reached a consistent plan for liberating women’s labor. A perusal of anarchist history reveals the deep-seated ambivalence and indetermination regarding the sexual division of labor, which was not uncommon even in the early historical stages of feminism. This conventional treatment betrayed the contradictory union of anarchism and feminism and forecast an incomplete gender revolution in anarchism.

Let us begin with Proudhon. It is not difficult to deduce what this famous misogynist had to say on the sexual division of labor. He reinforced the attribution of men to the public sphere and women to the private, writing, “once the household is established, man is charged with work,production, exterior relations, woman is charged with the administration of the interior. The division is determined by the respective qualities of the spouses.” Claire Moses, (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984), 156.Proudhon, the forerunner of anarchism, showed no intention to challenge the social exploitation of women’s labor at home in the 1870s. In his era, this viewpoint on gendered labor division reflected the mainstream opinion,uniting politicians, philosophers, and activists from mutually opposing factions. Even his feminists contemporaries did not contest this hierarchical social arrangement of women’s and men’s labor.They only asked for equal opportunities in the public realm for women but did not demand equal male participation at home.

This attitude characterized the familial feminists in France. Karen Offen has described familial feminism in implicit relation to individualist feminism: “Familial feminism espoused a sexual division of labor in both society and the family, and a positive concept of women’s special nature, or womanliness, informed all demands for change. Familial feminists aimed not to overthrow the economic basis of patriarchy but to reorganize the existing society to the greater advantage of women.” Karen Offen, “Depopulation, Nationalism, and Feminism in Fin-de-Siècle France,” 89, no. 3 (1984): 654.The familial feminists maintained the age-old sexual division of labor and asked for an equalized social appraisal of domestic work. They represented but a mainstream opinion held by all walks of life in the long course of the nineteenth century.

The limitations of anarchist endeavors in exposing the injustice underlying gendered division of labor are pronounced on the practical level, too. The dawn of the twentieth century takes us to the militant milieu where the French individualist anarchists who “vivaient en anarchiste”suggested communal living as a path to the liberation of women’s labor. This was a reorganization of family and social life in which childcare and housework were in the collective’s hands. Anna Steiner described the individualist way of living: “It is a way of living in groups or in networks characterized by a generous hospitality offered to comrades, a preference for free love, solidarity in childcare, and potential recourse to illegal practices which can range from moving without paying the rent to the circulation of false money.”Does solidarity in childcare mean men and women unite together to take care of children in the community, or does it mean women work together to take charge of each other’s children? Relying on the scholarship of Anne Steiner, we learn that it was still women who were expected to take care of the housework traditionally considered“women’s work,” such as laundry and upkeep of clothes, chores, cooking, and childcare.It is disappointing that this “solution” only meant that women grouped together to do the housework collectively. In this sense, the anarchist colonies were merely an extension of the monogamous family that anarchists were committed to abolishing. It was a mechanical transition from a nuclear familial unit to a communal familial unit sustained by the same gendered division of labor. French individualist endeavors in communal living retained male prerogatives. At least on the practical level, communal living as an alternative to monogamous family did not solve the devaluation of woman’s labor.

In order to solve the problem posed by women’s labor, Chinese anarchists, like the Marxists and Bolsheviks, suggested the opening of large-scale nurseries and daycare centers. The only difference was that Chinese anarchists called for the social organization of nurseries and childcare centers to be free from the regulations of state, whereas the Marxists and Bolsheviks advocated a centralized state action sanctioned by the government. Both He-Yin Zhen and Liu Shipei supported the idea of public childcare centers. However, the question of who would work in the nurseries as well as in the childcare centers was not explored by either of them. Echoing Kropotkin’s view that housework is one of the major obstacles to women’s emancipation, He-Yin Zhen also saw chores as a problem to be overcome. It is easy to see the inadequacy of her theory. She tolerated, or even was wholly content with, monogamy for lack of a better way to solve the woman question; yet, if the hierarchical labor division of gender in the family was not contested, then no substantial change would be brought forth within the framework of monogamous marriage. If the anarchist movement did not try to resolve the problematic distribution of labor in both the public and private spheres, it would never be able to subvert the hierarchies that underlie labor division that impact both sexes,and would remain powerless in undertaking women’s emancipation.

He-Yin Zhen placed centrality on economic analysis. As Peter Zarrow argues: “She firmly linked women’s liberation to the notion of revolution, a remaking of society in political, economic and class terms.” Peter Zarrow, “He Zhen and Anarcho-Feminism in China,” 47, no. 4 (1988): 802.The rejuvenation of society must rely on the implementation of communism. If we reconsider He-Yin Zhen’s theory of women’s labor, her association of the emancipation of women’s labor with communism is obvious. Communism was her ultimate solution to the uneven distribution of property, class division and stratification, and gender inequality. In her article “On Women’s Labor,” He-Yin Zhen outlined four kinds of misuse of women’s labor in China: female workers in factories, house maids or servants, prostitutes, and concubines. In her eyes, these forms of labor were coercive and imposed upon women by the difficulty of making a

shengji

生計(livelihood). She further traced this hardship of living to the monopoly of the means of production by the capitalists, which exploited the have-nots and enriched the haves. In order to make women’s labor free and voluntary, the highest form of labor in He-Yin Zhen’s terms, she argued that communism was indispensable: “In our opinion, if there is an implementation of a system of communalized property, then everyone, whether man or woman, would labor equally.” HE-YIN Zhen, “On the Question of Women’s Labor,” in , eds. Lydia H. Liu, Rebecca E. Karl, and Dorothy Ko (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013),91.It is admittedly true that labor in its ideal form, equal and free, is a noble pursuit. Yet, the distribution,organization, and use of labor in her current design are suspicious. The ideal form of labor is contingent on the highest development of both individual and social organisms. It can only be accomplished in a society embodying the highest perfection, consisting of individuals with flawless human nature. It is only with a leap of logic and an effort of imagination that He-Yin Zhen arrived at the equalization of labor and the communalization of property.

Conclusion

The comparative analysis of anarcho-feminism gives us historical insights into its boundaries and heritage on the theorization of women’s oppression and the practice of liberating women therefrom. The foremost boundary of anarcho-feminism arises from its anarchist stance that no self-claimed authority is legitimate and no self-proclaimed center is justified. In declaring these principles, it denies its own possibility of laying claim to a historical center. In consequence, it is hard to attract a large number of sympathizers. Empirically, to win over a great crowd of followers,it is both strategic and imperative to claim a status as the only authority, as is the case with religion and political regimes. This might serve to explain the frequent conversions to other political persuasions among Chinese anarchists.

The second boundary is set by the limitations of contemporaneous feminism in assuming compulsory heterosexuality on both sides and imperative maternity on the Chinese side. Whether anarchists subscribed to free love or monogamous marriage institutions, they exclusively conceptualized women in or without relation to men. In other terms, anarchists in the early twentieth century still conceived of heterosexuality as the only normative experience available to women. They failed to acknowledge sexual identities on the margins that deviated from heteronormative parameters, thereby excluding sympathy for and solidarity with any group of peripheral sexual identities. In the worst cases, anarchists denied the existence of lesbian and gay experiences: Emma Goldman, for example, went to great lengths in denying that Louise Michel was a lesbian. This fear and self-distance from lesbianism attest to anarchists’ exclusion of homosexuality. Adrienne Rich, in her analysis of texts that suggest compulsory heterosexuality,argued that each work would have been a force of change had the author felt compelled to deal with lesbian existence as a reality and as a source of knowledge and power available to women, or with the institution of heterosexuality itself having a foothold in male dominance. Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” 5, no. 4 (1980): 633.This theoretical lacuna of anarcho-feminists eventually went against its ideal to claim legitimacy for anyone who was not the center.

However, to focus on their failure is to lose sight of the unfavorable circumstances faced by feminists and the general moral strictures imposed on women. Feminists in the eventful course of the nineteenth century had long come to understand that the emancipation of women had to be achieved in gradualist terms, which implied frequent setbacks, impasses, and, most of the time,compromises. For anarchists, as well as feminists, at the dawn of the twentieth century, it was dangerous to assert the rights of homosexual women when even a slight indication of economic independence from men—i.e., working outside the home—was attacked as neglect of motherhood and wifely duties. An argument for lesbianism suggests, to many, a total denial and exclusion of men. It was not strategically wise to go this far and to invite the repression of their efforts and backlashes against their achievements. Any visible and sizable effort in lesbian campaigns had to wait until the late twentieth century to materialize, and until the twentieth-first century to see the effort come to fruition.

That said, anarcho-feminism nourished the revolutionary discourse and radical politics of France and China in many meaningful ways and remains a source of inspiration and revelations for contemporary feminist initiatives. To the extent that anarchism denies any center to history,anarcho-feminism denies any national, racial, ethnic, or classist centers to the shaping of women’s history, thereby challenging occidental, white, and bourgeois feminism. On the basis of its decentralizing and destabilizing principles, it allows women of color and working class women to claim their place in history, and in principle, accords legitimacy to veritably any form of feminism.

Moreover, the anti-hierarchical core of anarchism offers feminism promising ways to resolve class divisions embedded in demographic constituencies and project priorities for the feminist agenda. Feminism has long been accused of being a middle-class ideology, and while this statement may not reflect the full picture of feminism, it is not totally unfounded. Taking a look at the French suffragist movement in the late nineteenth century, we find that most of the French suffragists were educated, professional, middle-class women. Steven Hause and Anne Kenney have concluded that “Women of the liberal middle classes, with shared backgrounds and values,dominated the movement” Steven C. Hause and Anne R. Kenney, “The Limits of Suffragist Behavior: Legalism and Militancy in France,1876–1922,” 84, no. 4 (1981): 783.and that “no peasant women and few working-class women can be found among the leaders of French feminism.”

It is equally true for Chinese feminism during its nascent stage that most female leaders were born into the middle and upper classes and received a privileged education inaccessible to their less privileged female peers of that era. Tang Qunying 唐群英 (1871–1937), an influential leader in the women’s suffragist movement in China, was the daughter of an army general in Hengzhou city who later married the cousin of prominent Qing official Zeng Guofan 曾國藩 (1811–1872). Qiu Jin秋瑾 (1875–1907), a legendary feminist executed by the Qing government, was born into an affluent scholar-official family and married the son of a wealthy merchant, Wang Zifang 王子芳(1879–1909). He Zhen, daughter of a local governor, likewise did not come from modest origins.Early Chinese feminism was led by women born with social advantages who, by intimate association with powerful men, wielded political power.

Contrary to the republican feminism in France, whose adherents had close associations with the French government, the contemporaneous anarcho-feminists were largely working class.Anarcho-feminism’s natural appeal to women of the underclass is an asset in and of itself. Its historically documented attention to and care of the lower classes enables it to attract more working class women to the feminist cause. Louise Michel secured food and clothing for socially disadvantaged children, and the

L’Avenir social

orphanage founded by Madeleine Vernet took care of workers’ children. If the male tradition makes a synthesis between anarchism and feminism ambivalent, anarchism’s innate sympathies to the lower class renders a united effort possible.

In addition, the anarchist aspiration to build a society freed from a center and from authority enriches the dynamics of eco-feminism, which places the equality of all living forms at the top of its political agenda. Gaining wide currency in the 1980s and commanding popular interest still today, eco-feminism foregrounds an environmentalism in which the liberation of women serves as one of the centerpieces. Eco-feminism’s call for relieving women of the burden of unwanted pregnancies echoes anarcho-feminists’ concerns with voluntary maternity. Eco-feminism takes anarchofeminism’s goal beyond the human world: if anarchism aims to create a human society in which no individual and no group commands the center, eco-feminism seeks to create an earth in which no living being is subordinated by another. As Matthew Hall argues: “ As a political philosophy that rejects hierarchy and authority and domination, anarchism represents a promising basis for a more environmental culture.” Matthew Hall, “Beyond the Human: Extending Ecological Anarchism,” 20, no. 3 (2011):374.Eco-feminism establishes an egalitarian relationship between the human world and the non-human world.

On the basis of center-less institutions and power-free individuals, anarcho-feminism aims not to accord men and women an equal measure of power, nor does it intend to dismantle power structures, but to ultimately annihilate the notion of “power” itself. In this respect, anarchofeminism’s struggle against power centers and power structures embedded in the social is perhaps one of the most complete and thus one of the most difficult. Anarcho-feminism insists on reworking social relations in all forms until equality reigns as the only principle. It suggests a future where the notion of power itself shall be erased on the ideological and linguistic level.Already Anne Mahé attempted to reform the French language, addressing the ways in which French orthography and grammar were embedded in prejudices and reinforced class barriers.Conscious of the ideological impact that language exerted on social conventions and tradition, He-Yin Zhen argued that Chinese women’s historical subjugation was inscribed in Chinese characters. HE-YIN Zhen, “On the Revenge of Women,” in , eds. Lydia H. Liu, Rebecca E. Karl, and Dorothy Ko (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 114.The ambition of annihilating the notion of power is explicit in the works of both Chinese and French anarcho-feminists. Although existing peripherally, anarcho-feminism’s determination to dismantle authority and its stress on individual autonomy and collective equality empower feminists of today to break the symbolic order and create a “power-free” language outside the dominant discourse.

The legacy of first-wave feminism must be studied in its full scope. When the accomplishments of suffrage are celebrated, anti-statist discourses by French and Chinese anarchofeminists should not be neglected. They together supply an important chapter of women’s global efforts toward gender equality. Anarcho-feminism offers a liberating paradigm that allows for decentralized power structures and stands as a counter-discourse to the meta-discourse of power,hierarchy, and state. Challenging the principles of aggression, competition, hostility, and independence that underlie masculine culture, it fosters a philosophy of love and peace as well as an alternative existence that build on equality, mutual aid and care, and interdependence. It is a vision that continues to nourish present-day feminist politics.