Louise Saumoneau was a French feminist who later renounced feminism as being irrelevant to the class struggle.
22 Facts About Louise Saumoneau
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Louise Saumoneau became a union leader and a prominent socialist.
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Louise Aimee Saumoneau was born on 17 December 1875 near Poitiers.
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Louise Saumoneau's father was a cabinet maker who worked for a large workshop.
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Louise Saumoneau worked as a seamstress doing piecework to help bring some income to the family, which now included her older sister's four children.
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Around 1898 Louise Saumoneau took a half day off work to attend a feminist meeting, and was annoyed when much time was spent discussing whether dowries were acceptable, an irrelevant topic to a working-class woman.
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Louise Saumoneau became hostile to feminism, seeing the class struggle as more important.
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Louise Saumoneau denounced "bourgeois" feminism and took little interest in problems unique to women.
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In 1900 Louise Saumoneau organized a union of seamstresses, which was associated with other groups in three working-class neighborhoods of Paris.
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Louise Saumoneau was elected secretary, helped by her younger sister Berthe.
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Louise Saumoneau became convinced that unions must represent both men and women.
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Louise Saumoneau saw that the working women had more in common with working men than with women of the bourgeoisie.
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Louise Saumoneau fell out with Renaud in 1902 and the GFS became less active.
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Louise Saumoneau revived La Femme socialiste as an educational and propaganda organ in 1912, and continued to publish it until 1940.
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On 5 July 1914 Louise Saumoneau led the first event of the International Working Women's Day, held just before the outbreak of war.
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Early in 1915 Louise Saumoneau distributed the German socialist Clara Zetkin's essay in which she called on socialist women to fight for peace.
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Louise Saumoneau pointed at that although the masses were against the war, their leaders were afraid to take a strong stand.
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On her return from Bern, Louise Saumoneau was persecuted both by the police and by her own SFIO party.
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Louise Saumoneau stayed with the socialist SFIO rather than join the French Communist Party.
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Louise Saumoneau had been a strong supporter of the Third International before 1920, so this was a significant rightward shift in her views.
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Louise Saumoneau continued to publish Le Femme socialiste until 1940, when it closed down for the rest of World War II.
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Louise Saumoneau revived the paper after the war, and published it from 1947 to 1949.