Feminism’s prehistory

In France, women have played a prominent political role through their involvement with the salons. To rise in society, one needed to please the women who served as guardians of the salons; and to rise politically one needed to rise in society.

England, by contrast, was a nation of men’s clubs, men’s colleges, men’s sports, men’s debates. Women were excluded from social life, and hence from politics.

Rosenstock-Huessy summarizes: “The clubs of England, the counterparts of the French salons, excluded women from all political influence. In France, nothing was Salic (i.e., excluding females) except the throne; in England everything is ‘Salic’ except the throne.”

France needed no suffrage movement because women were already influential politically; but in England feminists “had to shock the frequenters of clubs and taverns into restoring, by the poor means of external, political measures, what the Puritan revolution had stolen from the women of England.”