Chapter 2 Preface: Invisible Life (2)

①Toulouse: An industrial city in the south of France, with the largest Romanesque church in France, and the University of Toulouse founded in 1229—annotation. With the advent of the French Revolution and its ideals of justice and fraternity, a few men and women began to understand that equality was either for all individuals or for none: "Either no man has real rights, or We all have the same rights; whoever votes against the rights of others, whatever his religion, color, or sex, is in that way giving up his own." This is Condorcet's 1790 essay on Recognition of Women's Rights to the City," the venerable French philosopher who helped draft the Revolutionary Constitution.Condorcet was a passionate feminist; he and a handful of other discerning gentlemen set out to expose women's plight.Those first proclamations by non-sexist men were of the utmost importance, a critical attitude could only be assumed by cultured men, and women of the time were almost entirely uneducated.

① Condorcet (1743-1794): French Enlightenment thinker, advocating deism, and one of the leaders of the Girondists during the French bourgeois revolution—annotation. With the upsurge of the Great Revolution, women's clubs and women's associations began to appear all over France (and quickly spread to the whole of Europe), and produced famous feminist revolutionaries, such as Ollampe de Gouges and Teruigne de Merigour .But that dream of justice and freedom was short-lived: the advent of the Reign of Terror once again locked women in the house. In June 1793, Teroigne was attacked by a group of townwomen and hit in the head with a stone; she survived, but became insane and spent the rest of her life in a madhouse.Ollampe was beheaded in November 1793 and the women's club was banned.As for Condorcet, Robespierre sentenced him to death, and in September of that same year the philosopher preferred to take poison on his first night in prison.Sexist prejudice is back again.

However, decades later, in the mid-nineteenth century, the term "women's question" was coined, which means that for the first time women were understood as a social problem. This is a result of the Industrial Revolution, which ended traditional family life.In the past, housewives belonged to men and also carried a lot of the burden of daily life.They canned food, salted fish, sewed their family's clothes, tended the garden and livestock, made soap, candles, shoes, learned about herbs, and looked after their family's health.They are active and important figures in the family sphere.But the Industrial Revolution gradually removed all their authority: soap was bought in the store, vegetable gardens and livestock were dwindled by urban populations, and health began to be administered by doctors.In short, women have lost their place in this world.

Also experienced the climax of positivism and scientism.God is dying, the unchanging natural order is no longer accepted as an absolute answer to the inexplicable, and the entire universe must be redefined.Women are another unknown of existence, a secret that should be revealed in scientific terms.At the end of the nineteenth century, people believed that through the definition of the wise, through the classification of the learned, human beings can sort out and see all the ignorance of reality. Women thus became subjects of study by men, who compared them to "normality," that is, male values ​​and qualities.According to Darwin, "the faculties of intuition, feeling, and perhaps imitation are generally admitted to be more prominent in women than in men, but at least some of these functions are characteristic of the lower races, and thus of an obsolete and less developed state of civilization characteristics." From the male point of view, the woman came to be seen as an abnormality, a patient subject to menstruation and pain.Suffocation and fainting were exacerbated by unhealthy and torturous women's fashion corsets (by which women sprained their ribs and caused dislocation of uterus and liver), and lack of social status and life prospects added to depression and misery.Woman is thus seen as sick, and indeed she is: there was a "plague" of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and these anorexic women, women afflicted with strange chronic diseases, even became Freud's Said hysterical woman.The novelist Henry James is good at shaping the typical women of his time in his books, intelligent and passionate, but restricted by the social environment.The writer may have been inspired by Henry's sister Alice James, a creative and sensitive woman who loved to write (her diary was published not long ago), but could not go to university or get the necessary Support, she cannot engage in literature like Henry.Alice was chronically ill: mysterious illnesses had crippled her since she was nineteen, she had acute cancer at forty-three, and she was glad she died.

It was probably a very painful and difficult time for women: lower-class women were exhausted by sixteen-hour shifts in factories, and had to bear children and care for families, while upper-middle-class women were locked in golden cages. .The heroines of nineteenth-century literature (Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, Anna Ossaules in The President's Madame) tell the tragedies of sensitive, intelligent, and capable women who Living meaningless lives, trying to escape the void through romantic love, they pay a high price for violating strict precepts.With exceptions (such as the American writer Mark Twain was always a delightful feminist), the male environment of that era was mostly hostile and misunderstood so much that many women began to choose celibacy, or with other women. Create a lifelong cohabitation relationship.In the United States, female cohabitation was then called a Boston-style marriage (Henry James's novel "The Boston Woman" is about that kind of female world), it does not necessarily have lesbian connotations, but in many cases , compared to the lives of women who are active, independent, restless, and unwilling to submit to the confinement of society, it is a combination of emotion and kindred spirit.

Most amazing though, is the confirmation that there have always been creative women who can overcome the toughest circumstances, women warriors, women adventurers, women politicians, women scientists, who have the ability and courage Free from a fate as narrow as the grave.Such women were, of course, a minority compared with the vast number of women who remained obscure and succumbed to the constraints the world imposed on them; but there was no doubt that there were far more such women than we know and remember today.Because as the Italian female writer Dacia Maraini said, when women die, they go forever, subject to the double end of the body and memory.Historians, encyclopedias, academicians, and custodians of official culture and public memory have always been men, and women's actions and works rarely enter the annals.Today, this sexist amnesia is finally being ameliorated: the increasing presence of women at the academic and intellectual levels has begun to normalize the situation, and a whole new field of research has opened up, mostly by women, who seek to learn from the Our female predecessors were unearthed from the haze of history.

① A writing symbol used by Yao women in Jiangyong County and Dao County, Hunan Province, to write the native language of the Han people in southern Hunan——annotation. Some female predecessors were able to perform great unknown deeds, such as inventing a secret language in Hunan Province, China, or rather, a script for women only, a mysterious writing called "Nvshu" way, which includes two thousand characters and is at least a thousand years old (some experts even say six thousand), is spoken today by only half a dozen old women.There is also a legend that "Nvshu" was invented by a Chinese emperor's concubine (if so, how talented she is! She can invent a whole writing system), in order to be able to tell her private life to her female companions life, their grievances and emotions without risking discovery and punishment.Many of the women who mastered the script could not write Chinese characters, China's official language, which was carefully excluded from intellectual culture because of their illiteracy.The underground "Nvshu" endowed them with the ability to express in words, which is a kind of mutual support force for women, and they use it to make some resistance. "We must form a sisterhood from our youth, communicating with each other through secret texts," says one of the texts that has been preserved for thousands of years.Another text adds: "Men dare to leave their homes to face the outside world, but women are equally brave when they create a language that men cannot understand."