On women’s slavery: the value of homo-analogy

Résumé 0

Based on the examination of texts published during the revolutionary period, the study analyzes the recurrence of the motif of women’s slavery, considered as a homo-analogy. Beyond the legal value that it acquires in a context that claimed civil and civic rights, it is invested with a strong political value since the servile situation of woman is put in the balance with the liberation, allowed by the Revolution, of another type of slavery (the domination suffered by people under the yoke of the “tyrants” of the Old Regime): now recognized as half of society but also, after the abolition of the old orders, as its “second order”, women had become the non-privileged sex as opposed to men, who were accused of having rekindled against them the logic of domination they once suffered. If the intersectional value of homo-analogy remains a delicate point, especially when the dimension of race is introduced into the discussion on top of gender and class, these texts, in their content, echo the discourses of feminists of the 1970s and can thus be taken into account in a reflection on the archaeology of feminisms. The persistence of the claims also invites us to question the performative force of the discourses that carry these claims into the public space.