Flora Tristan

Flore Célestine Thérèse Henriette Tristán y Moscoso better known as Flora Tristan (7 April 1803 – 14 November 1844) was a French-Peruvian socialist writer and activist. She made important contributions to early feminist theory, and argued that the progress of women's rights was directly related with the progress of the working class. She wrote several works, the best known of which are ''Peregrinations of a Pariah'' (1838), ''Promenades in London'' (1840), and ''The Workers' Union'' (1843).
Tristan was the grandmother of the painter Paul Gauguin.

Early life

Her full name was Flore Célestine Thérèse Henriette Tristán y Moscoso. Her father, Mariano Eusebio Antonio Tristán y Moscoso, was a colonel of the Spanish Navy, born in Arequipa, a city of Peru. His family was one of the most powerful in the south of the country; his brother Pío de Tristán became viceroy of Peru. Flora Tristan's mother, Anne-Pierre Laisnay, was French; the couple met in Bilbao, Spain.

When her father died in 1807, before her fifth birthday, the situation of Tristan and her mother changed drastically from the high standards of living they were accustomed to. In 1833 she travelled to Arequipa to claim her paternal inheritance, which was in possession of her uncle, Juan Pío de Tristán y Moscoso. She remained in Peru until 16 July 1834. Though she never secured the inheritance that brought her there, Tristan wrote a travel diary about her experiences during Peru's tumultuous post-independence period. The diary was published in 1838 as ''Pérégrinations d'une paria''. Around this time, Tristan met and was influenced by the philosophy of the androgynous mystic Simon Ganneau, as well as her longtime friend Éliphas Lévi.

''The Workers' Union''

Tristan wrote this essay in 1843 after an extensive stay in Peru and a short trip to Britain where she produced works on the social conditions along the Channel. ''The Workers' Union'' was the last of her writings and gave her a public persona of political activist. Through this work, one can compare Tristan to similar Utopian Socialists including Charles Fourier (whom she knew personally) and the works of the French Socialists, the Saint Simonians, whose works she had studied through the years. Tristan took into account the studies and teachings of these previous socialists, but created a different solution to the suppression of not only the proletariat, but the working women as well. She was the first to connect the freedom of the working class with the advancement of women's rights.

Tristan recognized that the working class had been fighting for over twenty-five years to no avail. Her suggested solution was to act and create a Workers' Union. She saw a great advantage to this because “divided, you are weak and fall, crushed underfoot by all sorts of misery! Union makes power. You have numbers in your favor, and numbers mean a great deal.” Through union dues, she argued for plans to provide the proletariats’ children with safe havens and increased access to education, to build palaces for the ill and wounded workers, and to reach out to manufacturers and financiers, including those among the nobility, in order to sustain and maintain such programs.

In two different essays, Flora Tristan acknowledged the need for the liberation of women in order to complete the emancipation of the working class, seeing as the working class itself was fractured. She argued that once society fixes these fissures (women's rights), the rest would fall into place. In that sense, women's liberation would lead to the greatest good for the greatest number of people, thereby supporting a Utilitarian mindset. Despite her positive stance on women's liberation, she recognized that in the post-revolution French society, women would not be easily considered equal just because they were human beings. She therefore had to base her argument on a series of benefits to the male majority. In addition to introducing new ways of thinking about socialism, Tristan was also the first to connect the emerging social rights movement to the idea of women's liberation. In doing so, she laid the groundwork for a new ideology—feminism. She made the analogy between the proletariat to the bourgeoisie and the wife to the family before Friedrich Engels

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