Marie Huot: antispeciesism and feminism, the same fight against dominations in the XIXᵉ century.

At a time of urgent ecological challenges, the singular itinerary of Marie Huot (1846-1930) is coming back to the fore. Long invisible, her fight for the animal cause and women's emancipation is becoming, a century later, a source of inspiration for younger generations.

Sylvain Wagnon, University of Montpellier

Writer, poet and libertarian activist Marie Huot was a pioneer of birth control. Her name reappeared in November 2022, just as the world's population passed the eight-billion mark. Population growth is once again a topical political issue.

A battle of yesterday and today

His ideas have a very contemporary resonance in the environmental movement. The current questioning of a generation wondering whether to have children, while governments and public opinion remain immobile or paralyzed when it comes to taking action on climate and environmental issues, highlights Marie Huot's potential legacy.

At the same time, her fight against violence inflicted on animals echoes the demands of many environmental and vegan activists. This pioneer of antispeciesism waged a relentless battle against bullfighting, which remains a model for today's struggles.

Lastly, her commitment has opened the way to debates on the convergence of struggles, highlighting the intersectionality of social, feminist and environmental struggles, with the aim of designing a different, more united and egalitarian society.

The belly strike

Marie Huot doesn't simply advocate birth control. She advocates a more radical means of human and political action: the womb strike.

In 1892, in her article "Maternités", published in the anarchist journalEn dehors, she directly addressed the issue of abortion and the need for a "strike of the womb" to combat poverty and inequality between men and women. Her contribution to feminist struggles is emblematic of the desire to make motherhood a conscious, considered act, and an element in the transformation of society.

By making motherhood, or the refusal of motherhood, an object of political struggle, she is also part of the anti-militarist movement that refuses to consider children as "cannon fodder".

In 2019, the international Birthstrike movement directly takes up Marie Huot's legacy and mode of action, relayed by leading figures such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

My body belongs to me!

Above all, for Marie Huot, women had to become fully involved in political struggles in order to emancipate themselves from the exclusive role of wife and mother to which the bourgeois, capitalist society of the XIXᵉ century confined them.

Marie Huot became involved in the "neo-Malthusian" movement, which advocated birth control as a prerequisite for a better life for proletarians. She took part in demonstrations, signed petitions and gave lectures to promote the emergence of birth control, which she saw as a prerequisite for women's emancipation.

It's a struggle that many feminist movements are currently waging in the name of social justice.

She supports the anarchist pedagogue Paul Robin in his fight for an integral education that takes into account the different facets of the child, contrary to the vision of traditional education. Learning with the head, but also with the body and emotions, remains revolutionary in the field of education, then as now.

For Marie Huot, sex education is essential, a prerequisite for the advent of a "conscious generation". For a woman, knowing her body means being able to dispose of it freely. Need we remind you that we had to wait until 2017 for a school textbook to depict a clitoris?

It's also worth pointing out that, in the late ^19th century, "procreative prudence" and birth control were fiercely attacked by conservatives and clerics who advocated a puritanical, rigorist morality. And within the revolutionary and progressive currents, these were minority issues.

Animal causes and feminism

With the first French libertarian feminists, "neither housewives nor courtesans", Marie Huot is committed to fighting the patriarchal system of domination. For her, the convergence of feminist and animal rights struggles is self-evident, since the patriarchal and capitalist system oppresses and dominates both women and animals.

In her writings on animal rights, she constantly highlights the similarities between the violence inflicted on animals and that suffered by women. Through concrete interventions, she fights against experimental medicine practiced by male doctors who take advantage of their ascendancy to conduct violent and unnecessary experiments on animals, but also on women.

She railed against doctors who, in the name of Claude Bernard's so-called experimental method, abuse vivisection "in demonstrations repeated a thousand times over". She had no hesitation in interrupting the Brown-Séquard doctor who was performing a public vivisection on a young live monkey. Her friendship with Louise Michel, anarchist activist and major figure in the Paris Commune, brought to light by their correspondence, shows Marie Huot on the offensive, multiplying her actions and interventions within the Ligue populaire contre la vivisection (People's League against vivisection), in particular against bullfighting, which was beginning to develop in France.

During her lifetime, Marie Huot was attacked as a woman, a libertarian and an anti-speciesist. Invisibilized by historians because of her eclecticism and the difficulty of "fitting" her into a specific ideological current. Yet Marie Huot lays the foundations of an anti-speciesist philosophy. She forcefully asserts that sexism and speciesism share the same root of discrimination and domination, and that they must be fought together for a new balance between all living beings, based no longer on domination but on equality.

Sylvain Wagnon, Professor of Education, Faculty of Education, University of Montpellier

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read theoriginal article.