Feminists of the First International Involved in the Cooperative Movement. Marguerite Tinayre and André Léo

Abstract

This article aims to analyze the connections—still largely unexplored by historians—between cooperation, feminism, and internationalism in the 1860s. To this end, it examines the cooperative activism of two French feminist activists who were members of the International Workingmen’s Association (IWA): André Léo and Marguerite Victoire Tinayre. I argue that their championing of worker cooperation—at once bound up with and in tension with their feminist and internationalist struggles—was rooted in a shared project of popular education, which both regarded as essential to the future of socialism. To demonstrate this, I draw mainly on the cooperative and socialist press, as well as the novels of Tinayre and Léo and archival material that sheds light on the functioning of cooperatives. First, I examine how the two feminists viewed consumer cooperatives as educational—a position that aligned with arguments made at IWA congresses. I then show that their campaign to bring the consumer cooperative model to women—both educational in intent and feminist in its political objectives—aimed to restore female workers’ sense of agency. Finally, I examine what appears to be an enigmatic decision: why Tinayre and Léo declined to encourage women’s participation in producers’ cooperatives—despite the renewed interest these were attracting in the pre-Commune period, particularly within the Geneva and Paris sections of the IWA.