"What! Such Things Have Happened and No Women Were Taught about Them": A Nineteenth-Century French Woman's View of the Importance of Women's History

This remarkable meditation on the importance of women's history was published during the Revolution of 1848 by Henriette Wild (dates not known), who signed as "Henriette, artiste." Although she was among the French women active in the movement for women's emancipation and published her work in the revolutionary women's periodical La Voix des femmes ("Women's Voice"), little biographical information seems available. We do know, however, that she was a Protestant and that she was closely associated with Jeanne Deroin, one of the best remembered of the women activists for women's rights in the Revolution of 1848. In the 1850s, "Henriette, artiste" was engaged in a polemic with another women's rights activist, Jenny P. d'Héricourt, over the issue of female celibacy. In 1889 she spoke about Jeanne Deroin at the second international women's rights congress, held in Paris.

The author's focus on the sage femme, which renders in English both as "midwife" and as "wise woman, " is significant; a key issue in Parisian women's protest in the 1840s was the admission of women to the study of medicine and, more generally, to higher learning, to savoir or learned knowledge. The book referred to by the much-published Mme de Renneville (née Sophie de Senneterre) is doubtless her Biographie des femmes illustres de Rome, de la Grèce et du Bas-Empire (Paris: Parmantier, 1825). The Areopagus referred to in the text is the Athenian court, consisting of several male judges. The story of Agnodice told by Henriette Wild shows up again in Josephine Butler's edited collection Women's Work and Women's Culture (London: Macmillan, 1869), and in Hedwig Dohm's work Women's Nature and Privilege (London: Women's Printing Society, 1896) translated from the German Frauen Natur und Recht (Berlin, 1876). Dohm's work was reprinted in 1976 by Hyperion Press. This piece appeared in La Voix des femmes 28 (20 April 1848): 2-3.

The original French text has been lightly corrected. The translation is by Karen Offen.