The ‘New Moral Law’ and Women’s Sexual Roles

Abstract

From December 1831, the distinction in Saint-Simonian theory between male and female natures took a new form. Enfantin’s speculations had led him to distinguish between ‘steadfast’ and ‘changeable’ personality types, that is, between people who were inherently monogamous and others who were naturally promiscuous. Women were identified predominantly with the ‘changeable’ type and came to personify ‘the flesh’. This characterisation of women was hardly new, but the Saint-Simonians’ call for the ‘rehabilitation of the flesh’, that is, for a positive valuation of the passions, ran counter to the early nineteenth-century attempt to confine and restrain them. The ‘disorderly’ impact of sexuality, and its particular association with women (‘the sex’) had been used to justify the exclusion of women from public life from the late eighteenth century, so the redefinition of sexuality as a beneficial social force provided further justification for a public place for women.¹