Crazy Attempts
Apart from fans of the English school of political economy, like JeanBaptiste Say, French political economists had little confidence in capital- ism.51 Yet moral condemnations of British and American greed were often grounded in patriarchal loyalties that limited room for socialist feminist maneuver.
Those who raised issues of sexual as well as economic rights for women made themselves extremely vulnerable. In his History of Political Economy in Europe, first published in 1837, Jerome-Adolphe Blanqui remarked that de Saint-Simon’s ‘‘crazy attempts at the emancipation of women” had discredited his larger arguments, a claim that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels would reiterate.52 August Comte, who served as de Saint- Simon’s secretary for several years, later renounced his mentor’s views, explaining that women’s emotional and moral character suited them for family responsibilities alone.53Still, de Saint-Simon and Fourier expanded the boundaries of economic vision, creating a cultural space for the more moderate ideas that John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor, among others, would soon articulate. Through modern eyes, their critiques of the sexual double standard look rather prescient. Individualist principles helped dislodge patriarchal ones. Socialist hopes for greater equality between the sexes, though not borne out for many years to come, would fare better than their hopes for more cooperation among men.