Tristan wrote this essay in 1843 after an extensive stay in Peru and a short trip to Britain where she produced works on the social conditions along the Channel. The Workers' Union was the last of her writings and gave her a public persona of political activist. Through this work, one can compare Tristan to similar Utopian Socialists including Charles Fourier (whom she knew personally) and the works of the French Socialists, the Saint Simonians, whose works she had studied throughout the years. Tristan takes into account the studies and teachings of these previous socialists, but creates a different and arguably more effective solution to the suppression of not only the proletariats, but the working women as well. She is the first to acknowledge the undeniable connection between the freedom of the working class and the deliverance of women’s rights.
Tristan recognizes that the working class had been fighting for over twenty-five years to no avail. Her suggested solution is to act and create a Workers' Union. She sees a great advantage to this because “divided, you are weak and fall, crushed underfoot by all sorts of misery! Union makes power. You have numbers in your favor, and numbers mean a great deal.” Through union dues, she insists on plans to provide the proletariats’ children with safe havens and increased access to education, to build palaces for the ill and wounded workers, and reach out to manufacturers and financiers, including those among the nobility, in order to sustain and maintain such programs.
Although seemingly two different essays, Flora Tristan acknowledges the need for the liberation of women in order to complete the emancipation of the working class. The society is not whole and the working class itself is fractured. She argues that once society fixes the pieces of the fissure (women’s rights) then the rest will fall into place. In a sense, women’s liberation will lead to the greatest good for the greatest amount of people thereby supporting a Utilitarian mindset. Although thinking positively about women’s liberation, Tristan did recognize that in the post-revolution French society, women would not be easily considered equal just because they are human beings. Therefore, Tristan had to make the argument based on a series of benefits to the male majority. By feeding into the male ego, she opens up a new line of communication that no socialist had been able to tap into before.
Her effort at creating a common union was the last before Flora Tristan’s death in 1844. By drawing and building upon her colleagues’ and mentors’ socialist concepts, she created a logical and reasonable plan that the proletariats could realistically achieve. She opted to change the angle previously attempted and was able to include women’s rights as an important lever in the machine to create an independent Workers' Union.
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