Eliska Vincent
| Eliska Vincent | |
|---|---|
| Born |
Eliska Girard 1841 Mézières, Eure-et-Loir, France |
| Died | 1914 |
| Nationality | French |
| Occupation | Feminist |
| Known for | Lost archives of feminism |
Eliska Vincent (née Eliska Girard 1841–1914) was a Utopian socialist and militant feminist in France. She argued that women had lost civil rights that existed in the Middle Ages, and these should be restored. In the late 1880s and 1890s she was one of the most influential of the Parisian feminists. She created extensive archives on the feminist movement of the 19th and early 20th centuries, but these have been lost.
Eliska Girard was born in Mézières, Eure-et-Loir, in 1841. Her father was an artisan. He was imprisoned for his participation as a Republican in the French Revolution of 1848. She joined the Société pour la Revendication du Droit des Femmes (Society for claiming women's rights), which first met in 1866 at André Léo's house. Other members were Maria Deraismes, Paule Mink, Louise Michel, Élie Reclus and Caroline de Barrau. The members had a range of views, but agreed to work on the common goal of improving education of girls. Vincent was also a Utopian socialist. She supported the Paris Commune in 1871, and was almost executed for her role. In 1878 Eliska Vincent was a delegate to a worker's congress.
In 1888 Eliska Vincent formed the feminist group Egalité de Asnières, named after the suburb in which she lived. The small but influential group never had more than one hundred members. She also founded the journal L'Egalité that year.Hubertine Auclert, the overall feminist leader in Paris, left for Algeria in 1888. Vincent took the lead in Paris with her group. With a moderate and relatively uncontroversial program, she gained support for the movement from middle-class women. In the first women's rights congress, held in 1889, as representative for Egalité she made the proposal that women should participate in local charity boards, which won general support.
In January 1892 Eugénie Potonié-Pierre brought together eight feminist groups in Paris into the Fédération Française des Sociétés Féministes (French Federation of Feminist Societies). The Federation's secretary Aline Valette founded the weekly tabloid L'Harmonie sociale which first appeared on 15 October 1892 as a means of making contact with working women to understand their concerns. The masthead had the socialist message: "The emancipation of women is in emancipated labor". However, the contributors to the journal, who included Eliska Vincent, Marie Bonnevial and Marya Chéliga-Loevy, were more interested in feminism than socialism.
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