During the political uprising in France in 1848, Pauline Roland and Jeanne Deroine unsuccessfully sought voting rights and an equal civil status for French women. However, the two women won election to the Central Committee of the Associative Unions, the umbrella organization of French trade unions. Imprisoned for their activism, they dispatched a letter to the Second Woman’s Rights Convention, which met in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1851.

When their letter was read to the Convention, Ernestine Potowsky Rose (1810–1892) offered the following response, which indicated the different perspective and political strategy of the American women’s movement.

Pauline Roland and Jeanne Deroine

Letter to the Convention of the Women of America

Dear Sisters: Your courageous declaration of Woman’s Rights has resounded even to our prison and has filled our souls with inexpressible joy. In France the [conservative] reaction [to the uprising of 1848] has suppressed the cry of liberty of the women of the future. … The Assembly kept silence in regard to the right of one half of humanity. … No mention was made of the right of woman in a Constitution framed in the name of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. …

[However,] the right of woman has been recognized by the laborers and they have consecrated that right by the election of those who had claimed it in vain for both sexes. … It is by labor; it is by entering resolutely into the ranks of the working people that women will conquer the civil and political equality on which depends the happiness of the world. … Sisters of America! your socialist sisters of France are united with you in the vindication of the right of woman to civil and political equality. … [Only] by the union of the working classes of both sexes [can we achieve] … the civil and political equality of woman.

Ernestine Rose

Speech to the Second Woman’s Rights Convention

After having heard the letter read from our poor incarcerated sisters of France, well might we exclaim, Alas poor France! Where is thy glory?

… But need we wonder that France, governed as she is by Russian and Austrian despotism, does not recognize … the Rights of Woman, when even here, in this far-famed land of freedom … woman, the mockingly so-called “better half” of man, has yet to plead for her rights. … In the laws of the land, she has no rights; in government she has no voice. … From the cradle to the grave she is subject to the power and control of man. Father, guardian, or husband, one conveys her like some piece of merchandise over to the other.

… Carry out the republican principle of universal suffrage, or strike it from your banners and substitute “Freedom and Power to one half of society, and Submission and Slavery to the other.” Give women the elective franchise. Let married women have the same right to property that their husbands have. …

There is no reason against woman’s elevation, but … prejudices. The main cause is a pernicious falsehood propagated against her being, namely that she is inferior by her nature. Inferior in what? What has man ever done that woman, under the same advantages could not do?

Source: History of Woman Suffrage, ed. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage (New York: Fowler & Wells, 1887), 1: 234–242.