They buttoned up in the back, so as to ensure that every disciple, when he put on his shirt in the morning and when he took it off at night, was reminded of the need we all have to help and be helped—since you couldn’t reach the buttons yourself.
The one displayed belonged to “Le Père” himself, as you can see. The collared jersey (“gilet,” in the language of the time) went with a short blue frock coat, a belt, tight white cotton pants, and a red beret. The women’s version was more or less identical.
Forty disciples, most of them graduates of the super-élite Ecole Polytechnique, accompanied Prosper Enfantin on his retreat from Paris in 1831. On the heights of Ménilmontant, now part of Paris but then out in the country, they provided much amusement for the town as they took turns washing dishes, digging in the garden, polishing boots and making beds—all tasks that would have been handled by servants, but they had sworn to leave behind them the “exploitation of man by man.” And exploitation of woman they had taken off the table too, for the time being, for all these young men had sworn to remain celibate and bearded until “Le Père” had found the woman of his dreams, “La Mère,” who in her dealings with the Père would show the world how to run a household of equals.
As sects usually do, the Saint-Simonians ended up reproducing the features of society they rejected with the greatest vigor. A handful of disciples heard the Père’s secret counsels, while others were sent to the corner to pick up a liter of red. The celibate Père was allegedly arrested while enjoying a déjeuner sur l’herbe with two female votaries. One of the keys of their doctrine was the abolition of inherited property, but the commune wouldn’t have existed were it not for a bequest from Enfantin’s parents. Karl Marx wasn’t tender toward the utopians, and he may have resented their being there first, but his BS deflector was in fine working order.
The women Saint-Simonians, though, were farther out on the limb of imagining a new society. They dropped their patronyms, signed their books “Suzanne” or “Odile.” They refused marriage. They demanded civic rights—to begin with, the status of adults (the Napoleonic Code defined a daughter as the property of her father, a wife as the property of her husband). One of them claimed in an 1848 editorial that “history has not yet begun.” A strange echo, there, of “Le Père” in 1831 endorsing the equality of the sexes in principle, but adding the temporary measure that “the Free Woman has not yet spoken, and until the Free Woman has appeared, no woman can participate in our movement as a leader.” Now that’s utopianism, all right. Some of the women got the message and left to found their own communes and societies.
This little Valentine’s Day message is dedicated to the feminist movement—another club that won’t let me join (and they’re right to do so, lest history stop before it gets properly started). I hope the phalansteries of the world are abuzz with exchanges of affection today, however silted up the Suez Canal may be and however dangerous the crossing of borders. L’amour est un enfant de bohème. Bohemia, Utopia.
On a related fashion note, let me add Hazlitt's description of the dress of the Utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham: “the open shirt-collar, the single-breasted coat, the old-fashioned half-boots and ribbed stockings.” I'm not sure what other dudes were wearing in the 1820's but I guess it was more elaborate.
What would today's Utilitarian wear? That is a question I ask myself every morning. A crewneck, Henley or wrinkle-free button down collar? A full-zip poly fleece jacket?
So are we all utilitarians now? And that slob over there-- might be-- a philosopher?
I'm pretty sure today's utilitarian would wear one of those one-piece track suits worn by Olympic athletes.
As for the feminist movement not letting you join, H S, maybe this isn't the place to start a huge debate on the status of men in feminism (somehow the question seems so very fifteen years ago), but I'll say nonetheless that the best reason for men to be feminists is that women aren't the only victims of heterosexism — see J Lee's post on boy whispering of a few days ago.
But perhaps “being” a feminist and being a member of the “feminist movement” are different things? It may be enough, for the latter, that you declare yourself the former publicly.
Utilitarian dress was easy when you just had the axis of simple vs. elaborate. More simple = less elaborate. But then came understated elegance and upset the apple cart, again and again.
E, you're right about the men-in-feminism business being a whiff of the well-composted past. It seems important for me not to be a registered member of the movement, so that I can continue to diagnose (or have others diagnose, freely and for free) my slidings back into hypocrisy. Whereas one imagines that some people, the dears, can join and have done with it. Far from bemoaning the situation of the self-distrusting pro-feminist man, I'm grateful to it for keeping alive a touch of helpful anxiety-- in which female feminists are welcome to participate too.
-- Just as (to complete the thought) it is good to have to ask somebody else to button or zip the back of one's garment. This is the point at which the utilitarian dress becomes useless for the individual, favorable to the group. And maybe the failure to think about that kind of tipping point is what's wrong with contemporary utilitarianism. Hmm.
You mean to say that I sat through two hours of silent Chartreusean monks when I coulda had the signifying Saint-Simonians? (One wonders what a good geomancer would say of the love canal.) The talk of utilitarian clothing puts me in mind of William Gibson's character Cayce in *Pattern Recognition* who is so neurologically sensitive to patterns that she has an allergic reaction to all brands and must have all the buttons on her levis jeans sanded off so that she doesn't get queasy when she puts them on, and who wears generic pullovers that are not identifiable to any particular trend in the past several decades. If I may return to the days when we used to talk about the semiotics of clothing (just before the men-in-fem era, in fact), I like this image of utility as an attempt to thwart the signifiers of branding --but, of course, as even Gibson remarks, that attempt at resistance is still legible to the keen eye as a sign, as a statement about, well, utility among other things, such as, for example, to repeat your earlier comment, the power of understatement, which is the very (mis)reading in the novel that another character makes in that unique situation. (The rest of us are not allergic to the emblazoning of brands, though I think I heard Haun once say just that, perhaps in an allusion, when buying a gift of clothing for his daughter. Concessions were made to teenage exigencies, but I shall reveal no more.) And they are “levis” in the story, after all, even if they are, de rigueur, sous-rature. I often think of Thoreau's comment that a man would sooner walk to town with a broken leg than with a broken pant leg. One pays a pretty penny for that fashion here in London these days.
“The brand that can be branded is not the constant brand.” This afternoon I bought a sweater for said daughter, justifying to myself the inflated price by the fact that I bought the same brand of sweater in 1976 and am still wearing it today. But if I tell her so, I'm sure she will never put it on! The only change: the buttons now bear the company name in (discreet) intaglio. Utilitarian, with concessions.
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