“Here I am, a normal person once more”: Class and Gender in Madeleine Pelletier’s My Adventurous Voyage to Communist Russia

The political activist, writer, and doctor, Madeleine Pelletier (1878-1939), is often remembered for defying expectations commonly associated with her social class and gender. For example, despite her working-class background and limited formal education, Pelletier was the first woman to pass the French psychiatric residency exam in 1903.[1] However, Pelletier never embraced the bourgeois status of her profession and joined various left-wing groups instead.[2] As a feminist, Pelletier also eschewed popular belle époque fashions, preferring to sport plain smocks, cropped hair and, occasionally, male attire, in contrast to many of her contemporaries, such as Marguerite Durand.[3] Moreover, whereas marriage remained a foregone conclusion in most French women’s lives, Pelletier was a militant celibate who equated the institution of marriage with inferiority and barbarism.[4] Yet, in order to travel to Moscow in 1921, the doctoresse had to change the way she presented herself in accordance with the expectations of those she met along the way. This paper examines the clash between Pelletier’s self-image, and stereotypes related to class and gender, as represented in My Adventurous Journey to Communist Russia.[5]

Pelletier’s roughly two hundred-page text recounts the author’s clandestine 1921 trek from Paris to Moscow. Unable to obtain a French passport, Pelletier relied on militants and smugglers to facilitate her pilgrimage to Soviet Russia, during which adventures abounded.[6] Learning the art of disappearing ink, sleeping on flea-infested mattresses with little more than a slice of lard for dinner, and crossing a border while hidden in a farmer’s cart are among the text’s more colorful passages. However, such physical discomfort, and at times real danger, seemed worth it to Pelletier, who noted: “If the ideal really is there, who cares indeed about the loss of money. Fatigue and even dangers are nothing: I feel disposed to brave all to go receive, in the new Rome, the revolutionary baptism.”[7]

Like many of the approximately 10,000 French citizens who traveled to Russia between the World Wars, including fellow feminist Hélène Brion, Pelletier’s enthusiasm waned upon arriving in Russia.[8] Particularly disappointing was the observation that the Revolution had brought only minor improvements to women’s lives.[9] Whereas Pelletier observed with pleasure women smoking in public, wearing short hair not unlike her own, and sitting alone on a park bench without arousing suspicion, she lamented the absence of women in positions of political power.[10] Further, many of the men and women Pelletier met on her journey harbored, in her opinion, antiquated views on women: “The men, penetrated by ancient prejudices consider the feminine sex inferior, and the women, in virtue of the same prejudice, think indeed they are not worth as much as men.”[11]

While Pelletier worried about how successfully a militant, celibate, intellectual woman could cross six international borders without documentation, she was confident that she would find acceptance in Soviet Russia. However, both on the road and in Moscow, the categories upon which Pelletier had constructed her public identity were undermined when others evaluated her according to their own perceptions of her class and gender. Pelletier’s reactions to the stereotypes she encountered while abroad differed: she bristled when taken for a bourgeoise, accepted the temporary label of mother and wife, and balked when asked by party officials to participate in a women’s sewing day. While Pelletier’s legacy rests largely on her absolute refusal to conform to gender norms, I argue that the incidents she recounted in My Adventurous Voyage complicate this view.[12]

Historians Christine Bard, Felicia Gordon, Claude Maignien and Charles Sowerwine have written much of what we know about Madeline Pelletier’s life and work.[13] When considering Pelletier’s voyage to Russia, in particular, historians have primarily concentrated on the way in which the text illuminates Pelletier’s relationship to the Communist Party.[14] While Pelletier’s text certainly provides valuable insight not only into her eventual break with the Party, but also the experience of French visitors to Russia in the wake of the Revolution, I focus on what Pelletier’s voyage and resulting text can reveal about class and gender norms in the same context. Jennifer Boittin and Carolyn Eichner have recently provided methodological examples of how interpreting a European woman’s experience abroad can speak to broader historical questions.[15] My goal is thus not only to complicate our understanding of Pelletier’s relationship to class and gender, but also to use her text to shed light on the way these categories were perceived more generally in interwar Europe. Ultimately, My Adventurous Voyage to Communist Russia represents a compelling case study of the way one French woman encountered and dealt with class and gender-based norms across international borders.

Interpreting Actions, Reading the Body: Pelletier as Bourgeoise

Pelletier’s travel narrative is characterized by the tension between her desire to present herself as an independent woman, and limits to that independence owing to her status as an undocumented traveler. Without a passport, Pelletier had to rely on strangers in an underground network of activists to ensure her safe arrival in Moscow. Dependency was a particularly irritating condition for Pelletier, who painstakingly controlled her image to project absolute independence, equal to that of men and devoid of “feminine” attachments.[16] Accustomed to a more self-reliant existence, Pelletier expressed aggravation in the early stages of her journey: “Already the state of dependency in which I am weighs heavily on me; I would like to be at a hotel, go out to a restaurant, to the theater, take a walk, do what I want, finally!”[17] As a dedicated left-wing activist, the inability to curate her image pertaining to social class and political affiliation was especially frustrating for Pelletier.

Before and after her journey to Russia, Pelletier was associated with various political movements, including anarchism, socialism, Freemasonry and communism. Indeed, political activism, and feminism in particular, constituted an essential part of Pelletier’s identity, as she affirmed in her unpublished autobiography.[18] Pelletier’s arduous six-week journey to Russia provides a striking example of faith in a political cause. Before departing, Pelletier defended Bolshevism at a series of conferences organized by La Voix des femmes, the feminist newspaper in which she published weekly articles discussing the merits of the Russian Revolution.[19] Following her return, the Communist Party daily, L’Humanité regularly advertised Pelletier’s speeches with titles such as “What I Saw in Russia”.[20]

Nevertheless, even with so impressive a resumé, comrades questioned her loyalty throughout her journey. In one instance, Pelletier’s apparently unreasonable culinary standards — namely, avoiding spoiled foods — subjected her to suspicion. While lodging at the Hotel Lux, the only accommodations available to foreign visitors in the years following the Revolution, a neighboring diner spied Pelletier declining the rancid butter and cried out : “She’s not eating the butter! She’s a menshevik!”[21] Apparently unfazed, Pelletier described her reaction: “In order to correct his bad impression I put the butter on his plate, ‘Eat, you will be doubly communist!’”[22] How Pelletier presented herself and her politics was immaterial; the diner considered her dietary habits a more reliable indicator of her commitment. This passage points not only to rampant suspicion in post-revolutionary Russia, but also to Pelletier’s limited ability to define herself as a militant when others viewed her body and its actions as a vector for her social class.

Within her own political network, Pelletier’s body was also not above suspicion. As famine crept across Soviet Russia, some associated a plump physique, even that of a recently-arrived foreigner, as an indication of financial ease and bourgeois sympathies.[23] Pelletier complained that her weight made her the target of a joke during a somewhat morbid role-playing game she enjoyed with fellow travelers and Party members as they waited for safe passage across the border to Russia: “I am accused, again! A German man makes a terrible indictment against me solely based on the fleshy tissues nature has given me. Everyone is thin here, except you, so you have wanted for nothing, so you are a bourgeoise! Naturally, I am condemned to death.”[24] Pelletier described other times when her loyalty came under fire. For example, a female host in a buffer state threatened to denounce Pelletier as a traitor when she refused to sleep on soiled sheets.[25] Later, Pelletier related a comrade’s reaction when he discovered her penchant for dining out: “[S]uch things, they say, one should not admit to, and when one has the weakness to do them one must have the discretion to hide them.”[26] Pelletier’s ability to self-define as a left-wing militant was weakened, both seriously and in jest, as others questioned her political affiliation based on her embodied identity.

Through these encounters, Pelletier’s relationship to communism evolved. First, Pelletier discovered that she did not believe political activism and physical comfort to be mutually exclusive, as her many remarks about the lack of culture and civilization in Russia prove.[27] Next, Pelletier’s journey forced the activist to reconsider her commitment to violent revolution, as Claude Maignien has demonstrated.[28] Pelletier grappled with her feelings towards communism, revolution and violence in the final section of her text entitled “What to do?”[29] While I concur with the way historians have assessed the impact of Pelletier’s trip to Moscow on her politics, I argue that the above examples show that Pelletier’s changing relationship to militancy was mediated through her body. To paraphrase Simone de Beauvoir, women’s identities are often reduced to, and produced by, the creation of the sexed body.[30] In this particular case, the way others interpreted Pelletier’s embodied identity hindered her ability to assert her ideological positions which, in turn, forced the author to reconsider her political identity.

“Here are your two sons”: Pelletier as Mother

Pelletier objected when others questioned her revolutionary zeal or defined her as a bourgeoise. Yet she temporarily accepted another previously-rejected label when a senior official suggested that pretending to have children might ease passage over the Russian border. The man justified his request by arguing that in case of arrest, a mother and her two sons would arouse less suspicion than a woman traveling alone. Pelletier described the said Party official’s order to adopt a false name and two adult children: “- You’re a mother! - What? -Yes, you’re a mother, you must be, do you understand? -Okay, I am a mother. The two Italians are there: -Here are your two sons: Michaël and Adolphe Capoutchévitch. You are from ...(a German town) [sic] and you are going to Russia with your children. That is what you will say to the police if they interrogate you.”[31] The official concocted this alibi in case of arrest, implying that he considered this scenario more plausible than the truth of Pelletier traveling as a single woman accompanied by two Italian men belonging to the same political network. That Pelletier did not speak Russian and could manage only rudimentary German did not seem to threaten the ruse’s credibility. Pelletier highlighted another way in which her sudden maternity was ridiculous: “But my children do not know French and I do not know Italian, there is a question of age, I’m angry, Michaël is only five years younger than me, I would have started young.”[32] The alibi was both biologically impossible and linguistically unlikely as the “mother” could hardly communicate with her “sons.”

That Pelletier’s fellow travelers stuck to this story, rather than to the truth, points to two somewhat contradictory conclusions. First, the militants with whom Pelletier interacted seemed to view gender roles as negotiable, to be deployed or abandoned according to circumstance, suggesting that they thought gender could be a performative act.[33] Second, the activists in Pelletier’s circle judged maternity to be the most believable explanation for her presence. One can therefore infer that adherence to the maternity cover story implies that the relationship between woman and motherhood remained linked in the imaginary of the comrades with whom Pelletier dealt, as well as the public at large. In other words, although Pelletier’s contacts agreed to help her, a childless woman, reach Moscow, some relied on the common association of woman with mother in order to render her presence in the buffer states between France and Russia acceptable.

Images of mothers loomed large in postwar France and Germany, whether in the form of anxiety about declining birth rates, mothers’ grief over fallen sons, or debates about women’s place in society as they entered the workforce in greater numbers.[34] Worries regarding the supposedly “natural” relationship between women and domesticity applied particularly to single female travelers, as Sidonie Smith explains: “Yet, if bourgeois femininity could be packed up and taken on the road, a woman on the road still signaled femininity displaced from its founding attachment to domesticity and the requisite sessility.”[35] Pelletier’s presence as a single woman thus required explaining along gendered lines. Further, it was Pelletier’s embodied identity that dictated the terms of those explanations. In this case, traveling partners urged Pelletier to adopt the role of mother owing to her biological potential to bear children.

Dressing the Part: Pelletier as Wife

Pretending to be a mother was not the only gender-based norm Pelletier accepted. In order to blend in while traveling to Moscow, Pelletier dressed as an average middle-class woman. In her daily life, however, she had long ago renounced female sartorial norms, sometimes donning a men’s suit and bowler hat. Passing as a man, Pelletier circulated in public space more easily and expressed pride: “When dressed as a man, I pass along unnoticed. Streetwalkers address me as “mon gros”. I feel flattered. I would prefer “mon mince” but one can’t make oneself over.”[36] Conversely, on her trip, it was as a woman that Pelletier was afforded increased mobility. She described the effect of her “disguise”: “At the exit, a man, the police chief, no doubt, stares at everyone. He doesn’t notice me; I changed my ordinary hairstyle, on my short hair, I wear a ‘transformation’[sic], I am a woman like the others.”[37] Once in Moscow, Pelletier removed her wig and displayed her short hair, to the consternation of a Comintern official. “A woman, he says, must not resemble a man, she has a mission to charm.”[38] Pelletier expressed anger at such backwards views of women: “Was it necessary to travel 3,000 kilometers to find the clichés of the retrograde minds of Paris. And me who imagined Russia so advanced that I was afraid I wouldn’t be advanced enough.”[39] In interwar France, women’s clothing represented fraught terrain as flowing belle époque fashions gave way to more tailored silhouettes.[40] Indeed, throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, the body and its adornments had emerged as a means to express political and social identities.[41] The exchanges in My Adventurous Voyage demonstrate that women’s clothing also remained a contested subject in Germany and Soviet Russia, despite shifting national, political, and cultural landscapes.

Thanks to her disguise as a middle-class woman, Pelletier’s presence often went unnoticed during her journey, particularly in transitional spaces like train stations. However, when she left these spaces and walked about town — especially in Mulhouse, Frankfurt and Berlin — she wrote that her presence sparked distrust in those cities’ inhabitants: “I have to suffer in the streets of Mulhouse the curiosity of passersby. The slavery of women is still so deeply rooted in the customs that we hardly admit that a woman can travel alone.”[42] Pelletier’s presence in public space aroused suspicion simply because, no matter how she dressed, she was a single woman. In fact, Pelletier, along with fellow radical Arria Ly, was one of the few French feminists who espoused celibacy as the only viable option for women in a society where sexual relationships necessarily entailed exploitation.[43] Remaining celibate was not only a personal decision, but also a deeply political one, for the single woman evoked complicated images in interwar France. Whether lauded by feminists as a symbol of independence, deemed a natural consequence of the unprecedented numbers of male deaths in the First World War, or feared as a threat to moral order by conservatives, the single woman was, as Mary-Louise Roberts has argued, at the center of fierce debate.[44]

It was against such a backdrop that Pelletier complained of the curious stares she attracted as a single woman traveling to Moscow. On the return journey, however, Pelletier was accompanied by a male associate who convinced her to pass as his wife in order to prevent excessive attention from prying hotel staff: “You understand that we must enter into the conceptions of the hotel owners to pass unnoticed. Couples; they know that; so we are a nice couple and we’ll take a room with two beds.”[45] Much like the maternity cover story, this incident suggests that the public at large expected women travelers to be married, and distrusted those who were not. Moreover, the request to pose as husband and wife evoked long-held stereotypes that equated single female travelers with sexual promiscuity and availability.[46] Despite Pelletier’s defense of female celibacy, she agreed to play the role of wife to minimize innkeepers’ curiosity, which could have led to dangerous questions about her passport and political affiliation. To sum up, Pelletier presented as an average bourgeois woman so that she could travel more easily. Yet, no matter how respectably she was dressed, she elicited suspicion, and ultimately had to be legitimated through adherence to gender-based stereotypes.

“Me sew? Ah! no!”: Pelletier as Seamstress

After being mistaken for a bourgeoise and begrudgingly playing the role of mother, Pelletier, on the contrary, refused to spend the day sewing while in Moscow. Pelletier explained, not without resentment, that in order to quell the people’s growing hostility towards the intellectuals in Hotel Lux, the Party occasionally forced the inn’s guests to engage in manual labor.[47] On one such work day, when prodded to join the hotel’s female lodgers, Pelletier instead opted to haul iron with her male counterparts. She even reacted violently at the suggestion that she sew with Hotel Lux’s other female guests: “Me sew? Ah! no! Come on! I didn’t come to Moscow to work in an women’s workshop. Sewing is the symbol of female slavery.”[48] For Pelletier, if domesticity was tantamount to female enslavement, then education was the key to enfranchisement.[49] By becoming a doctor, Pelletier had escaped Proudhon’s famous dichotomy according to which the 19th-century woman could become either a housewife or a harlot.[50] But Pelletier’s occupation was not just a matter of personal pride; it was a feminist affirmation.[51] It is therefore my contention that Pelletier’s attachment to her public image as a physician prompted her refusal to sew. Pelletier’s capacity to define herself as an intellectual was at odds with what others believed it meant to be a woman and to do women’s work.

In interwar France, though an increasing number of women began to enter professions to which they previously had had little access, their presence in many fields was akin to “a homeopathic dose — just enough to be able to claim equality of opportunity.”[52] When women did achieve professional success, the mainstream press often ignored the struggles the led to their accomplishments.[53] Instead, “exceptional female achievers were seamlessly fitted into a lady-like role to conform to their gender stereotype.”[54] As one of the rare female doctors in France, Pelletier surely felt protective of her hard-won success, and refused, even for one day, to align herself with domestic labor.

Pelletier believed that intellectuals held the key to reforming an unjust society.[55] Therefore, witnessing former professionals occupy what she saw as menial jobs in Soviet Russia shook Pelletier’s confidence in the communist regime: “Another danger of integral communism is the exaggeration of the egalitarian spirit.”[56] Despite legislative improvements in sexual equality, Pelletier saw that women’s professional options remained limited under the Bolshevik regime. For instance, at an official Party event, she was initially hopeful when several women appeared on stage, but soon expressed disappointment upon realizing they were all either stenographers or Party officials’ wives.[57] Pelletier’s reactions to the enduring gendered division of work in Moscow indicate a complex relationship to both her gender and her class. On the one hand, Pelletier criticized communism for demoting prominent intellectuals to unskilled positions. Yet, despite her pride in being an intellectual, she did agree to perform physical work on the condition it be divorced from domesticity.

In My Adventurous Voyage, Pelletier portrayed her refusal to sew as a rebellion that spread through the ranks of Hotel Lux:: “Someone told me that I almost started a revolution among the women at the hotel [...].”[58] She also bragged that a guest accused her of “turning the other women’s brains inside out.”[59] Bearing in mind that Pelletier intended her text for publication in La Voix des femmes, I argue that she tried to set an example not only for women in Moscow but also in France. In choosing hard labor over a domestic task, Pelletier contested gender-based stereotypes concerning work. Judith Butler explains how challenges to prevailing social norms can emerge:

I do not contend that Pelletier’s refusal to sew was somehow responsible for the reconfiguration of gender roles in Soviet Russia. I do argue, however, that when examined through Butler’s theoretical lens, Pelletier’s rejection of the norm that equated women with domestic work, as well as the way she represented this incident, appears not as a mere anecdote, but rather as an attempt to renegotiate traditional gender roles.[61]

Conclusion

My reading of Pelletier’s Adventurous Voyage to Communist Russia analyzes how and why the categories according to which the author defined herself — political militant, childless woman, celibate and intellectual — became strained when she traveled alone. In order to successfully journey to Moscow with neither passport nor identification, Pelletier became dependent on others’ perceptions of her class and gender. In her travel narrative, Pelletier lamented this temporary loss of autonomy: “O Paris, my Paris. Things are far from perfect, I know it only too well, but, in the end, my accounts paid, my door closed, I don’t owe anything to anyone.”[62] Pelletier dictated the terms of her life in Paris. While on the road, however, she was forced to adapt her performance of gender and class in order to blend in with a public who may not have accepted her otherwise. Whether traveling in nations socially defined by their middle class or in Communist Russia, Pelletier’s encounters were framed by the way in which others assumed her embodied identity represented her social class and dictated appropriate gender roles. My Adventurous Voyage indicates that gender-based stereotypes transcended national borders in interwar Europe. It also speaks to the experience of single women travelers more generally: they had to be “figured out” and understood according to well-defined social categories.

Finally, Pelletier’s own relationship to gender and class-based social norms was complicated by her journey to Soviet Russia. In order to thrive in Paris, she embraced traditionally male behavior regarding dress and professional activity, yet was willing to occupy certain typically female roles in order to function successfully in other cultural and political contexts. Pelletier’s text allows the reader to consider her political identity as an unstable, unending process rather than “a fully formed self [that] is resisting the impositions of the social order or measuring what it knows of its true self against a misinterpretation on the outside.”[63] Joan Scott urges historians to consider the study of gender as the intersection between a subject’s psyche and normative boundaries established by a given society.[64] Pelletier’s text brings this concept into sharp relief as her political, social and gender identities were, in part, shaped by her interactions with the men and women she met during her Adventurous Voyage.

1. Felicia Gordon, “Convergence and Conflict: Anthropology, Psychiatry and Feminism in the Early Writings of Madeleine Pelletier (1874-1938),” History of Psychiatry 19, no. 2 (2008): 141.

2. Felicia Gordon, The Integral Feminist: Madeleine Pelletier, 1874-1939 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), 158.

3. For more on Marguerite Durand, see Mary Louise Roberts, Disruptive Acts: The New Woman in Fin-de-Siècle France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).

4. Madeleine Pelletier, Le Célibat, état supérieur (Caen, n.d.). While it is not my primary focus here, it is important to note the imperial connotation inherent in Pelletier’s argument in favor of celibacy. Further, though Pelletier practiced celibacy, she advocated for women’s complete sexual liberation in L'Êmancipation sexuelle de la femme (Paris: M. Giard & E. Brière, 1911).

5. Madeleine Pelletier. Mon voyage aventureux en Russie communiste (Paris: M. Giard, 1922). The text originally appeared in serial form for the feminist, socialist periodical, La Voix des femmes in 1921. All translations are mine.

6. Rachel Mazuy, Croire plutôt que voir?: voyages en Russie soviétique, 1919-1939 (Paris: O. Jacob, 2002), 11. Like Pelletier, many French militants who traveled to Russia during the interwar period did so without official documentation.

7. Pelletier, Mon Voyage, 22.

8. Mazuy, Croire plutôt que voir?, 9. According to Mazuy, travelers to Russia during the interwar years did so for ideological, rather than cultural, reasons, contrary to the 19th-century French visitor to Russia.

9. Claude Maignien, “L’expérience communiste ou la foi en l’avenir radieux (1920-1926),” in Madeleine Pelletier (1874-1939): Logique et infortunes d’un combat pour l’égalité, ed. Christine Bard (Paris: côté-femmes éditions, 1992), 157-165.

10. For more on women in the Soviet Union see Barbara E. Clements, A History of Women in Russia: From Earliest Times to the Present (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012); Linda Edmondson, ed., Women and Society in Russia and the Soviet Union (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Barbara Engel, Anastasia Posadskaya-Vanderbeck, and Sona S. Hoisington. A Revolution of Their Own: Voices of Women in Soviet History (Boulder, Colo: Westview Press, 1998); Wendy Z. Goldman, Women, The State and Revolution: Soviet Family Policy and Social Life, 1917-1936 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Jane McDermid and Anna Hillyar, Women and Work in Russia, 1880-1930: A Study in Continuity Through Change (Hoboken: Taylor and Francis, 2014).

11. Pelletier, Mon Voyage, 217.

12. See Christine Bard, Filles de Marianne: Histoire des féminismes 1914-1940 (Paris: Fayard, 1995); Laurence Klejman and Florence Rochefort, L’Égalité en marche: Le féminisme sous la Troisième République (Paris: Presses de la fondation nationale des sciences politiques, 1989); Paul Smith, Feminism and the Third Republic: Women’s Political and Civil Rights in France 1918-1945 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996).

13. Gordon, Integral; Claude Maignien and Charles Sowerwine. Madeleine Pelletier, Une Féministe dans l’arène politique (Paris: Les Éditions Ouvrières, 1992.); Claude Maignien, “L’expérience communiste”.

14. Gordon, Integral, 153-171. Felicia Gordon provides a rich description of Pelletier’s voyage in which she touches on several of the themes I explore here. For example, Gordon mentions Pelletier’s reluctant acceptance of feminine clothing and perceptions of Pelletier’s class affiliation based on her attachment to material comfort, 155-6.

15. Jennifer Anne Boittin "Adventurers and Agents Provocateurs: A German Woman Traveling through French West Africa in the Shadow of War,” Historical Reflections, 40, no. 1, (2014): 111-131; Carolyn Eichner ”La Citoyenne in the World: Hubertine Auclert and Feminist Imperialism,” French Historical Studies, 32, no. 1 (2009): 63-84.

16. Gordon, “Convergence”, 147.

17. Pelletier, Mon Voyage, 89.

18. Gordon, Integral, image 12. For more on Pelletier’s political activism see Maignien and Sowerwine, Une Féministe dans l’arène politique.

19. Maignien, “L’expérience communiste”, 158.

20. L’Humanité. 12 January 1922. Pelletier’s conferences are advertised in several editions of L’Humanité in 1921 and 1922 under the “Fêtes et conferences” rubric.

21. Pelletier, Mon Voyage, 96. For more on Hotel Lux, see Fred Kupferman, Au pays des Soviets: Le voyage français en Union soviétique 1917-1939 (Bruxelles: Éditions Complexe, 1979), 12.

22. Pelletier, Mon Voyage, 96.

23. Michael David-Fox, Showcasing the Great Experiment: Cultural Diplomacy and Western Visitors to the Soviet Union, 1921-1941 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 30-46.

24. Pelletier, Mon Voyage, 68.

25. Ibid., 48.

26. Ibid., 98.

27. Gordon, Integral, 158. Gordon notes Pelletier’s intellectual and cultural arrogance towards the Russian people.

28. Maignien, “L’expérience communiste”, 160.

29. Pelletier, Mon Voyage, 201-215.

30. Simone de Beauvoir, Le Deuxième sexe (Paris: Gallimard, 1949).

31. Pelletier, Mon Voyage, 60.

32. Ibid., 69.

33. For more on performativity and the social construction of gender see Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990); De Beauvoir, Le Deuxième Sexe. By emphasizing this incident’s theoretical implications, I do not discount the fact that Pelletier’s performance as a mother was, in fact, a disguise that afforded her practical advantages.

34. For more on motherhood see Elinor Accampo, Blessed Motherhood, Bitter Fruit: Nelly Roussel and the Politics of Female Pain in Third Republic France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010); Ann Taylor Allen, Feminism and Motherhood in Western Europe 1890-1970: The Maternal Dilemma (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005); Mary Louise Roberts, Civilization without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France, 1917-1927 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994); Adam C. Stanley, Modernizing Tradition: Gender and Consumerism in Interwar France and Germany (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008); Françoise Thébaud, Quand nos grand-mères donnaient la vie: La maternité en France dans l’entre-deux-guerres (Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1986).

35. Sidonie Smith, Moving Lives: 20th-Century Women’s Travel Writing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 17.

36. Gordon, Integral, 19. The quotation comes from a letter from Pelletier to militant feminist Arria Ly. The translation is Gordon's.

37. Pelletier, Mon Voyage, 7. Michelle Perrot,“Madeleine Pelletier ou le refus du ‘devenir femme’” in Christine Bard, ed. Madeleine Pelletier (1874-1939), 187. Perrot argues that Pelletier felt uncomfortable dressed in “feminine” clothing: “It is as a woman that she [Pelletier] feels disguised, grotesque, shackled.”

38. Pelletier, Mon Voyage, 187.

39. Ibid.

40. For more on the stakes of women’s fashion see Christine Bard, Les Garçonnes: Modes et fantasmes des Années folles. (Paris: Flammarion, 1998); Mary Louise Roberts, Disruptive Acts; Roberts, Civilization Without Sexes.

41. Paul R. Deslandes, “Exposing, Adorning, and Dressing in the Modern Era” in The Routledge History of Sex and the Body: 1500 to the Present, eds. Sarah Toulalan and Kate Fisher, eds. (London: Routledge, 2013).

42. Pelletier, Mon Voyage, 8.

43. Pelletier, Le célibat. For more on singleness in France see Andrea Mansker “"Vive 'Mademoiselle'!" the Politics of Singleness in Early Twentieth-Century French Feminism” Feminist Studies, 33, No. 3 (2007), pp. 632-658.

44. Roberts, Civilization without Sexes, 149-183.

45. Pelletier, Mon Voyage, 194.

46. Smith, Moving Lives, 128.

47. Pelletier, Mon Voyage, 149.

48. Ibid., 150.

49. Madeleine Pelletier, L’Éducation féministe des filles (Paris, 1914).

50. James F. McMillan, Housewife or Harlot: The Place of Women in French Society, 1870-1940 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990). Pelletier argued that though women always worked outside the home, “the majority of women, married or not, were kept by a man; housewife or harlot, as Proudhon said.” Madeleine Pelletier, Le Droit au travail pour la femme, Brochure mensuelle, November 1931, 15.

51. Gordon, Integral, 25.

52. Siân Reynolds, France Between the Wars: Gender and Politics (London: Routledge, 1996), 95.

53. Felicia Gordon “Publicity and Professionalism: Madeleine Pelletier (1874-1939) and Constance Pascal (1877-1937),” Modern and Contemporary France 17, no. 3 (2009).

54. Ibid., 32. This is one of the reasons Pelletier was somewhat marginalized in the press; she did not fit stereotypical “feminine” images.

55. Charles Sowerwine “Militantisme et identité sexuelle: la carrière politique et l’œuvre thérorique de Madeleine Pelletier (1874-1939),” Le Mouvement social. no. 157 (Oct.-Dec. 1991): 31.

56. Pelletier, Mon voyage, 214.

57. Ibid., 156.

58. Ibid., 149.

59. Ibid., 152.

60. Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004), 4.

61. While Pelletier credited herself with changing perceptions of women’s work, we must remember that in so doing she is suggesting that she, an outsider, is the first person to have done so in Russia, a standpoint that reflects an imperialist attitude towards the women she meets.

62. Pelletier, Mon Voyage, 113.

63. Joan W. Scott. The Fantasy of Feminist History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 13.

64. Ibid., 20.