Héricourt, Jenny Poinsard d' (1809–1875)

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Héricourt, Jenny Poinsard d' (1809–1875)

French philosopher, medical practitioner, Communist, and feminist. Name variations: Jenny d'Hericourt; Jeanne Marie; Mme Marie; (pseudonyms) Félix Lamb; Jeanne Marie; and Poinsard d'Héricourt. Born Jeanne-Marie-Fabienne Poinsard in Besançon on September 10, 1809; died in January 1875; daughter of Jean-Pierre Poinsard (a clockmaker from Héricourt) and Marguerite-Baptiste-Alexandrine Brenet; had at least one younger sister; educated at home; received Instructrice diploma at age 18; diploma from Medical Homeopathic Institute of Buenos Ayres (Paris); diploma of maitresse sage femme; married Michel-Gabriel-Joseph Marie, in August 1832.

Selected works:

(as Félix Lamb) Le Fils du reprouvé (1844); Icarian movement songs; articles in Le Droit des femmes, The Woman's Journal, Solidarité, Revue Philosophique et réligieuse, La Ragione (1855–57); articles in The Agitator, including her autobiography, "La Femme [pseud. Poinsard d'Héricourt] 'Madame Jenny P. D'Héricourt'" (1869); La Femme affranchie: réponse à M.M. Michelet, P.-J. Proudhon, E. de Girardin, A. Comte, et aux autres novateurs modernes (1860, abridged English publication in 1864 as A Woman's Philosophy of Woman or Woman Affranchised ).

Jeanne-Marie-Fabienne Poinsard was born to French Protestants on September 10, 1809. Her father Jean-Pierre Poinsard was a Lutheran clockmaker from Héricourt, in the ancient region of Franch-Comte, and her mother Marguerite-Baptiste-Alexandrine Brenet was of Swiss Calvinist lineage. Jenny was nicknamed "Don Quixote" by her parents, because she rose to the defense of other children and animals. Her father died when she was eight, and Jenny moved to Paris with her mother and younger sister.

The life of Jenny d'Héricourt has been hard to trace because she took her father's birthplace as her surname, and her authorship of some pieces under pseudonyms are disputed. She became a teacher after receiving the diploma Instructrice at the age of 18. Despite her humble beginnings, she became the owner of a school for girls. In 1832, she married Michel-Gabriel-Joseph Marie, an employee of the Palais Bourbon (Chambres des Députés) in Paris. The marriage was extremely unhappy, but divorce was illegal in France (this problem was among the issues Héricourt would address in her writings). She left him after he tried to murder her in order to marry someone else.

In the 1840s, she became a follower of Étienne Cabet, a French Communist theorist. In Cabet's journal Le Populaire, Héricourt published a serialized novel about working-class misery. She was later active in his revolutionary club, the Société fraternalle centrale. Her other contributions to French communism include songs for the Icarian movement, a group of French immigrants who wanted to establish a Communist settlement.

Héricourt became an active feminist in the late 1840s and the 1850s, and she published a great deal. She belonged to several women's clubs, worked for the women's revolutionary press, and signed the published manifesto of the Society for Women's Emancipation. In Voix des Femmes (Women's Voice), she wrote under the name "Jeanne Marie." She also published two pieces of romantic fiction with moral undertones, one about adultery (according to her autobiography) and one about capital punishment, Le Fils du reprouvé, under the pseudonym Félix Lamb, in 1844. As a woman, she could not be admitted to the French Medical Academy, but Héricourt studied physiology and medicine at home and then continued her medical studies at a foreign institute in Paris, the Medical Homeopathic Institute of Buenos Ayres. She was then able to work as a medical practitioner and act as a midwife.

Interested in the philosophical implications of recent scientific discoveries, in the late 1850s she published extensively in the Revue Philosophique et réligieuse (Review of Philosophy and Religion), including a critique of homeopathic practice, and in the liberal Italian philosophy journal La Ragione (Reason). Her greatest influence was outside France, particularly in Italy and in Russia, because of her intellectual contacts, M.L. Mikhailov and the Shelgunovs.

She believed and argued that women should have equal rights to men and be equally educated. A heated dispute with Pierre-Joseph Proudhon led her to publish in 1860 La Femme affranchie: réponse à M.M. Michelet, P.-J. Proudhon, E. de Girardin, A. Comte et aux autres novateurs modernes. In 1864, an abridged English translation was published as A Woman's Philosophy of Woman or Woman Affranchised. In this work, Héricourt addressed the major French male intellectual writers of the 1840s and '50s, taking up theories in philosophy of science and medicine, moral epistemology, and politics. In particular, she argued that women are important to the physical and moral continuation of a nation, against Proudhon's view that women are socially and intellectually inferior to men. She also disputed as unrealistic the ideals of femininity espoused by Auguste Comte and Jules Michelet.

In the mid-1860s, Héricourt moved to the United States, settling in Chicago, where she hoped to set up a medical practice for women. In America, as in France, she became involved in the women's movement, publishing in the feminist press of the 1860s and becoming a facilitator between American and French feminists. She became friends with women's rights advocates Mary Livermore (who published Héricourt's writing, including her autobiography, in her periodical The Agitator) and Kate Newell Poggett (the founder of a literary club for Chicago women known as the "Fortnightly Club" who introduced Jenny to Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony ).

Héricourt missed France, however, as she expressed in letters published by her friend Charles Fauvety, and she returned there in 1873. She then became involved in the intellectual circle surrounding the periodical L'Avenir des femmes (Women's Future). Jenny Poinsard d'Héricourt died suddenly in January 1875 and is buried in a common grave in St. Owen at the edge of Paris.