Flora Tristan

Her full name was Flore Célestine Thérèse Henriette Tristán y Moscoso.[2] Her father, Mariano Eusebio Antonio Tristán y Moscoso, was a colonel of the Spanish Navy, born in Arequipa, a city of Peru. His family was one of the most powerful in the south of the country; his brother Pío de Tristán became viceroy of Peru. Flora Tristan's mother, Anne-Pierre Laisnay, was French; the couple met in Bilbao, Spain.

When her father died in 1807, before her fifth birthday, the situation of Tristan and her mother changed drastically from the high standards of living they were accustomed to. In 1833 she travelled to Arequipa to claim her paternal inheritance, which was in possession of her uncle, Juan Pío de Tristán y Moscoso. She remained in Peru until 16 July 1834. Though she never secured the inheritance that brought her there, Tristan wrote a travel diary about her experiences during Peru's tumultuous post-independence period. The diary was published in 1838 as Pérégrinations d'une paria.[3] Around this time, Tristan met and was influenced by the philosophy of the androgynous mystic Simon Ganneau, as well as her longtime friend Éliphas Lévi.[4][5][6]

Repressed for the most part in history, women's historiography has been gaining traction in the attempt of historians to highlight “minoritized” histories. Through her writings, Flora Tristan was able to show the ability of women to conceptualize the idea of freedom which emanated from her works.

Seeing the failure of the promises of capitalism, Flora Tristan works would entail a deep desire for social progress – combining the women struggle with socialism. When one would trace socialism going together with feminism, Flora Tristan would become the key person in this amalgamation. Flora Tristan would be known as the “mother of feminism and of popular communitarian socialism”,[7] fighting the prejudice and misogyny that powers women's oppression.

Tristan would organize the fragmented ideas of women equality at that time, brought by the French Revolution. She would provide the platform for the later rise of feminism in the late 19th century. Tristan would die “defending the rights of the proletarian or rather demanding them for him; she died whilst preaching, through her words and her actions, the law of union and love that she had brought to him”.[8]

Flora Tristan would be “the first woman to try to merge the proto-feminist and social discourses into a critical synthesis, opening the way leading for the future shape of feminism of a proletarian class character, which finds it inconceivable that there exist oppressed women who are capable of oppressing other women”.[9]

Tristan would highlight themes and ideas that gives primacy to worker's rights. She would be the first one to conceive the idea that the emancipation of the proletariat would be the synthesis of the people's struggle against the bourgeoisie. She would further add that this was only to be possible with the emancipation of the sexes.[7]

Flora Tristan's life, works, and ideals have proved fruitful for the excavation of women's work through time. Establishing histories that would focus on the contribution of women, Flora Tristan has provided much in the progressing excavation of women's role in our history.

• Tristan, Flora. The Workers Union. Translated by Beverly Livingston. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1983, 77–78.
• Máire Cross. The Feminism of Flora Tristan. Berg, Oxford, 1992. ISBN 0-85496-731-1
• Máire Cross. The Letter in Flora Tristan's Politics, 1835-1844, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004. ISBN 0-333-77264-4
• Flora Tristan’s Diary: The Tour of France 1843–1844, translated, annotated and introduced by Máire Fedelma Cross. Berne: Peter Lang, 2002. ISBN 978-3-906768-48-9
• Dominique Desanti. A Woman in Revolt: A Biography of Flora Tristan. New York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1976. ISBN 0-517-51878-3
• The London Journal of Flora Tristan, translated, annotated and introduced by Jean Hawkes. London: Virago Press, 1982. ISBN 0-86068-214-5
• Tristan, Flora. Peregrinations of a Pariah, translated by Jean Hawkes. London: Virago Press, 1985. ISBN 0-86068-477-6
• Beik, Doris and Paul. Flora Tristan: Utopian Feminist: Her Travel Diaries and Personal Crusade. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993.
• Dijkstra, Sandra. Flora Tristan: Feminism in the Age of George Sand. London: Pluto Press, 1992. ISBN 0745304508
• Krulic, Brigitte. ‘’Flora Tristan.’’ Paris: Gallimard/NRF, 2022. ISBN 978-2-07-282022-9
• Melzer, Sara E. and Rabine, Leslie W. Rebel Daughters: Women and the French Revolution. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992, 284.
• Schneider, Joyce Anne. Flora Tristan: Feminist, Socialist, and Free Spirit. New York: Morrow, 1980. ISBN 0688222501.
• Strumingher, Laura L. The Odyssey of Flora Tristan. New York: Peter Lang, 1988. University of Cincinnati Studies in Historical and Contemporary Europe, vol. 2. ISBN 0820408883

• Works by or about Flora Tristan at Internet Archive
• Ibero-American Electronic Text Series: Tristan, Flora, Peregrinaciones de una Paria (Selección). Presented online by the University of Wisconsin Digital Collections Center.
• Archive of Flora Tristan Papers at the International Institute of Social History
• Excerpts and full text of Promenades in London (1840) at the Marxist Internet Archive (in Spanish)