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First Published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
"First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company."--Provided by publisher.
This extensive collection of English-language essays examines the many strategies of resistance to male domination that women in France from the 16th through the 18th centuries utilized in their lives and their writings.
This historical study examines the way women used writing to create themselves as modern individuals in post-Revolutionary France.--From publisher description.
Writing the Revolution challenges the thesis that exclusion defined women's experiences of the French Revolution by exploring the life of a middle-class wife and mother of revolutionary elites, Rosalie Jullien.
The present volume covers 30 Pre-Revolutionary French women, providing a representative sampling of their manifold and varied contributions to intellectual and cultural history. This volume is unique in its grouping of essentially French writers from the Pre-Revolutionary period. The authors included here range from those prominent because of their social position or literary fame, to those slowly becoming part of a new canon of Old Regime women writers - authors whose works were known to their contemporaries but who have slipped into near invisibility in the following centuries until their recent rediscovery and reassessment.
This volume represents the first book-length study of attitudes toward women in revolutionary France. Based on extensive research in the libraries and archives of Paris, the book examines the impact of the Revolution's ideology of liberty and equality. When the men of 1789 wrote the Declaration of the Rights of Man, they were thinking in terms of man the male, not man the species. But there were some men and women who interpreted it in terms of all humanity. The outrage of these individuals over what they perceived as a discrepancy between the principles and the practice of the Revolution motivated them to produce some of the most unhesitating declarations of sexual equality that had ever been seen in history. Dr. Proctor demonstrates, however, these claims of equality were not simply ignored; they were categorically rejected by the mainstream revolutionaries. The book examines the typical 18th-century concept of women as alien and in some ways inferior beings and traces the striking continuity between pre-Revolutionary and Revolutionary thought on the subject. Against this background, Proctor addresses a number of important questions: How widespread was the support for a movement in favor of sexual equality? What was the response of the Revolution itself to demands for equal rights for women? How did the men of the French Revolution justify the contradiction between their suppression of women and the ideologies for which they claimed to be fighting? To arrive at the answers, an abundance of material produced in France in the 18th century is identified and analyzed, and cited in an extensive bibliography of original sources. What finally emerges is not only a clearer picture of the French Revolution and its attitude toward women, but a deeper understanding of the ambivalent attitudes toward women that still affect our society today. This book will be an important resource for courses in European history, the French Revolution, and women's studies, as well as a valuable reference for college, university, and public libraries.
In this provocative interdisciplinary essay, Joan B. Landes examines the impact on women of the emergence of a new, bourgeois organization of public life in the eighteenth century. She focuses on France, contrasting the role and representation of women under the Old Regime with their status during and after the Revolution. Basing her work on a wide reading of current historical scholarship, Landes draws on the work of Habermas and his followers, as well as on recent theories of representation, to re-create public-sphere theory from a feminist point of view.Within the extremely personal and patriarchal political culture of Old Regime France, elite women wielded surprising influence and power, both in the court and in salons. Urban women of the artisanal class often worked side by side with men and participated in many public functions. But the Revolution, Landes asserts, relegated women to the home, and created a rigidly gendered, essentially male, bourgeois public sphere. The formal adoption of "universal" rights actually silenced public women by emphasizing bourgeois conceptions of domestic virtue.In the first part of this book, Landes links the change in women's roles to a shift in systems of cultural representation. Under the absolute monarchy of the Old Regime, political culture was represented by the personalized iconic imagery of the father/king. This imagery gave way in bourgeois thought to a more symbolic system of representation based on speech, writing, and the law. Landes traces this change through the art and writing of the period. Using the works of Rousseau and Montesquieu as examples of the passage to the bourgeois theory of the public sphere, she shows how such concepts as universal reason, law, and nature were rooted in an ideologically sanctioned order of gender difference and separate public and private spheres. In the second part of the book, Landes discusses the discourses on women's rights and on women in society authored by Condorcet, Wollstonecraft, Gouges, Tristan, and Comte within the context of these new definitions of the public sphere. Focusing on the period after the execution of the king, she asks who got to be included as "the People" when men and women demanded that liberal and republican principles be carried to their logical conclusion. She examines women's roles in the revolutionary process and relates the birth of modern feminism to the silencing of the politically influential women of the Old Regime court and salon and to women's expulsion from public participation during and after the Revolution.
Writing the Revolution is a microhistory of a middle-class Parisian woman, Rosalie Jullien, whose nearly 1,000 familiar letters have never before been studied. The Jullien name is not new to histories of the French Revolution. Rosalie's son, Marc-Antoine, known in the family as Jules, was closely connected to the Committee of Public Safety during the Reign of Terror. However, despite being the wife and mother of revolutionary elites, Rosalie led a private life. Connected to the Revolution in very personal ways, she was also distanced from the lime light because of her gender and her proclivity for modesty. Her correspondence allows readers to enter her private world and see the intellectual, emotional, and familial life of a revolutionary in all of its complexity. The prevailing thesis in the field holds that the revolutionary elite constructed the New Regime against women, effectively excluding them from the political sphere, although nearly every existing study of women has approached the subject through oblique sources and mostly male voices. Rosalie Jullien's long missives to her husband and son, however, document her relationship to politics as she explained it. Despite never seeking a public role, Rosalie developed a political identity that included a revolutionized understanding of womanhood. Writing the Revolution builds on the innovative scholarship on the history of the family during the Revolution and demonstrates how the family sphere was revolutionized even in cases where the wife maintained a traditional family role. Jullien's correspondence boasts many values as an artifact of the Revolutionary experience, of women's lives, and of epistolary culture. Rosalie demonstrates the individual's experience within the evolving structures of a modernizing state, family, and gender identity. The period covered spans from 1775 to 1810. A portrayal of Rosalie's early married life, and the decade she spent with her husband and children in a small town north of Grenoble, begins the book, and is followed by a chapter on the couple's reading practices and their views toward religion prior to the Revolution. The heart of the research focuses on Rosalie's life and experiences in Revolutionary Paris and her decision, in the aftermath of the Terror, to emphasize private, domestic life over politics.
Annotation A sophisticated and groundbreaking book on what women actually did and what actually happened to them during the French Revolution.