Author: Joan B. Landes Publisher: Cornell University Press ISBN: 9780801494819 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 294
Book Description
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.
Author: Joan B. Landes Publisher: Cornell University Press ISBN: 1501727532 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 273
Book Description
Popular images of women were everywhere in revolutionary France. Although women's political participation was curtailed, female allegories of liberty, justice, and the republic played a crucial role in the passage from old regime to modern society. In her lavishly illustrated and gracefully written book, Joan B. Landes explores this paradox within the workings of revolutionary visual culture and traces the interaction between pictorial and textual political arguments. Landes highlights the widespread circulation of images of the female body, notwithstanding the political leadership's suspicions of the dangers of feminine influence and the seductions of visual imagery. The use of caricatures and allegories contributed to the destruction of the masculinized images of hierarchic absolutism and to forging new roles for men and women in both the intimate and public arenas. Landes tells the fascinating story of how the depiction of the nation as a desirable female body worked to eroticize patriotism and to bind male subjects to the nation-state. Despite their political subordination, women too were invited to identify with the project of nationalism. Recent views of the French Revolution have emphasized linguistic concerns; in contrast, Landes stresses the role of visual cognition in fashioning ideas of nationalism and citizenship. Her book demonstrates as well that the image is often a site of contestation, as individual viewers may respond to it in unexpected, even subversive, ways.
Author: Sara E. Melzer Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0190281804 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 312
Book Description
This interdisciplinary collection of essays examines the important and paradoxical relation between women and the French Revolution. Although the male leaders of the Revolution depended on the women's active militant participation, they denied to women the rights they helped to establish. At the same time that women were banned from the political sphere, "woman" was transformed into an allegorical figure which became the very symbol of (masculine) Liberty and Equality. This volume analyzes how the revolutionary process constructed a new gender system at the foundation of modern liberal culture.
Author: Olwen Hufton Publisher: University of Toronto Press ISBN: 1442638583 Category : History Languages : en Pages :
Book Description
The French masses overwhelmingly supported the Revolution in 1789. Economic hardship, hunger, and debt combined to put them solidly behind the leaders. But between the people's expectations and the politicians' interpretation of what was needed to construct a new state lay a vast chasm. Olwen H. Hufton explores the responses of two groups of working women – those in rural areas and those in Paris – to the revolution's aftermath. Women were denied citizenship in the new state, but they were not apolitical. In Paris, collective female activity promoted a controlled economy as women struggled to secure an adequate supply of bread at a reasonable price. Rural women engaged in collective confrontation to undermine government religious policy which was destroying the networks of traditional Catholic charity. Hufton examines the motivations of these two groups, the strategies they used to advance their respective causes, and the bitter misogyinistic legacy of the republican tradition which persisted into the twentieth century.
Author: Lisa Beckstrand Publisher: Associated University Presse ISBN: 9780838641927 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 174
Book Description
"Despite critical interest in the role of women in the French Revolution, there is no single, comprehensive study of the works of the two most prolific women writers of the period: Olympe de Gouges and Manon Roland. At a time when politicians were molding public policy concerning life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and constituting criteria for citizenship, increasing numbers of women in Paris were clamoring for rights. New medical and philosophical theories redefining female nature were trotted out to justify women's continued exclusion from full political participation. Such theories focused on the female body as the locus of women's intellectual inadequacies and promulgated the idea that women who acted outside of the confines of their physiological nature were considered desensitized and unfeminine. "Deviant Women of the French Revolution and the Rise of Feminism" aims to uncover the work of those women who challenged prevailing views of female nature, sought social reforms, and were deemed 'deviant' for their writing and/or activism during the French Revolution."--Jacket.
Author: Dominique Godineau Publisher: Univ of California Press ISBN: 0520340604 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 439
Book Description
During the French Revolution, hundreds of domestic and working-class women of Paris were interrogated, examined, accused, denounced, arrested, and imprisoned for their rebellious and often hostile behavior. Here, for the first time in English translation, Dominique Godineau offers an illuminating account of these female revolutionaries. As nurturing and tender as they are belligerent and contentious, these are not singular female heroines but the collective common women who struggled for bare subsistence by working in factories, in shops, on the streets, and on the home front while still finding time to participate in national assemblies, activist gatherings, and public demonstrations in their fight for the recognition of women as citizens within a burgeoning democracy. Relying on exhaustive research in historical archives, police accounts, and demographic resources at specific moments of the Revolutionary period, Godineau describes the private and public lives of these women within their precise political, social, historical, and gender-specific contexts. Her insightful and engaging observations shed new light on the importance of women as instigators, activists, militants, and decisive revolutionary individuals in the crafting and rechartering of their political and social roles as female citizens within the New Republic.
Author: Mary Dewhurst Lewis Publisher: Stanford University Press ISBN: 9780804757225 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 386
Book Description
In this first comprehensive history of immigrant inequality in France, Mary D. Lewis chronicles the conflicts arising from mass immigration between the First and Second World Wars, the uneven rights arrangements that emerged during this time, and their legacy for contemporary France.
Author: Suzanne Desan Publisher: Univ of California Press ISBN: 0520248163 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 475
Book Description
Annotation A sophisticated and groundbreaking book on what women actually did and what actually happened to them during the French Revolution.
Author: Craig Calhoun Publisher: MIT Press ISBN: 9780262531146 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 516
Book Description
In this book, scholars from a wide range of disciplines respond to Habermas's most directly relevant work, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. The relationship between civil society and public life is in the forefront of contemporary discussion. No single scholarly voice informs this discussion more than that of Jürgen Habermas. His contributions have shaped the nature of debates over critical theory, feminism, cultural studies, and democratic politics. In this book, scholars from a wide range of disciplines respond to Habermas's most directly relevant work, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. From political theory to cultural criticism, from ethics to gender studies, from history to media studies, these essays challenge, refine, and extend our understanding of the social foundations and changing character of democracy and public discourse. Contributors Hannah Arendt, Keith Baker, Seyla Benhabib, Harry C. Boyte, Craig Calhoun, Geoff Eley, Nancy Fraser, Nicholas Garnham, Jürgen Habermas, Peter Hohendahl, Lloyd Kramer, Benjamin Lee, Thomas McCarthy, Moishe Postone, Mary P. Ryan, Michael Schudson, Michael Warner, David Zaret
Author: Susan Foley Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing ISBN: 1350317381 Category : Psychology Languages : en Pages : 321
Book Description
This compelling study traces the changes in women's lives in France from 1789 to the present. Susan K. Foley surveys the patterns of women's experiences in the socially-segregated society of the early nineteenth century, and then traces the evolution of their lifestyles to the turn of the twenty-first century, when many of the earlier social distinctions had disappeared. Focusing on women's contested place within the political nation, Women in France since 1789 examines: - The on-going strength of notions of sexual difference - Recurrent debates over gender - The anxiety created by women's perceived departure from ideals of womanhood - Major controversies over matters such as reproductive rights, significant cultural changes, and women's often under-estimated political roles By addressing and exploring these key issues, Foley demonstrates women's efforts over two centuries to create a place in society on their own terms.
Author: Joan B. Landes
Author: Joan B. Landes
Author: Sara E. Melzer
Author: Olwen Hufton
Author: Lisa Beckstrand
Author: Dominique Godineau
Author: Mary Dewhurst Lewis
Author: Suzanne Desan
Author: Craig Calhoun
Author: Susan Foley