Literate Women and the French Revolution of 1789 PDF Download

Author:
Publisher: Summa Publications, Inc.
ISBN: 9781883479077
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 342

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Author: Candice E. Proctor
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313368554
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
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.

Author: Darline Gay Levy
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252008559
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
200 years ago, the women of revolutionary Paris were demanding legal equality in marriage; educational opportunities for girls; and public instruction, licensing, and support for midwives. This title presents sixty documents which focuses on these and other socioeconomic struggles by women and their impact on the French Revolutionary era.

Author: Yves Bessieres
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : France
Languages : en
Pages : 102

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Author: M. Lyons
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230287808
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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In the nineteenth century, the reading public expanded to embrace new categories of consumers, especially of cheap fiction. These new lower-class and female readers frightened liberals, Catholics and republicans alike. The study focuses on workers, women and peasants, and the ways in which their reading was constructed as a social and political problem, to analyse the fear of reading in nineteenth century France. The author presents a series of case-studies of actual readers, to examine their choices and their practices, and to evaluate how far they responded to (or subverted) attempts at cultural domination.

Author: Shirley Elson Roessler
Publisher: Peter Lang Incorporated, International Academic Publishers
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Named an Outstanding Academic Book for 1997 by CHOICE Out of the Shadows demonstrates the importance of the role of women in the French Revolution. It traces the growth of female political awareness and depicts the determination of women of the working class to participate in the life of the new nation despite their government's obstinate denial of the rights of citizenship. The author examines in detail the grassroots involvement of women in the affairs of the country right up until the avalanche of repressive legislation passed in the spring of 1795.

Author: Sara E. Melzer
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195344987
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 309

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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: James McMillan
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134589581
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
France and Women, 1789-1914 is the first book to offer an authoritative account of women's history throughout the nineteenth century. James McMillan, author of the seminal work Housewife or Harlot, offers a major reinterpretation of the French past in relation to gender throughout these tumultuous decades of revolution and war. This book provides a challenging discussion of the factors which made French political culture so profoundly sexist and in particular, it shows that many of the myths about progress and emancipation associated with modernisation and the coming of mass politics do not stand up to close scrutiny. It also reveals the conservative nature of the republican left and of the ingrained belief throughout french society that women should remain within the domestic sphere. James McMillan considers the role played by French men and women in the politics, culture and society of their country throughout the 1800s.

Author: Dominique Godineau
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520340604
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 439

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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: Lisa Beckstrand
Publisher: Associated University Presse
ISBN: 9780838641927
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 174

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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.