Women and the Limits of Citizenship in the French Revolution
Women and the Limits of Citizenship in the French Revolution

Author: Olwen Hufton

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 1999-04-14

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 1442638583

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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.

Women and the Limits of Citizenship in the French Revolution
Women and the Limits of Citizenship in the French Revolution

Author: Olwen H. Hufton

Publisher:

Published: 1992

Total Pages: 201

ISBN-13: 9780802058980

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Not a general history of women in the Revolution, but an examination of selected issues with a view not merely to proving that women were there and hence had a revolution as well, but that their responses transformed and modified the entire history of the period 1789-1815. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution
Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution

Author: Joan B. Landes

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 1988

Total Pages: 294

ISBN-13: 9780801494819

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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.

The Family on Trial in Revolutionary France
The Family on Trial in Revolutionary France

Author: Suzanne Desan

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2006-06-19

Total Pages: 475

ISBN-13: 0520248163

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Annotation A sophisticated and groundbreaking book on what women actually did and what actually happened to them during the French Revolution.

Citoyennes
Citoyennes

Author: Annie Smart

Publisher: University of Delaware

Published: 2011-12-23

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 1611493552

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Did women have a civic identity in eighteenth-century France? In Citoyennes: Women and the Ideal of Citizenship in Eighteenth-Century France, Annie Smart contends that they did. While previous scholarship has emphasized the ideal of domestic motherhood or the image of the republican mother, Smart argues persuasively that many pre-revolutionary and revolutionary texts created another ideal for women – the ideal of civic motherhood. Smart asserts that women were portrayed as possessing civic virtue, and as promoting the values and ideals of the public sphere. Contemporary critics have theorized that the eighteenth-century ideal of the Republic intentionally excluded women from the public sphere. According to this perspective, a discourse of “Rousseauean” domestic motherhood stripped women of an active civic identity, and limited their role to breastfeeding and childcare. Eighteenth-century France marked thus the division between a male public sphere of political action and a female private sphere of the home. Citoyennes challenges this position and offers an alternative model of female identity. This interdisciplinary study brings together a variety of genres to demonstrate convincingly that women were portrayed as civic individuals. Using foundational texts such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile, or on Education (1762), revolutionary gouaches of Lesueur, and vaudeville plays of Year II of the Republic (1793/1794), this study brilliantly shows that in text and image, women were represented as devoted to both the public good and their families. In addition, Citoyennes offers an innovative interpretation of the home. Through re-examining sphere theory, this study challenges the tendency to equate the home with private concerns, and shows that the home can function as a site for both private life and civic identity. Citoyennes breaks new ground, for it both rectifies the ideal of domestic Rousseauean motherhood, and brings a fuller understanding to how female civic identity operated in important French texts and images.

The Family and the Nation
The Family and the Nation

Author: Jennifer Ngaire Heuer

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2018-09-05

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 1501725602

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The French Revolution transformed the nation's—and eventually the world's—thinking about citizenship, nationality, and gender roles. At the same time, it created fundamental contradictions between citizenship and family as women acquired new rights and duties but remained dependents within the household. In The Family and the Nation, Jennifer Ngaire Heuer examines the meaning of citizenship during and after the revolution and the relationship between citizenship and gender as these ideas and practices were reworked in the late 1790s and early nineteenth century.Heuer argues that tensions between family and nation shaped men's and women's legal and social identities from the Revolution and Terror through the Restoration. She shows the critical importance of relating nationality to political citizenship and of examining the application, not just the creation, of new categories of membership in the nation. Heuer draws on diverse historical sources—from political treatises to police records, immigration reports to court cases—to demonstrate the extent of revolutionary concern over national citizenship. This book casts into relief France's evolving attitudes toward patriotism, immigration, and emigration, and the frequently opposing demands of family ties and citizenship.

Citizens (or Citoyennes) of the World
Citizens (or Citoyennes) of the World

Author: Lisa Michelle Christian

Publisher:

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 116

ISBN-13:

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This study examines the fluid definitions of citizenship during the French Revolution, especially citizenship's relationship to exile. I assert that citizenship was always defined by who could not be citizens. Furthermore, this study focuses upon women's experience of citizenship and exile for their especial vulnerability to exclusion from public and political affairs. In particular, I address the political actions of Parisian common women, and the political actions and writings of the English exiles Helen Maria Williams and Mary Wollstonecraft. Essentially, this study has three distinct parts that demonstrate the development of women's citizenship during the Revolution and the causes of their official exile from active citizenship. First, I examine the historical situation of the October Days, when Parisian market-women drew upon traditional female political action to perform a militant citizenship in the new régime. Next, I move from the physical to the mediated experiences of revolution as I examine the initial responses of Edmund Burke, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Helen Maria Williams, and their different definitions of citizenship based upon a bourgeois English identity. Lastly, I examine Williams and Wollstonecraft's experiences as exiles in France leading up to and during the Terror, the ways in which both English women negotiated the ever-restricting and nationalistic definitions of citizenship of the Jacobin régime while maintaining their cosmopolitan ideals. Furthermore, Williams and Wollstonecraft's definition of bourgeois cosmopolitan citizenship was diametrically opposed to the popular sovereignty promoted by the Parisian common women. In the end, I seek to demonstrate that women, whatever their class or nationality, were always acting or attempting to define citizenship from a position of exile.

Women's Rights and the French Revolution
Women's Rights and the French Revolution

Author: Sophie Mousset

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-07-28

Total Pages: 119

ISBN-13: 135147118X

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Women played a major part in the French Revolution of 1789, but have received very little recognition for their contributions. The many claims and protests put forth by women at that time were suppressed, women's clubs were banned, and Olympe de Gouges, a leading contemporary advocate for women's rights, was silenced and has since remained an obscure figure. This book is the first biography of this astonishing woman.After boldly publishing her Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen in 1791, de Gouges was sent to the guillotine for having had the courage to mount the rostrum on behalf of women. Unlike many who have captured posterity's attention, de Gouges had great sympathy but no indulgence for her sex. Instead of considering her female colleagues as eternal victims, she understood that they were to some extent responsible for their misfortunes, and that if they united and devoted themselves to changing their image, they could become great. De Gouges called for the advent of a new woman, one who would relinquish the nocturnal administering of men.Olympe de Gouges rightly deserves the title of pioneer, prophet, and heroine. This long-overdue biography pays her due homage. It will be of interest to students of the French Revolution, women's studies, and biography.

The Women of Paris and Their French Revolution
The Women of Paris and Their French Revolution

Author: Dominique Godineau

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2023-04-28

Total Pages: 439

ISBN-13: 0520340604

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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. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1998. 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,