From the French Revolution to the fin de siècle
 History of Women
 Social reality
 Category of sex is taken for granted (men, women)
 History of Gender and Sexuality
 The way that ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’ are ascribed
to people and things and the power relations that are
thereby established
 Discourses about sexual difference
 Marginalized in historical studies until 1970s
 Recovery of their role in history
 From above
 Great women: salonnières, Marie-Antoinette, Olympe de
Gouges, Mme de Staël
 From below
 Peasants, workers, market women
 Focus on ‘the feminine’, ‘the masculine’ as discourses
 Ways of imagining subjectivity
 Conceptual boundaries that constrain but also create
possibilities
 Particularist society: everyone had a specific place in
the ‘Great Chain of Being’
 God
 Angels
 Man
 Woman
 Animals
 Social hierarchy
 Privileges defined differently
 Punishment for insults and slander are set according to
the relative status of the two parties involved
 Insults from a superior to an inferior are punished less
severely (or not at all) compared to insults from an
inferior to a superior
 Women and children at the bottom of the list, after God,
King, Ministers, clerics, Nobles, Magistrates, Writers,
Distinguished Citizens, Bourgeois, Commoners
 Rousseau: conceptions of civic equality, for men.
 Equal but different? The limits of equality
 Critique of ‘civility’ and ‘civilization’ as feminine
 Public sphere for men
 Domestic sphere for women
 ‘A home whose mistress is absent is a body without a
soul which soon falls into corruption…
 A woman outside of her home loses her greatest luster
and, despoiled of her real ornaments, she displays
herself indecently’ – Letter to d’Alembert
 ‘And no longer being able to tolerate the separation,
unable to make themselves men, the women make us
into women’
 Women’s revolutionary actions vs. gender hierarchy in
republicanism
 Women’s Bread March to Versailles (Oct 1789)
 Active in clubs, sections
 Petitions, patriotic gifts to the nation (jewellery, clothes)
 Olympe de Gouges
 Playwright, political commentator, feminist
 ‘woman has the right to mount the scaffold; she has the
right to mount the rostrum’
 Separate National Assembly of and for women
 Equality in
 property rights
 public administration
 work place
 Taxes, education
 Marriage and divorce: civil, not religious, procedure
 Women can initiate divorce
 All children inherit (rather than just sons)
 Abolition of the guilds: work possibilities opened up
 Society of Revolutionary Republican Women (1793)
 Radical agendas too much for Republican officials,
Catholic women, many bourgeois women
 De-democratization after the terror thwarted feminist
agenda
 1795: Women banned from galleries in National
Convention
 1796: Women banned from senior teaching positions
 1804: Civil Code
 Unequal standards of divorce restored
 Women can’t defend themselves in court
 Cannot own property without husband’s consent
 Catholicism and Republicanism, otherwise at odds,
agree on the subordination of women
 Committee on the Rights of Women
 ‘You say “There are no more proletarians”’, but if women
are excluded, ‘there remains more than 17 million of
them!’
 ‘When they abolish all privileges, they will not think of
conserving the worst one of all and leaving one half of
the nation under the domination of the other half.’
 - Jeanne Deroin to the National Assembly, 1848
 ‘Knowledge’ marshaled to justify gender inequality
 Jules Michelet
 republican, celebrated popular democracy and the French
Revolution
 Love (1859)
 Women (1860)
 Women’s reproductive biology rendered them unfit for public
life. Women’s minds and bodies should be ‘fertilized’ by her
husband’s superior attributes, physical and mental
 Auguste Comte (Positivism) and
 Charles Darwin (evolution)
 Natural basis for inequality
 The sexes have become more distinct over time
 Mastery over nature has softened life
 As women are increasingly protected by men, they lose their
wits to compete and fight
 Men’s rivalry with other men – over women and over wealth
and resources – ensured their superiority in the future
 1860s
 Highlighted the horrendous conditions of women
workers
 Conclusion: they should be at home caring for
husbands and children
 Victor Hugo
 At the funeral of an 1848 woman activist
 ‘The 18th century proclaimed the right of man, the 19th
century will proclaim the right of woman.’
 Les Misérables: described the sexism, harassment and
oppression that drove a single working mother into
prostitution, disease and death (Fantine)
 John Stuart Mill
 On Liberty (1859)
 On the Subjection of Women (1869)
 Women’s nature can’t be ‘defined’ until all legal and
cultural constraints on her development are lifted
Organized ambulance and nursing services
Day-care facilities
Secular primary schools
Producer cooperatives for women
Challenged clerical control of education, marriage
laws, poorly paid workshop conditions
Mounted barricades, carried arms, fought
 Socialist communards (men) rejected the movement
 The government, which brutally suppressed the
Commune, blamed the downfall of civilization on
women’s emancipation movements and failure to serve
as good spouses.
 1889: French and International Congress on the Rights
of Women (England, France, US)
 Divisions over the work question
 Rise of ‘conservative’ protection for women
 Banned night work for women
 Enforce unpaid maternity leaves
 Responses:
 A) Women’s right to choose how and when to work
 B) State subsidies for mothers
 C) Enforced male participation in domestic work
 The Rights of Man and of the Citizen
 What is man?
 Who can be a citizen?
 Feminism torn between
 Universal individual (w/o particularities)
 Particularity: womanhood
 Equal, but equal to whom? (Irigaray)
 Republicanism
 Gender differences naturalized
 Socialism
 Introduces equality and ‘the social question’ but is
unsettled on the question of gender sameness or
difference
 A feminist kind of socialism:
 If the paradigm is: politics (male) v. the social (female)
feminists might ally with socialist men to improve
society through politics
 In this case, gender difference is invoked and mobilised
for the sake of equality
 Contradictions and paradoxes become more acute
 If women have political rights, are they supposed to
behave like men (since ‘citizenship’ carries the freight of
the masculine)
 Can they bring their gender differences to politics – their
different interests and concerns?
 Feminism, like all movements against oppression, must
battle to reconcile universal-sameness and
particularities
 Few before the French Revolution
 Oral = female // Writing = male
 Reflected in literacy and publication rates
 French Revolution
 Freedom of expression
 More and more women write from 1789 onward, even in
the age of ‘domesticity’
 Women do not achieve intellectual authority in the
sphere of writing…
 Philosophy, science – women are expelled
 Women retreat into fiction, the novel
 Female characters – unconcerned with absolutes
 They navigate laws and constraints – contingent
reasoning
 Fiction: an apolitical sphere to produce the self
 20th century: from fiction to prose: achieving public
intellectual authority
 Playacting as means to act publicly
 Using gender stereotypes while subverting them
 Playing and subverting with limits; a contingent and creative
path to moral autonomy (i.e., freedom)
 La fronde (1897-1905)
 Newspaper: circulation: 50,000
 Proved women’s skills in the fields of law, psychiatry
 Used male pseudonyms at times and some reporters even
male disguises to get interviews
 Sarah Bernhardt – actress, courtesan, cross-dresser,
scandal-prone, but ‘acted’ normalcy for fans