From the French Revolution to the fin de siècle

Gender and Sexuality in Modern France

History of WomenSocial realityCategory of sex is taken for granted (men,

women)

History of Gender and SexualityThe way that ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’ are

ascribed to people and things and the power relations that are thereby established

Discourses about sexual difference

Two historical approaches

Marginalized in historical studies until 1970s

Recovery of their role in history

From aboveGreat women: salonnières, Marie-Antoinette,

Olympe de Gouges, Mme de StaëlFrom below

Peasants, workers, market women

History of Women

Focus on ‘the feminine’, ‘the masculine’ as discourses

Ways of imagining subjectivity

Conceptual boundaries that constrain but also create possibilities

History of Gender

Pink and BlueGendered colors?

Virgin Mary: Blue

JesusSpanish Renaissance

JesusGiotto, late medieval Italian

American marketing: 1920s-1940s

Jacques Louis DavidOath of the Horatii, 1784

Particularist society: everyone had a specific place in the ‘Great Chain of Being’GodAngelsManWomanAnimals

Social hierarchyPrivileges defined differently

Gender Hierarchy Old Regime

Punishment for insults and slander are set according to the relative status of the two parties involvedInsults 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

Treatise on the Jurisprudence of Injurious Speech (1775)

Rousseau: conceptions of civic equality, for men.

Equal but different? The limits of equality

Critique of ‘civility’ and ‘civilization’ as feminine

Public sphere for menDomestic sphere for women

Enlightenment and Gender

‘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’

Rousseau

David’s Oath of the Horatii (1784)What is going on here?

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)

French Revolution

Olympe de GougesPlaywright, 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 womenEquality in

property rightspublic administrationwork placeTaxes, education

Declaration of the Rights of Women- 1791

Marriage and divorce: civil, not religious, procedure

Women can initiate divorceAll children inherit (rather than just sons)Abolition of the guilds: work possibilities

opened upSociety 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

Revolutionary advances…

1795: Women banned from galleries in National Convention

1796: Women banned from senior teaching positions

1804: Civil CodeUnequal standards of divorce restoredWomen can’t defend themselves in courtCannot own property without husband’s

consent

Directory/Napoleonic backlash

Catholicism and Republicanism, otherwise at odds, agree on the subordination of women

Early 19th century

Cult of Domesticity – 19th century

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

Resurgence, 1848

‘Knowledge’ marshaled to justify gender inequality

Jules Micheletrepublican, celebrated popular democracy and the

French RevolutionLove (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

La Question des femmes (1850-60s)The Question of Women

Auguste Comte (Positivism) and Charles Darwin (evolution)Natural basis for inequality

The sexes have become more distinct over timeMastery over nature has softened lifeAs women are increasingly protected by men, they

lose their wits to compete and fightMen’s rivalry with other men – over women and

over wealth and resources – ensured their superiority in the future

Question des femmes, 1850-60s

1860s

Highlighted the horrendous conditions of women workers

Conclusion: they should be at home caring for husbands and children

Sociological studies of women workers

Victor HugoAt 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)

Question des femmesPro-women views by men

John Stuart MillOn 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

Question des femmes

The Communardes, 1871Organized 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.

Attacked on left and right

1889: French and International Congress on the Rights of Women (England, France, US)

Divisions over the work questionRise of ‘conservative’ protection for women

Banned night work for womenEnforce unpaid maternity leaves

Responses:A) Women’s right to choose how and when to workB) State subsidies for mothersC) Enforced male participation in domestic work

1870s – 1890s: Internationalization of Women’s Movement

The Rights of Man and of the CitizenWhat is man?Who can be a citizen?

Feminism torn betweenUniversal individual (w/o particularities)Particularity: womanhood

Equal, but equal to whom? (Irigaray)

Paradox of French Feminism

RepublicanismGender differences naturalized

SocialismIntroduces 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 politicsIn this case, gender difference is invoked and

mobilised for the sake of equality

Difference vs. Sameness

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

Once equality is granted…

Few before the French Revolution

Oral = female // Writing = maleReflected in literacy and publication rates

French RevolutionFreedom of expressionMore and more women write from 1789

onward, even in the age of ‘domesticity’

The Case of Women Writers

Women do not achieve intellectual authority in the sphere of writing…Philosophy, science – women are expelled

Women retreat into fiction, the novelFemale characters – unconcerned with absolutesThey navigate laws and constraints – contingent

reasoningFiction: an apolitical sphere to produce the self20th century: from fiction to prose: achieving

public intellectual authority

But…

Playacting as means to act publicly

Using gender stereotypes while subverting themPlaying and subverting with limits; a contingent and

creative path to moral autonomy (i.e., freedom)

La fronde (1897-1905)Newspaper: circulation: 50,000Proved women’s skills in the fields of law, psychiatryUsed male pseudonyms at times and some reporters even

male disguises to get interviewsSarah Bernhardt – actress, courtesan, cross-dresser,

scandal-prone, but ‘acted’ normalcy for fans

New Woman (fin de siècle)