Figurations Of The Feminine In The Early French Women S Press 1758 1848

The origins and early years of the French women's press represent a pivotal period in the history of French women's self-expression and their feminist and cultural consciousness. Through a range of insightful textual analyses, this book highlights the political significance of this critically neglected literary medium.

The origins and early years of the French women’s press represent a pivotal period in the history of French women’s self-expression and their feminist and cultural consciousness. Through a range of insightful textual analyses, this book highlights the political significance of this critically neglected literary medium.

This book is organized around the personal struggles of ten extraordinary French women activists: Eugenie Niboyet, Eugenie Foa, Suzanne Voilquin, Josephine Bachellery, Pauline Roland, Jeanne Deroin, Elisa Lemonnier, Desiree Gay, Adele Esquiros, and Marie Noemie Constant. Ranging in age from 52 to 20 in 1848, coming from different economic backgrounds, these women share a common quest to be included in the economic and political rights won by the revolt against the July Monarchy. Banding together in the face of exclusion from the right to work guaranteed to all men in February 1848, they write petitions to the Provisional Government, and create the first daily feminist newspaper, “La Voix des femmes.” The newspaper is a forum for their demands: midwives who demand to be paid as civil servants, domestic workers who demand support while unemployed, teachers who demand opportunities for higher education and for higher wages. The right to vote and the right to divorce are debated in the newspaper. Seeking to widen their support, Niboyet and her cohort launch a political club, Le Club de femmes, which is ridiculed in the satiric press. The women activists of 1848 do not withdraw from the public sphere. They form workers’ associations. Deroin and Roland are imprisoned for their activism. All continue to work for women’s rights as teachers, writers, and artists. The women of 1848 inspire successive generations of women to continue their struggle.

Explores the Enlightenment in the brutal slave societies of the colonial French and British Caribbean before the Haitian Revolution.

The city has traditionally been configured as a fundamentally masculine space. This collection of essays seeks to question many of the idées reçues surrounding women’s ongoing association with the private, the domestic and the rural. Covering a selection of films, journals and novels from the French medieval period to the Franco-Algerian present, it challenges the traditionally gendered dichotomisation of the masculine public and feminine private upon which so much of French and European literature and culture is predicated. Is the urban flâneur a quintessentially male phenomenon, or can there exist a true flâneuse as active agent, expressing the confidence and pleasure of a woman moving freely in the urban environment? Women and the City in French Literature and Culture seeks to locate exactly where women are heading – both individually and collectively – in their relationships to the urban environment; by so doing, it nuances the conventional binaristic perception of women and the city in an endeavour to redirect future research in women’s studies towards more interesting and representative urban destinations.

Histories of French Sexuality contends that the history of sexuality is at a crossroads. Decades of scholarship have shown that sexuality is implicated in a wide range of topics, such as studies of reproduction, the body, sexual knowledge, gender identity, marriage, and sexual citizenship. These studies have broadened historical narratives and interpretations of areas such as urbanization, the family, work, class, empire, the military and war, and the nation. Yet while the field has evolved, not everyone has caught on, especially scholars of French history. Covering the early eighteenth century through the present, the essays in Histories of French Sexuality show how attention to the history of sexuality deepens, changes, challenges, supports, or otherwise complicates the major narratives of French history. This volume makes a set of historical arguments about the nature of the past and a larger historiographical claim about the value and place of the field of the history of sexuality within the broader discipline of history. The topics include early empire-building, religion, the Enlightenment, feminism, socialism, formation of the modern self, medicine, urbanization, decolonization, the social world of postwar France, and the rise of modern and social media.

Examining Romanticism's pan-European circulation of people, ideas, and texts, this history re-analyses the period and Britain's place in it.

Explores the intersection of Enlightenment ideas and colonial realities amongst White, male colonists in the eighteenth-century French and British Caribbean. For them, becoming 'enlightened' meant diversion, status seeking, satisfying curiosity about the tropical environment, and making sense of the brutal societies and the enslaved Africans.