Unruly Women Of Paris

In this vividly written and amply illustrated book, Gay L. Gullickson analyzes the representations of women who were part of the insurrection known as the Paris Commune. The uprising and its bloody suppression by the French army is still one of the most hotly debated episodes in modern history. Especially controversial was the role played by women, whose prominent place among the Communards shocked many commentators and spawned the legend of the pétroleuses, women who were accused of burning the city during the battle that ended the Commune. In the midst of the turmoil that shook Paris, the media distinguished women for their cruelty and rage. The Paris-Journal, for example, raved: "Madness seems to possess them; one sees them, their hair down like furies, throwing boiling oil, furniture, paving stones, on the soldiers." Gullickson explores the significance of the images created by journalists, memoirists, and political commentators, and elaborated by latter-day historians and political thinkers. The pétroleuse is the most notorious figure to emerge from the Commune, but the literature depicts the Communardes in other guises, too: the innocent victim, the scandalous orator, the Amazon warrior, and the ministering angel, among others. Gullickson argues that these caricatures played an important role in conveying and evoking moral condemnation of the Commune. More important, they reveal the gender conceptualizations that structured, limited, and assigned meaning to women as political actors for the balance of the nineteenth and well into the twentieth century.

"Based on previously unpublished French archival records as well as published primary sources from France, its enemies, and its allies from the early 1700s until the Great War, Intrepid women is the first serious ... study of a previously ignored aspect women's and military history. Thomas Cardoza shows that these women were far more numerous and far more important to French logistics and morale than previously recognized, and suggests that their suppression was both premature and ultimately counterproductive. He also paints ... a complete picture of these women's daily lives: social origins, recruitment, business dealings, behavior on the battlefield, marriage and family life, retirement, and death"--Jacket.

Women's bodies and their portrayals in the media remain at the center of every debate on women's rights worldwide. This study examines the domains of public and private space--and the interstices between them--with a focus on how women advance in the public arena, drawing on the domestic politics of the private realm in their drive for social justice and equality. The author examines the visual culture of first-wave feminists in Edwardian England and feminist developments in France. Late 20th century and 21st century women's movements are discussed in the context of how they continue to honor first-wave suffrage history.

For over two centuries the notion that societies have been sharply divided into women's (private) and men's (public) spheres has been used both to describe and to prescribe social life. More recently, it has been applied and critiqued by feminist scholars as an explanation for women's oppression. Spanning a rich array of historical contexts--from medieval nunneries to Ottoman harems to Paris communes to electronics firms in today's Silicon Valley--the twenty essays collected here offer a pathbreaking reassessment of the significance of the concept of separate spheres. After a theoretical introduction by the editors, certain essays reexamine historians' definitions of public and private realms and show how the imposition of these categories often obscures the realities of power structures and the alterable nature of gender roles. Other chapters consider how the concept of separate domains has been used to control women's actions. Additional essays explore the limits of public/private distinctions, focusing on women's working lives, the role of the state in the family, and the ways in which women including Native North Americans, African-Americans in the birth control movement, and participants in the lesbian bar culture have themselves reshaped the model of separate spheres. Making available the best papers on the public/private theme delivered at the 1987 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Gendered Domains will be welcomed by anyone interested in women's studies, including historians, political scientists, feminist theorists, anthropologists, sociologists, and philosophers.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, radical women’s movements and the avant-gardes were often in contact with one another, brought together through the socialist internationals. Juno Jill Richards argues that these movements were not just socially linked but also deeply interconnected. Each offered the other an experimental language that could move beyond the nation-state’s rights of man and citizen, suggesting an alternative conceptual vocabulary for women’s rights. Rather than focus on the demand for the vote, The Fury Archives turns to the daily practices and social worlds of feminist action. It offers an alternative history of women’s rights, practiced by female arsonists, suffragette rioters, industrial saboteurs, self-named terrorists, lesbian criminals, and queer resistance cells. Richards also examines the criminal proceedings that emerged in the wake of women’s actions, tracing the way that citizen and human emerged as linked categories for women on the fringes of an international campaign for suffrage. Recovering a transatlantic print archive, Richards brings together a wide range of activists and artists, including Lumina Sophie, Ina Césaire, Rosa Luxemburg, Rebecca West, Angelina Weld Grimké, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Hannah Höch, Claude Cahun, Paulette Nardal, and Leonora Carrington. An expansive and methodologically innovative book, The Fury Archives argues that the relationship of women’s rights movements and the avant-gardes offers a radical alternative to liberal discourses of human rights in formation at the same historical moment.

The Paris Commune was the biggest and last popular revolution in western Europe - ending the cycle of revolutions that started in 1789. The Parisians, reeling from defeat in the Franco-Prussian War set up their own revolutionary administration. Government troops eventually retook the city and took a terrible revenge: thousands died in the bloodbath that followed. The short-lived Commune and its repression cast a long shadow. It exposed deep divisions in French society and became a potent inspiration for the radical left. This stirring new study written with great zest, and a vivid sense of time and place lets the reader experience these tumultuous events at first hand and provides a comprehensive synthesis of recent research in both French and English.

A revolutionary reinterpretation of the French past, focused on contesting and defending masculine hierarchy in relations between women and men.

McMillan (history, U. of Edinburgh) relates how even the republican left was surprisingly conservative in its sexist ideologies for women and their roles in his exploration of French politics, culture, and society in the 19th century. He demonstrates that the ideas of progress and emancipation so prevalent at this time, and which are generally associated with the modernization of the Industrial Revolution, do not hold up to close scrutiny, particularly in relation to women's lives. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR