Women, Gender and the Family

The family and gender were key aspects of the French Revolution. They were transformed by the Revolution, but they also contributed to transforming it. Gender politics fed into changes in the laws governing marriage, inheritance and property more generally. It is in these themes that some of the problems of equality can be found. You'll recall from previous weeks that one of the central problems of the Revolution was setting parameters for freedom and equality. When does one person's freedom impinge on another's? Just how equal can or should individuals be in society? Gender was one area of social relations that proved to be especially resistent to equality. The Revolution raised the possibility of gender equality, but social norms and power relations often intervened to limit that possibility. Even the most radical 'egalitarians' of the Revolution -- the sans-culottes -- proved to be sexists and even misogynistic.

Core primary reading

* Mason & Rizzo, FRDC:

• Chapter 8, Petition from Revolutionary Republican Women to the National Convention (August 1793), doc. 47
• Chapter 10, Decree Regulating Divorce (September 20, 1792), doc. 61

* D.G. Levy (ed.), Women in Revolutionary Paris, 1789-95 (1979): pp. 156-74, 182-196 (reserve and short-term loan in library)

Core secondary reading

Katie Jarvis, 'The Cost of Female Citizenship: Price Controls and the Gendering of Democracy in Revolutionary France', Politics in the Marketplace: Work, Gender and Citizenship in Revolutionary France (Oxford, 2019), 135-166.

Colin Jones, 'French Crossings IV: Vagaries of Passion and Power in Enlightenment Paris' Transactions of the Royal Historical Society vol 23, Dec 2013, pp. 3-35.

 

Questions

1. What do the primary sources reveal about the tension between principles of equality and the persistence of hierarchical gender norms?

2. What prompted revolutionaries to alter inheritance laws? Was it only because of a commitment to gender equality or were there other factors in play?

3. What language and principles did women themselves use to assert their rights and interests? Do they simply avail themselves of principles provided by revolutionary law (passed by men) or did they tweak what male legislators intended?

4. Why were women actors especially attuned to women's rights, according to Colin Jones?

 

Further reading

For a overviews of the relatively recent literature on gender and sexuality in the French Revolution,

• A Verjus,'Gender, Sexuality, and Political Culture', in McPhee, CFR, pp. 196-211.
• S. Desan, 'Recent Historiography on the French Revolution and Gender', Journal of Social History, vol. 52 no. 3 (2019), pp. 566–574

 

Women, Gender and the Salons

• J. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (1988)
• M. Steinbrugge, The Moral Sex: Women’s Nature in the French Enlightenment (1995)
• B. Craveri, Madame du Deffand and her World (1994)
• B. Craveri, The Age of Conversation (2005)
• D. Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (1994)
• K. Loiselle, Brotherly Love: Freemasonry and Male Friendship in Enlightenment France (2014)
• D. Z. Davidson, France after Revolution: Urban Life, Gender, and the New Social Order (2007)
• A. Lilti, The World of the Salons: Sociability and Worldliness in Eighteenth-century France (2015)
• S. D. Kale, ‘Women, Salons and the State in the Aftermath of the French Revolution’, Journal of Women’s History 13: 4 (2002), pp. 54-80.
• E.C. Goldsmith & D. Goodman (eds), Going Public: Women and Publishing in Early Modern France (1995)
• L. Schiebeinger, The Mind Has No Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science (1989)
• N.R. Gelbart, Feminist and Opposition Journalism in Old Régime France: The ‘Journal des Dames’ (1987)

For British women's responses to the French Revolution, see

• Adriana Craciun, Kari E. Lokke, Rebellious Hearts: British Women Writers and the French Revolution (NY: 2001)

 

Women & Revolutionary Politics

• Katie Jarvis, Politics in the Marketplace: Work, Gender, and Citizenship in Revolutionary France (2019)
• Lindsay Parker, Writing the Revolution: A French Woman's History in Letters (2013)
• S. Desan, 'War between brothers and sisters. Inheritance law and gender politics in revolutionary France', French Historical Studies 20 (1997), pp. 597-634.
• Suzanne Desan, ‘Constitutional Amazons: Jacobin Women’s Clubs in the French Revolution’ in B. T. Ragan Jr. and E. A. Williams (eds.), Re-Creating Authority in Revolutionary France (1992), pp. 11-35.

• Gregory Brown, "The Self-fashioning of Olympes de Gouges, 1784-1789', Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 34, n. 3 (2001), pp. 383-401.
• John R. Cole, Between the Queen and the Cabby (2011) [About Olympe de Gouges's Declaration of the Rights of Women]
• Sophie Mousset, Women's Rights and the French Revolution: A Biography of Olympe de Gouges (2017)
• Katie Jarvis, Politics in the Marketplace: Work, Gender, and Citizenship in Revolutionary France (2019)

• D. Outram, The Body and the French Revolution (1989)
• D.G. Levy et al. (eds), Women in Revolutionary Paris, 1789-95 (1979)
• S.E. Melzer & L. Rabine (eds), Rebel Daughters: Women and the French Revolution (1992)
• M. Yalom, Blood Sisters: The French Revolution in Women’s Memory (1995)
• C.R. Montfort, Literate Women and the French Revolution of 1789 (1994)
• D. Godineau, The Women of Paris and their French Revolution (1998)
• J. Landes, Women and Politics in the Age of the French Revolution (1988)
• O. Hufton, Women and the Limits of Citizenship in the French Revolution (1992)
• O. Hufton, ‘Women in Revolution, 1789-96’, Past and Present, 53 (1996)
• C. Hesse, The Other Enlightenment: How French Women became Modern (2001)
• S. Desan, Reclaiming the Sacred: Lay Religion and Popular Politics in Revolutionary France (1990)
• W. Sewell, ‘Le citoyen/la citoyenne: activity, passivity and the revolutionary concept of citizenship’, French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture, vol. 3
• J.W. Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man (1996)
• G.S. Brown, ‘The self-fashionings of Olympe de Gouges’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 34 (2001)
• L.H. Walker, ‘Sweet and consoling virtue: the memoirs of Madame Roland’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 34 (2001)
• N. Mirzoeff, ‘Revolution, representation, equality: gender, genre and emulation in the Académie royale de peinture et sculpture, 1785-93’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 31 (1997-8)
• J.E. Mitchell, ‘Picturing sisters: 1790 portraits by J.L. David’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 31 (1997-8)
• S. Malsan, ‘Susannah at her bath: surveillance and Revolutionary drama’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 34 (2001)
• S.P. Conner, ‘Politics, prostitution and the pox in Revolutionary Paris’, Journal of Social History, 22 (1989)
• L. di Caprio, ‘Women workers, state-sponsored work and the right to subsistence during the French Revolution’, Journal of Modern History, 71 (1999)
• W.C. Nielsen, ‘Staging Rousseau's Republic: French revolutionary festivals and Olympe de Gouge’, in Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, 43 (2002)
• S. Dalton, ‘Gender and the Shifting Ground of Revolutionary Politics: The Case of Madame Roland’, Canadian Journal of History, 36 (2001)
• L. Baker ‘Survival Strategies of Widows in Dijon during the French Revolution’, Women’s Studies 31 (2002).
• D. Godineau, The Women of Paris and their French Revolution (1998).
• S. E. Melzer and L. W. Rabine (eds.), Rebel Daughters: Women and the French Revolution (1992)

 

• The Family
• C. Cage, Unnatural Frenchmen: The Politics of Priestly Celibacy and Marriage, 1720-1815 (2015)
• S. Desan, 'Recent Historiography on the French Revolution and Gender', Journal of Social History 52, no. 4 (2019)
• S. Desan, The Family on Trial in Revolutionary France (2006)
• S. Desan and J. Merrick, Family, Gender, and Law in Early Modern France (2012)
• S. Desan, ‘The French Revolution and the Family’ in McPhee (ed.), A Companion to the French Revolution (2013), 470-485
• J. Heuer, The Family and the Nation: Gender and Citizenship in Revolutionary France, 1789-1830 (2007)
• L. Hunt, The Family Romance and the French Revolution (1992)
• James Traer, Marriage and the Family in the Eighteenth-Century France (Ithaca, N.Y., 1980)
• Roderick Philipps, Family Breakdown in Late Eighteenth-Century France: Divorces in Rouen, 1792-1803 (Oxford, 1980)
• Margaret Darrow, Revolution in the House: Family, Class, and Inheritance in Southern France, 1775-1825 (Princeton, N.J., 1989)
• Louise Tilly, "Women's History and Family History: Fruitful Collaboration or Missed Connection?', Journal of Family History, 12 (1987), pp. 303-15.
• Lynn Hunt, The family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley, 1992)
• Elisabeth Claverie and Pierre Lamaison, L'impossible mariage: violence et parente en Gevaudan (Paris, 1982)
• Isser Woloch, The New Regime: Transformations of the French Civic Order, 1789-1820s (New York, 1994), pp. 307-20.