Women’s Roles, Rights and Representations
T
he first part of this chapter looks at the key events affecting French women during the publication period covered by this book:from the approximate beginnings of the French women’s press in 1758 to the advent of the Second Republic in 1848 – 90 years that constitute some of the most turbulent and eventful in the country’s history, with numerous coups being staged and control being passed from one political faction to another. Adopting a feminocentric perspective, this chapter constructs a broadly sociopolitical and intellectual framework within which to position the women’s journals under study. Such a framework is necessary both in order to contextualise the objectives and opinions these journals express and, relatedly, to assess their political or ‘feminist’ timbre. This is not to suggest that there exists an unproblematic reflection between the many mediatic constructions of womanhood put forward in the early women’s press – whether, as the respective chapters in this study demonstrate, these take the form of bibliophile, informed fashion consumer, wife and mother, or worker – and the extratextual ‘reality’ they represent. Rather, by providing supplementary ‘background’ information on French women’s rights and roles throughout the decades in question, this chapter seeks to elucidate further the dialogue promoted in the early women’s press between journalistic text and reader, and to substantiate the textual readings around which Figurations of the Feminine centres.
The second part focuses on the development of the French women’s press and the changing publishing climate in France during the same period. As this study highlights, these 90 years testify to the rise of the French female
writer (whether author or journalist) as a cultural force whose participation in intellectual discussions was increasingly that of active agent, rather than passive recipient. In greater numbers than ever before, French women wrote their own history in the form of both literary and journalistic nouvelles.
Through their work, these French writers sought to influence the national agenda on issues of prime importance for women – issues ranging from greater access to education to the right to divorce. While the majority of women authors were from the privileged classes who enjoyed both the leisure time and the financial resources to write full-time, many women journalists originated from less wealthy and perhaps consequently more politicised backgrounds – as exemplified by Madame de Beaumer (Chapter 2) or the Saint Simonians (Chapter 5) – and sought to galvanise a similar social awareness among their readership. The regular publication of women’s journals, as well as the practice of pamphleteering that was prevalent during the Revolution, represented an effective means of engaging French women in the myriad debates unfolding both in the journals in question and nationally.
Journals and pamphlets presented their readers not with faits accomplis of previous historical and literary events but with a recent and ongoing account of them, encouraging their readers to play a role in shaping their evolution.
The journalistic press represented the most influential means of (in)forming French public opinion during this period.
The Changing Political Climate in France, 1758–1848
D
espite the rapidity with which successive regimes replaced one another, the different factions that made up the political landscape during this period may be grouped into three main, albeit approximate, categories: the aristocrats and monarchists, who would be associated with a right-wing, conservative and pro-Catholic agenda; the liberal nobility and bourgeoisie, who would be viewed as ‘middling’ democratic Republicans post-Revolution; and, on the left, the workers – three categories that interact productively with the three journalistic ‘genres’ to be examined in Chapters 3, 4 and 5 respectively. Whatever the rhetorical embellishment or political persuasion colouring their pronouncements, all three political groups held generally misogynous views on the role of women, as evidenced by the continuing refusal to give French women any form of political represen-tation throughout the 90 years under consideration.1 Indeed, from 1758 until1 This is not to deny the key role played by specific male individuals, such as the Marquis de Condorcet, the philosophe most concerned with improving women’s rights,
1789 French women’s general social position remained largely as it had been throughout the first half of the eighteenth century. In the final decades of the Ancien Régime wealthy French women continued to exercise a limited influence on social and cultural fashions through the medium of the salons, which allowed French women not only to take part in but to lead intellectual and literary debate. It is important to highlight, however, that such cultural influence was predominantly oral in nature, owing to the elevated levels of illiteracy among women from all social classes, a ‘gendered illiteracy’ which peaked in the latter part of the eighteenth century.2 The extensiveness of illiteracy, and thus women’s dependency on a dexterous ‘orality’ when seeking to effect any degree of social change, is further evidenced by the political activism of French women at the opposite end of the social spectrum in the form of the Parisian market women’s demand for bread in the early days of the Revolution. Carla Hesse (2003: 30) emphasises that French women’s political purchase in the pre- and early Revolutionary period was above all via the spoken word: ‘The salon and the marketplace mirrored the academy and the court as a kind of shadow government where women ruled.’ As
‘shadow governments’, their influence was thus principally localised and insubstantial. Or, as Maïté Albistur and Daniel Armogathe characterise eighteenth-century feminist activity, ‘[i]ndividuel dans les classes favorisées, occasionnel en bas de l’échelle, il ne parvient jamais à se faire admettre comme force cohérente et puissante qui menace vraiment le pouvoir mâle et le système économique’ (1977: 184). Nonetheless, as Chapter 2 suggests, the centrality of women as organising hosts to and polite arbitrators of salons’ discussions of Enlightenment ideas may be seen to echo the role of the female editors and writers of the early French women’s press in their governance over and facilitation of the expression of multiple points of view;
these ideas promoted the notion of an individual’s right to actively express social or political views, and thus ultimately contributed to the emerging concept of ‘public opinion’ – and to women’s capacity to exert some influence
or Choderlos de Laclos, whose Des femmes et de leur education (1783) makes clear the importance he invests in furthering the education of women in France.
2 Carla Hesse (2003: 9) comments in The Other Enlightenment: ‘The last decade of the eighteenth century saw the greatest extent of the gender gap in literacy: Most French men were literate and most French women were not.’ While literacy rates are notoriously difficult to establish and further complicated by the precise definition of literacy – does it mean the ability to write (one’s name?) or to read, or both? – Suellen Diaconoff (2005: 49) places the fraction of literate women at the end of the eighteenth century ‘somewhere between a quarter and upwards of a third of all Frenchwomen’
which correlates to ‘roughly some three and a half million potential female readers, based on a population of twenty-six million’.
over it. In Dena Goodman’s evocative phrase, such salons constituted a type of ‘self-constructed private school’ (1994: 81), where women communicated freely in serious and instructive exchanges on a range of intellectual subjects.3
In the latter half of the eighteenth century, that concept of ‘public opinion’ made itself heard in the French people’s increasingly vociferous reactions to the perceived moral policing and financial power exerted by the Catholic Church, reactions that were also directed towards members of the nobility for the financial and political benefits they too enjoyed. The decision by the nobility and clergy to reject any possible solution to the financial crisis hitting France during the 1780s, a crisis to which France’s participation in the Seven Years War and American Revolution had greatly contributed, aggravated this already fraught political situation and led the king to hold a meeting of the Estates General on 5 May 1789 – the gravity of the situation indicated by the fact that this was the first meeting since 1614. It soon became clear that the Estates General was untenable in its current form and had to be transformed into a more modern and egalitarian governmental body made up principally of members of the Third Estate.
It is important to emphasise that the social unrest at this time was not an exclusively male preserve, but one shared by a growing number of French women, as demonstrated by their contributions to the Cahiers de doléances, lists of grievances and suggestions compiled by each of the three orders before the meeting of the Estates General and sent to the king in an attempt to stem the nascent political crisis by popular consultation. Those of the Third Estate were typically drawn up by a village or town lawyer or teacher. In other words, women’s first ‘written’ taste of revolutionary activity was often through a male medium. In them, women requested that improvements be made to female education and social rights, including the right to divorce and to support provided for young single mothers, and articulated their desires for a more libertarian and egalitarian France of the future.4 Citing one example, Christine Fauré also testifies to the widespread sense of injustice at women’s complete absence of political representation:
Les cahiers de doléances et réclamations des femmes par Madame B***B***
(1789, pays de Caux), […] revendiquent l’admission des femmes aux États généraux au titre de l’identité des intérêts entre représentants et représentés:
« Étant démontré avec raison qu’un noble ne peut représenter un roturier ni 3 The fragmented, informal quality of much of the journalistic copy that made up the
early women’s press equally has a distinct ‘orature’ about it, whether in its emotive, personal tone, passionate rhetoric or dialogic nature.
4 1789 Cahiers de doléances des femmes et autres textes (1989: 50). Chapter 3 discusses girls’
access to education in France in detail.
celui-ci un noble; de même un homme ne pourrait avec équité représenter une femme. » (2006: 6)
Previously, unmarried women, widows and women in the religious orders had been allowed to vote for deputies of the First and Second Estates, and women’s guilds and corporations had been present at discussions of the Third Estate. Even this limited female participation had been rescinded by 1789. As Candice E. Proctor remarks in Women, Equality and the French Revolution:
By the time of the Revolution, the ability of female fief holders even to vote for representatives to the Estates General had similarly been reduced to the agency of male procureurs. And with the destruction of feudal privileges in 1789, even this minor political role, enjoyed by so few women, was lost, and with it any opportunity for pursuing a career in the political sphere. (1990: 72) On 17 June, the revolutionary fervour sweeping Paris led to the replacement of the Estates General by the National Assembly, comprised solely of deputies from the Third Estate. In other words, popular sovereignty, and with it a new constitution, replaced absolute monarchy. The French people were now portrayed as politically responsible for forming their own future, and this impression of a new democratic dawn, coupled with women’s exclusion from official political representation, no doubt fuelled the desire of the early women journalists to participate in many of these key debates about the individual’s legal and social rights within the sheaves of their own publications.
If the French Revolution of 1789 proved anything, it was the political power of ordinary French subjects to challenge the status quo. Political suffrage was no longer restricted to the upper echelons of society, but, for the first time, those most vulnerable to its vagaries exerted a direct and potentially seismic influence on it. Women played a fundamental part in highlighting the effectiveness of democratic action by participating in many of the political demonstrations that took place during the early days of the Revolution. One of the most famous examples, already cited, was the Day of the Market Women on 5 October 1789, when a huge gathering of around 5,000 women marched to Versailles to protest at the inflated price of bread.
As Chapters 3 and 4 demonstrate, consumption and domestic provision have long been portrayed as female activities, and women’s involvement in this particular demonstration was inevitable given their pivotal role within the domestic economy and bread’s importance as the principal means of sustenance for French working people at the time. In other words, the political activism of these mainly lower-class women stemmed from humani-tarian and patriotic, rather than specifically feminist, concerns; while many women desired greater equality with men, many more were content with
the prevailing distribution of gender roles, feeling greater affinity with their class than with their sex. These class-based protests, and women’s active role in influencing Revolutionary politics in Paris, were not historical anomalies, but had pre-Revolutionary precursors in the form of groups of women who monopolised certain professions under the Ancien Régime, such as les dames de la Halle, who ran the main market stalls in Paris. The participation of women had also been key to the success of earlier demonstrations, including that of the taxation populaire in 1775, when mobs of people invaded food merchants’
premises and forced them to sell goods at lower prices – highlighting, once again, women’s influential role as nurturer within the family unit. As Gisela Bock remarks in Women in European History:
Women had long taken the initiative in popular uprisings, though they tended to leave the use of open violence to men. Their turning directly to the monarch was also nothing new. In the harsh winter of 1708–9, women had marched to Versailles to demand that the Sun King, Louis XIV, alleviate the mass famine and end the war. (2002: 36)
Among advocates of sexual equality, the birth of a new French nation nourished hopes that women would be granted equal citizenship of the Republic and that significant improvements in their social status and rights would ensue. While women failed to qualify as citizens in 1789, the existence of a number of clubs – some women-only – provided another arena in which women could continue the process of politicisation given impetus by the events of the French Revolution. (As Chapter 5 demonstrates, women-only clubs and associations, whether arguing for improvements in women’s access to education or their conditions of employment, played a role throughout the 90-year period examined.) The creation of the militantly pro-Revolu-tionary Société des citoyennes républicaines révolutionnaires, a group led by Claire Lacombe and Pauline Léon in 1793, while endeavouring to remain representative of the radical concerns of the sans-culottes, also campaigned on issues specifically related to women’s rights. This club’s awareness of the prejudices faced by women qua women strengthened its conviction that the Revolution should secure equality between the two sexes as well as the three Estates. Many of the club’s members were mères de famille, who campaigned for women’s right to a better education and to divorce, both of which, it was argued, would ultimately lead to a happier, since freely assumed, family unit.
As subsequent chapters detail, while rare feminist demands were supported and even ratified by the political establishment (such as the legalisation of divorce in 1792, which was also partly granted in order to signal the increasing irrelevance of the Catholic Church in France), there remained a fear of and resistance to women’s active participation on the political stage.
Following the deputy André Amar’s claim that the Société des citoyennes républicaines révolutionnaires was both politically dangerous and membership of it constituted an unnatural female activity, the Convention voted to outlaw all women’s societies and organisations in November 1793, stipulating that
toutes les femmes se retireront jusqu’à ce qu’autrement soit ordonné, dans leurs domiciles respectifs: celles qui, une heure après l’affichage du présent décret seront trouvées dans les rues, attroupées au-dessus du nombre de cinq, seront dispersées par la force armée et successivement mises en état d’arrestation jusqu’à ce que la tranquillité publique soit rétablie dans Paris.5
The draconian nature of these measures, which vigorously condemned women to the domestic realm in a bid to reinforce the ‘natural’ order of the sexes, reveals the establishment’s concern with French women’s potential as a cohesive political force and thus surely accounts for some of the success enjoyed by early French women’s journals in establishing ‘virtual’ clubs among female readers isolated in their domestic domains.
While women’s active role in promoting the popular democracy of the French Revolution is unquestionable, the political consciousness that provoked their mass action, and which was increased as a result of it, was mainly experienced by those women living in Paris, where the networks of local groups and the government institutions based there gave women the possibility of exercising collective political influence. Rural women were far more conservative: they retained the strongest religious convictions of any section of French society during the Revolution and frequently resented what they viewed as the vilification of traditional forms of religion to which it gave rise.6 (It is no coincidence that the post-Revolutionary years of the Directory saw a renaissance of popular religious faith, as French society yearned for a return to greater social stability.) Overall, however, the Revolution irrefutably demonstrated women’s desire to be involved in shaping the French
5 Quoted in Maïté Albistur and Daniel Armogathe (1977: 234–5); source Paule-Marie Duhet (2001).
6 It was subsequently argued that women, in collusion with the Catholic Church, had limited the political impact of the French Revolution, an argument that was repeatedly voiced as justification for the Republican refusal to grant universal suffrage.
As this chapter later remarks, such misogynous mauvaise foi is further exemplified in the attribution of the Revolution itself to, among other reasons, the corruption and decadence viewed as characteristic of the salonnières during the Ancien Régime.
Dorinda Outram (1989: 125) comments on the increased exclusion of women from the public realm in Revolutionary France: ‘To the degree that power in the old regime was ascribed to women, the Revolution was committed to an anti-feminine rhetoric, which posed great problems for any women seeking public authority.’
political landscape and their concern for the future wellbeing of the French nation. They displayed the ‘masculine’ virtues of patriotism and bravery in abundance, although, as shall be seen, a patriotism that, before too long, would become synonymous with women’s withdrawal from the public realm and assimilation of the role of upright wife and mother; Woman, it would be decreed, could best help the nation by staying at home and raising her future citizens in order to ensure that the decadence viewed as characteristic of the Ancien Régime – a decadence typically presented as gynocentric despite Louis XV’s licentiousness and infamous ‘Parc-aux-Cerfs’ – and epitomised in the
‘sexually deviant’ and politically corrupt Marie Antoinette be replaced with
‘sexually deviant’ and politically corrupt Marie Antoinette be replaced with