The Position of Women in Contemporary France

The Position of Women in Contemporary France PDF Author: Frances Ida Clark
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780830501014
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 259

Get Book Here

Book Description

The Position of Women in Contemporary France

The Position of Women in Contemporary France PDF Author: Frances Ida Clark
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780830501014
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 259

Get Book Here

Book Description


Women in Contemporary France

Women in Contemporary France PDF Author: Abigail Gregory
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781474215978
Category : France
Languages : en
Pages : 227

Get Book Here

Book Description
"This book examines the contemporary situation of women in France and makes an essential contribution to the growing interdisciplinary interest in la condition féminine. It addresses both mainstream issues - such as women's paid and unpaid work, women in politics with particular reference to the current parity debates, leisure and contemporary women's writing - as well as under-represented areas, namely women in rural France, immigrant and exiled women and the situation of lesbians. Authors examine the problems facing women at home and at work and critically assess the policy initiatives to combat unemployment, occupation segregation and pay inequality. Despite their high levels of activity in employment, French women still shoulder the burden of domestic work, child rearing and care for relatives and there are many areas of political representation where they are notable for their absence. Leading experts survey leisure practices and language - fascinating indicators for social roles, power relations and gender differences - and provide us with new insights into the position of women, whether in rural France, the media or immigrant and exile communities. This interdisciplinary book is suitable for both specialists seeking information within a specific area of gender studies and non-specialists seeking a general overview of women's situation in contemporary metropolitan France and will therefore appeal to a wide range of readers across humanities and social sciences."--Bloomsbury Publishing

Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution

Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution PDF Author: Joan B. Landes
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801494819
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 294

Get Book Here

Book Description
In this provocative interdisciplinary essay, Joan B. Landes examines the impact on women of the emergence of a new, bourgeois organization of public life in the eighteenth century. She focuses on France, contrasting the role and representation of women under the Old Regime with their status during and after the Revolution. Basing her work on a wide reading of current historical scholarship, Landes draws on the work of Habermas and his followers, as well as on recent theories of representation, to re-create public-sphere theory from a feminist point of view.Within the extremely personal and patriarchal political culture of Old Regime France, elite women wielded surprising influence and power, both in the court and in salons. Urban women of the artisanal class often worked side by side with men and participated in many public functions. But the Revolution, Landes asserts, relegated women to the home, and created a rigidly gendered, essentially male, bourgeois public sphere. The formal adoption of "universal" rights actually silenced public women by emphasizing bourgeois conceptions of domestic virtue.In the first part of this book, Landes links the change in women's roles to a shift in systems of cultural representation. Under the absolute monarchy of the Old Regime, political culture was represented by the personalized iconic imagery of the father/king. This imagery gave way in bourgeois thought to a more symbolic system of representation based on speech, writing, and the law. Landes traces this change through the art and writing of the period. Using the works of Rousseau and Montesquieu as examples of the passage to the bourgeois theory of the public sphere, she shows how such concepts as universal reason, law, and nature were rooted in an ideologically sanctioned order of gender difference and separate public and private spheres. In the second part of the book, Landes discusses the discourses on women's rights and on women in society authored by Condorcet, Wollstonecraft, Gouges, Tristan, and Comte within the context of these new definitions of the public sphere. Focusing on the period after the execution of the king, she asks who got to be included as "the People" when men and women demanded that liberal and republican principles be carried to their logical conclusion. She examines women's roles in the revolutionary process and relates the birth of modern feminism to the silencing of the politically influential women of the Old Regime court and salon and to women's expulsion from public participation during and after the Revolution.

Citoyennes

Citoyennes PDF Author: Annie Smart
Publisher: University of Delaware
ISBN: 1611493552
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 273

Get Book Here

Book Description
Did women have a civic identity in eighteenth-century France? In Citoyennes: Women and the Ideal of Citizenship in Eighteenth-Century France, Annie Smart contends that they did. While previous scholarship has emphasized the ideal of domestic motherhood or the image of the republican mother, Smart argues persuasively that many pre-revolutionary and revolutionary texts created another ideal for women – the ideal of civic motherhood. Smart asserts that women were portrayed as possessing civic virtue, and as promoting the values and ideals of the public sphere. Contemporary critics have theorized that the eighteenth-century ideal of the Republic intentionally excluded women from the public sphere. According to this perspective, a discourse of “Rousseauean” domestic motherhood stripped women of an active civic identity, and limited their role to breastfeeding and childcare. Eighteenth-century France marked thus the division between a male public sphere of political action and a female private sphere of the home. Citoyennes challenges this position and offers an alternative model of female identity. This interdisciplinary study brings together a variety of genres to demonstrate convincingly that women were portrayed as civic individuals. Using foundational texts such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile, or on Education (1762), revolutionary gouaches of Lesueur, and vaudeville plays of Year II of the Republic (1793/1794), this study brilliantly shows that in text and image, women were represented as devoted to both the public good and their families. In addition, Citoyennes offers an innovative interpretation of the home. Through re-examining sphere theory, this study challenges the tendency to equate the home with private concerns, and shows that the home can function as a site for both private life and civic identity. Citoyennes breaks new ground, for it both rectifies the ideal of domestic Rousseauean motherhood, and brings a fuller understanding to how female civic identity operated in important French texts and images.

Women in Contemporary Culture

Women in Contemporary Culture PDF Author: Lesley K. Twomey
Publisher: Intellect Books
ISBN:
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 200

Get Book Here

Book Description
This is the only comparative study of its kind, investigating how women construct their roles within the public sphere and highlighting the ways in which traditional versus modern values impact on female identity in France and Spain. Which female figures are proposed for our admiration? Who proposes them and what values do they represent? This study embarks on an analysis of such cultural icons, going on to address contemporary roles and issues concerning women in the two countries. Finally, Twomey shows how these two strands of discussion inform and interact with each other. The 20th Century.

Taking Up Space

Taking Up Space PDF Author: Siham Bouamer
Publisher: University of Wales Press
ISBN: 1786839083
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 364

Get Book Here

Book Description


The Dynamics of Gender in Early Modern France

The Dynamics of Gender in Early Modern France PDF Author: Domna C. Stanton
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317035119
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 266

Get Book Here

Book Description
In its six case studies, The Dynamics of Gender in Early Modern France works out a model for (early modern) gender, which is articulated in the introduction. The book comprises essays on the construction of women: three in texts by male and three by female writers, including Racine, Fénelon, Poulain de la Barre, in the first part; La Guette, La Fayette and Sévigné, in the second. These studies thus also take up different genres: satire, tragedy and treatise; memoir, novella and letter-writing. Since gender is a relational construct, each chapter considers as well specific textual and contextual representations of men. In every instance, Stanton looks for signs of conformity to-and deviations from-normative gender scripts. The Dynamics of Gender adds a new dimension to early modern French literary and cultural studies: it incorporates a dynamic (shifting) theory of gender, and it engages both contemporary critical theory and literary historical readings of primary texts and established concepts in the field. This book emphasizes the central importance of historical context and close reading from a feminist perspective, which it also interrogates as a practice. The Afterword examines some of the meanings of reading-as-a-feminist.

Disruptive Acts

Disruptive Acts PDF Author: Mary Louise Roberts
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022636075X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 366

Get Book Here

Book Description
In fin-de-siècle France, politics were in an uproar, and gender roles blurred as never before. Into this maelstrom stepped the "new women," a group of primarily urban, middle-class French women who became the objects of intense public scrutiny. Some remained single, some entered nontraditional marriages, and some took up the professions of medicine and law, journalism and teaching. All of them challenged traditional notions of womanhood by living unconventional lives and doing supposedly "masculine" work outside the home. Mary Louise Roberts examines a constellation of famous new women active in journalism and the theater, including Marguerite Durand, founder of the women's newspaper La Fronde; the journalists Séverine and Gyp; and the actress Sarah Bernhardt. Roberts demonstrates how the tolerance for playacting in both these arenas allowed new women to stage acts that profoundly disrupted accepted gender roles. The existence of La Fronde itself was such an act, because it demonstrated that women could write just as well about the same subjects as men—even about the volatile Dreyfus Affair. When female reporters for La Fronde put on disguises to get a scoop or wrote under a pseudonym, and when actresses played men on stage, they demonstrated that gender identities were not fixed or natural, but inherently unstable. Thanks to the adventures of new women like these, conventional domestic femininity was exposed as a choice, not a destiny. Lively, sophisticated, and persuasive, Disruptive Acts will be a major work not just for historians, but also for scholars of cultural studies, gender studies, and the theater.

Feminism in France (RLE Feminist Theory)

Feminism in France (RLE Feminist Theory) PDF Author: Claire Duchen
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113619150X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 184

Get Book Here

Book Description
Feminism in France charts the evolution of the women’s liberation in France (MLF) from its emergence in 1968 to the present. Claire Duchen provides a lucid and compelling account of different feminist practices in France, clarifying the divergent political stances and the feminist theory that informs them. The remarkably clear introduction to French feminist theory, notably of Luce Irigaray and Helene Cixous, places it in its wider intellectual and political context and illuminates the complex connection of feminist thinking to other strands of contemporary French thought, represented by philosophers such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Lacan. The author’s role as ‘participant observer’ and her inclusion of interviews with French activists enhance her discussion, complementing the analytical with the immediacy of lived experience. ‘Claire Duchen’s lucid and succinct account is both timely and valuable.’ – Harriet Gilbert, New Statesman ‘Lucid, sympathetic and very helpful book on the French women’s movement ... will help us to understand the French feminist world much better.’ – Sian Reynolds, Women’s Review ‘An excellent introduction to French feminist theory which clarifies feminism in contemporary French thought, and includes illuminating interviews with activists.’ - SHE

French Women in Politics: Writing Power

French Women in Politics: Writing Power PDF Author: Raylene L. Ramsay
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 9781571810816
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 344

Get Book Here

Book Description
Although more women in France have entered political life than ever before, the fact remains that there are fewer women representatives in the French parliament than there were after the Second World War. In a new and original approach, the author presents an overview and analysis of the emerging body of text by or on women who have held high political office in France. The argument is that writing about women and politics has not just described or reflected women's slow but now substantial entry into political life; it has played a major part in shaping the parity debate and its outcomes. Interviews with political women, such as Huguette Bouchardeau, Simone Veil or Edith Cresson, inserted in the text, demonstrate the emergence and circulation of a new common discourse focused on the issue of whether women in politics make or should make a difference. A close reading of the various texts examined in this book and their connection to new public counter-discourses in France suggest that a re-writing of power is indeed occurring.