Women and Work in Eighteenth-Century France

Women and Work in Eighteenth-Century France PDF Author: Daryl M. Hafter
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 080715833X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 380

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Book Description
In the eighteenth century, French women were active in a wide range of employments-from printmaking to running whole-sale businesses-although social and legal structures frequently limited their capacity to work independently. The contributors to Women and Work in Eighteenth-Century France reveal how women at all levels of society negotiated these structures with determination and ingenuity in order to provide for themselves and their families. Recent historiography on women and work in eighteenth-century France has focused on the model of the "family economy," in which women's work existed as part of the communal effort to keep the family afloat, usually in support of the patriarch's occupation. The ten essays in this volume offer case studies that complicate the conventional model: wives of ship captains managed family businesses in their husbands' extended absences; high-end prostitutes managed their own households; female weavers, tailors, and merchants increasingly appeared on eighteenth-century tax rolls and guild membership lists; and female members of the nobility possessed and wielded the same legal power as their male counterparts. Examining female workers within and outside of the context of family, Women and Work in Eighteenth-Century France challenges current scholarly assumptions about gender and labor. This stimulating and important collection of essays broadens our understanding of the diversity, vitality, and crucial importance of women's work in the eighteenth-century economy.

Women and Work in Eighteenth-Century France

Women and Work in Eighteenth-Century France PDF Author: Daryl M. Hafter
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 080715833X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 380

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Book Description
In the eighteenth century, French women were active in a wide range of employments-from printmaking to running whole-sale businesses-although social and legal structures frequently limited their capacity to work independently. The contributors to Women and Work in Eighteenth-Century France reveal how women at all levels of society negotiated these structures with determination and ingenuity in order to provide for themselves and their families. Recent historiography on women and work in eighteenth-century France has focused on the model of the "family economy," in which women's work existed as part of the communal effort to keep the family afloat, usually in support of the patriarch's occupation. The ten essays in this volume offer case studies that complicate the conventional model: wives of ship captains managed family businesses in their husbands' extended absences; high-end prostitutes managed their own households; female weavers, tailors, and merchants increasingly appeared on eighteenth-century tax rolls and guild membership lists; and female members of the nobility possessed and wielded the same legal power as their male counterparts. Examining female workers within and outside of the context of family, Women and Work in Eighteenth-Century France challenges current scholarly assumptions about gender and labor. This stimulating and important collection of essays broadens our understanding of the diversity, vitality, and crucial importance of women's work in the eighteenth-century economy.

Women at Work in Preindustrial France

Women at Work in Preindustrial France PDF Author: Daryl M. Hafter
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271047593
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 330

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Book Description


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

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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.

Women, Gender and Disease in Eighteenth-Century England and France

Women, Gender and Disease in Eighteenth-Century England and France PDF Author: Ann Kathleen Doig
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443861219
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
Based on encyclopedias, medical journals, historical, and literary sources, this collection of interdisciplinary essays focuses on the intersection of women, gender, and disease in England and France. Diverse critical perspectives highlight contributions women made to the scientific and medical communities of the eighteenth century. In spite of obstacles encountered in spaces dominated by men, women became midwives, and wrote self-help manuals on women’s health, hygiene, and domestic economy. Excluded from universities, they nevertheless contributed significantly to such fields as anatomy, botany, medicine, and public health. Enlightenment perspectives on the nature of the female body, childbirth, diseases specific to women, “gender,” sex, “masculinity” and “femininity,” adolescence, and sexual differentiation inform close readings of English and French literary texts. Treatises by Montpellier vitalists influenced intellectuals and physicians such as Nicolas Chambon, Pierre Cabanis, Jacques-Louis Moreau de la Sarthe, Jules-Joseph Virey, and Théophile de Bordeu. They impacted the exchange of letters and production of literary works by Julie de Lespinasse, Françoise de Graffigny, Nicolas Chamfort, Mary Astell, Frances Burney, Lawrence Sterne, Eliza Haywood, and Daniel Defoe. In our post-modern era, these essays raise important questions regarding women as subjects, objects, and readers of the philosophical, medical, and historical discourses that framed the project of enlightenment.

Teaching Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century French Women Writers

Teaching Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century French Women Writers PDF Author: Faith E. Beasley
Publisher: Modern Language Association of America
ISBN: 9781603290951
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France has been celebrated as the period of conversation. Salons flourished and became an important social force. Women and men worked together, in dialogue with their contemporaries, other texts, and their culture to create novels, political satire, drama, poetry, fairy tales, travel narratives, and philosophy. Yet the inclusion of women's contributions, only recently recovered, changes the way we conceive of the period that constitutes one of the building blocks of French national identity and Western civilization, and teachers are often unsure how and where to incorporate the texts into their courses. Teaching Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century French Women Writers attempts to reconstruct these conversations by integrating women's work into classrooms across the curriculum. The works of French women writers are crucial to courses on the early modern period and enliven many others—whether on literature, history, women's history, the history of science, philosophy, women's and gender studies, or European civilization. The essays included in part 1 provide necessary background and help instructors identify places in their courses that could be enriched by taking women's participation into account. Contributors in part 2 focus on some of the central writers and genres of the period, including Lafayette, Charrière, and Graffigny, the epistolary novel, convent writing, and memoirs. The essays in part 3 offer concrete descriptions of courses that place women's texts in dialogue with those of their male colleagues or with historical issues.

The Reign of Women in Eighteenth-century France

The Reign of Women in Eighteenth-century France PDF Author: Vera Lee
Publisher: Cambridge, Mass. : Schenkman Publishing Company
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 168

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Book Description


Visualizing the Nation

Visualizing the Nation PDF Author: Joan B. Landes
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501727532
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
Popular images of women were everywhere in revolutionary France. Although women's political participation was curtailed, female allegories of liberty, justice, and the republic played a crucial role in the passage from old regime to modern society. In her lavishly illustrated and gracefully written book, Joan B. Landes explores this paradox within the workings of revolutionary visual culture and traces the interaction between pictorial and textual political arguments. Landes highlights the widespread circulation of images of the female body, notwithstanding the political leadership's suspicions of the dangers of feminine influence and the seductions of visual imagery. The use of caricatures and allegories contributed to the destruction of the masculinized images of hierarchic absolutism and to forging new roles for men and women in both the intimate and public arenas. Landes tells the fascinating story of how the depiction of the nation as a desirable female body worked to eroticize patriotism and to bind male subjects to the nation-state. Despite their political subordination, women too were invited to identify with the project of nationalism. Recent views of the French Revolution have emphasized linguistic concerns; in contrast, Landes stresses the role of visual cognition in fashioning ideas of nationalism and citizenship. Her book demonstrates as well that the image is often a site of contestation, as individual viewers may respond to it in unexpected, even subversive, ways.

Politics in the Marketplace

Politics in the Marketplace PDF Author: Katie Jarvis
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0190917113
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
Introduction : inventing citizenship in the revolutionary marketplace -- The Dames des Halles : economic lynchpins and the people personified -- Embodying sovereignty : the October days, political activism, and maternal work -- Occupying the marketplace : the battle over public space, particular interests, and the body politic -- Exacting change : money, market women, and the crumbling corporate world -- The cost of female citizenship : price controls and the gendering of democracy in revolutionary France -- Selling legitimacy : merchants, police, and the politics of popular subsistence -- Commercial licenses as political contracts : working out autonomy and economic citizenship -- Conclusion : fruits of labors : citizenship as social experience

Woman in France During the Eighteenth Century

Woman in France During the Eighteenth Century PDF Author: Julia Kavanagh
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : France
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description


Women in Eighteenth Century Europe

Women in Eighteenth Century Europe PDF Author: Margaret Hunt
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131788387X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 561

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Book Description
Was the century of Voltaire also the century of women? In the eighteenth century changes in the nature of work, family life, sexuality, education, law, religion, politics and warfare radically altered the lives of women. Some of these developments caused immense confusion and suffering; others greatly expanded women’s opportunities and worldview – long before the various women’s suffrage movements were more than a glimmer on the horizon. This study pays attention to queens as well as commoners; respectable working women as well as prostitutes; women physicists and mathematicians as well as musicians and actresses; feminists as well as their critics. The result is a rich and morally complex tale of conflict and tragedy, but also of achievement. The book deals with many regions and topics often under-represented in general surveys of European women, including coverage of the Balkans and both European Turkey and Anatolia, of Eastern Europe, of European colonial expansion (particularly the slave trade) and of Muslim, Eastern Orthodox, and Jewish women's history. Bringing all of Europe into the narrative of early modern women's history challenges many received assumptions about Europe and women in past times, and provides essential background for dealing with issues of diversity in the Europe of today.