Everyday revolutions: eighteenth-century women transforming public and private

Abstract

Women's everyday choices can engender revolutionary acts. This collection gathers essays that build upon this premise and go beyond the Habermassian public/private paradigm to examine the ways in which eighteenth-century women defied not only the restrictions their own culture sought to enforce, but also the restrictions our historical and literary understandings have created. While recent studies have linked women to public activity by looking at revolutionary moments, such work often implies that those moments were just that: isolated moments within a framework of repression, containment, and silencing. These essays demonstrate how women of the period were not circumscribed to precious revolutionary moments but rather were participants in a web of acts, ranging in scale, that contributed to the emergence of a rich cultural dialogue still vibrant today.These essays contest tenacious misconceptions about women's activities and abilities and revise a powerful account of the development and nature of the public and private spheres. The contributors show that eighteenth-century women's everyday lives challenged cultural expectations about the restrictions on the female role; women's everyday participation in activities like work and politics rejected notions about women's domesticity and privacy. Our recognition of women's everyday revolutionary behavior revises the way we understand the history of the public sphere and of the separation of spheres. The public/private paradigm, despite its discursive power, did not operate in monolithic fashion but could be manipulated and inflected in various ways to allow for and empower many kinds of action and agency in public and in private.