Figurations of the Feminine in the Early French Women's Press, 1758–1848 by Siobhán McIlvanney

Abstract

Reviewed by: Figurations of the Feminine in the Early French Women's Press, 1758–1848 by Siobhán McIlvanney Kate M. Bonin McIlvanney, Siobhán. Figurations of the Feminine in the Early French Women's Press, 1758–1848. Liverpool UP, 2019. ISBN 978-1-78694-188-6. Pp. 270. The period 1758 to 1848 spans ninety of the most turbulent years in French history. One of this period's important—but under-studied—cultural innovations is the advent of a French women's press: journals published for—and often by—French women. These publications ranged widely in subject and intended readership, often in tune with changing political regimes and the waxing or waning of press censorship laws. McIlvanney's study shows that there were daring (if only briefly in print) demands for women's rights in the early days of the 1789 and the 1848 revolutions. There were also longer periods during which the women's press was primarily occupied with the "unserious" topics of fashion, marriage, and homemaking, as women were consigned to domesticity and excluded from active participation in public life. Notwithstanding the limited scope of this "womanly" subject matter, it is McIlvanney's provocative thesis that "feminist tenets have always been present in the women's press alongside feminine ones" (15). Even during the misogynistic years of the Empire and the Restoration, the French women's press contained what McIlvanney terms "feminist elements" (11), in spite of its valorization of political passivity, domesticity, and consumerism. This is an eyebrow-raising thesis for those of us who grew up secure in the Woolf-inspired belief that one of women writers' chief occupations is to kill the [End Page 226] Angel in the House. However, McIlvanney argues that creating a journal specifically for women readers, with women-authored articles, was in itself an act with political repercussions: endowing women readers, writers (and even some women editors) "with a sense of social engagement which could not be erased" (73). In an era when female literacy was not a given, the fact that women's journals solicited and published correspondence from their readers created an important space for dialogue, encouraging readers to articulate and express their opinions in a public forum. Some of the arguments which McIlvanney marshals in support of this thesis feel a bit strained. For instance: the upper-class reader could find in fashion journals "the intellectual sustenance and supportive sense of sorority to aid her in her journey toward self-realization" (99–100). McIlvanney's best case for a common denominator linking these disparate journals across the decades lies in their shared, vocal desire for improved education for girls and women: from practical training for running a household, to the promotion of classes where girls and women could study subjects such as botany and natural history. As McIlvanney convincingly demonstrates, a clear realization that the available forms of instruction left women under-prepared for adult life—whatever they believed such a life ought to entail—subtends these publications: whether conservative, radical, or frivolous; whether aimed at a patrician, bourgeois, or working-class readership. In short, Figurations of the Feminine is a detailed, solidly useful contribution to women's history as well as cultural studies, spanning the end of the Ancien Regime through the rise of the Second Republic. Highly recommended. Kate M. Bonin Arcadia University (PA) Copyright © 2020 American Association of Teachers of French