French Women in Revolutionary Action and Thought

Abstract

French Women in Revolutionary Action and Thought Doris and Paul Beik. Flora Tristan, Utopian Feminist: Her Travel Diaries and Personal Crusade. Selected, Translated, and with an Introduction to Her Life. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993. xxi +195 pp. ISBN 0-252-31163-2 (cl); 0-253-20766-5 (pb). Claire Goldberg Moses and LesUe Wahl Rabine. Feminism, Socialism, and French Romanticism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993.371 pp. ISBN 0-253-20818-1 (cl); 0-253-20818-1 (pb). Marilyn Yalom. Blood Sisters: The French Revolution in Women's Memory. New York: Basic Books, 1993. xi + 308 pp. ISBN 0-465-09263-2 (cl). Marilyn J. Boxer These three books, by and about French women who participated in a half-century of revolutionary action and ideas, offer insight into the ways that sex differences affect human experience and perception and also into the methods that contemporary scholars use to reveal and interpret women's lives. Each book is intended for a different audience. AU three introduce readers directly to the words of women generaUy Utile known until the 1970s, when Flora Tristan reemerged in France and the United States as the subject of a dozen theses, dissertations, articles, and biographies , and until the 1980s, when authors of anthologies and texts destined for women's history and women's studies classes began to translate and publish selections from their works. By translating a substantial selection of excerpts from Tristan's major works, Doris and Paul Beik now make more widely avaüable her contributions to early nineteenth-century travel literature, social criticism, and feminist analysis. The book also documents her unique and lonely effort to mobihze the French working classes for social and economic transformation . Marilyn Yalom, as a teUer of tales of interest to a wider audience, adds to the vast popular Uterature on the French Revolution whüe also alerting scholars to a little used resource, women's memoirs. "No other Uterature in the Western world," she states, "offers such an early treasure of women recording their personal histories within the context of a great political cataclysm" (p. 11). Whüe relating and commenting on the Uves of this female "generation of 1789," Yalom skiUfuUy interweaves their observations and reflections. Claire Moses's and LesUe Rabine's innovative collaboration in social history and Uterary criticism also aUows their subjects to speak for them- © 1995 Journal of Women's History, Vol. 7 No. 4 (Winter) 152 Journal of Women's History Winter selves. Drawing on feminist and Uterary theory, the authors analyze both "word" and "act," "text" and "context," and the problems posed by their relationship. They devote somewhat over half their pages to the "word," through their translations of essays and correspondence written by working -class women of the Saint-Simonian movement including Tristan. Whüe the words and texts they make avaUable in EngUsh may appeal to a wide range of scholars in modern history, Uterature, and biography, their interpretation wül reach primarily readers prepared to interpret people's Uves in poststructuraUst terms. The French Revolution is often credited with shaking up the pieces of an older world so that roles and relationships of men and women of aU classes and stations could be reshaped into new forms. Women's reflections on their experiences of that event and its consequences offer a useful background for discussion of women's lives amid the social movements of the next half century. Yalom's memoirists were eyewitnesses to upheavals that tested their personal resources and their abüity to respond actively to challenges for which they were never prepared. They were often forced to defy both custom and law. Most were aristocrats and few supported the Revolution. The new world was not to their liking, and all portrayed themselves as victims. As Yalom points out, they "leave records of the connection of victimization and gender" (p. 7). But the interest for us, I believe, lies in the opposite direction. Without, I hope, trivializing the suffering of women who lost beloved husbands, fathers, and brothers to guillotine, sword, or gun; children to illness and malnutrition; or even their own Uves, one can find more significance in the process through which each...