Repackaging Rousseau: Femininity and Fashion in Old Regime France

Abstract

Joan Landes's important interpretation of the role of gender in the construction of citizenship in the French Revolution finds its inspiration in Michel de Certeau's observation that theorizing always needs a Savage. ' For Landes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau is a perfect example of a theorist whose thought required a savage other-in Rousseau's case, woman. In her chapter on Rousseau's reply to public women, Landes explores Rousseau's condemnation of the public roles of aristocratic and bourgeois women in the courts and salons of the ancien regime. In his critique of women, as in his political theory generally, Rousseau becomes, for Landes, the spokesman for his age who best articulated the new separation of the public realm of male virtue from the private realm of female domesticity.2 Landes is not alone in privileging the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau as the main site where new attitudes toward womanhood and the gendering of politics were developed and transmitted in the