Weighing Women's Words

Abstract

Mona Ozouf’s book opens with the startling assertion that “The woman’s portrait is a male genre. It rarely boasts a female signature. It is little concerned with women’s words.” Unlike portraits of men, it always begins with an exploration of the feminine “nature”— from which deviations must be explained. Women’s Words: Essay on French Singularity attempts to reformulate the historical woman’s portrait from a woman’s perspective. She pays attention to what individual women said and thought, and gives credence to their ideas. This is a perspective familiar to practitioners of Anglo-American women’s history; that it should have to be argued so forcefully by a French woman historian reveals much about the possibilities for and constraints on writing women’s history—at least among academic historians in France. Indeed, Ozouf is critical of women’s history as it has emerged in France since the mid-1970s for paying too much attention to (male) discourse about women and not enough to what women had to say about themselves, for focusing inordinate attention on victims and statistics and not enough on exceptional lives. These latter are also part of the story, she argues. So far, so good. The author points to numerous examples of French women writing against the prevailing or asserted norms, the “normative discourse on femininity” (xi), contesting claims by others that it is inevitably the masculine voice and prescriptions for femininity that drowns out the authentic voices of speaking women. Then she segues into a discussion of the relative timidity of contemporary French feminism, especially with reference to French academia. Finally, she addresses the theme of French singularity (raised by Michele Sarde and others), emphasizing the importance of the French Revolution in shaping this “singularity,” even as she objects vociferously to the still widely promulgated view that the exclusion of women was central to the foundation of democracy in France (48). She emphasizes instead “the inventive variety of individual paths” (xv) of a cluster of women engaged in inventing themselves, and united by their common concern for girls’ education. Their literary activity, Ozouf argues, was “a talisman against the mediocrity and monotony of female existence” (xxi) and on “the feminine art of managing time” (xxii). The ensuing portraits are rich, brisk, engaging. They are built by paying strict attention to what the women—beginning with Madame Deffand, Madame de Charriere, Madame Roland, and Madame de Stael, and proceeding through Madame de Remusat, George Sand, Hubertine Auclert, Colette, Simone Weil, and Simone de Beauvoir—had to say, in their own words and to the contexts in which they spoke. Each portrait, introduced by a short biographical sketch, focused on a distinctive personal trait (e.g. Ž xity, valor, stubbornness, gluttony, asceticism, greed). Each responds to the judgments of earlier male portraitists, but builds something very distinctive out of the written evidence provided by each woman. What comes through is the complex, highly developed intelligence of each of these ten women, ranging from the childless Deffand, Charriere, Auclert, and the