Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution.

Abstract

In this provocative interdisciplinary essay, Joan B. Landes examines impact on women of emergence of a new, bourgeois organization of public life in eighteenth century. She focuses on France, contrasting role and representation of women under Old Regime with their status during and after Revolution. Basing her work on a wide reading of current historical scholarship, Landes draws on work of Habermas and his followers, as well as on recent theories of representation, to re-create public-sphere theory from a feminist point of view. Within extremely personal and patriarchal political culture of Old Regime France, elite women wielded surprising influence and power, both in court and in salons. Urban women of artisanal class often worked side by side with men and participated in many public functions. But Revolution, Landes asserts, relegated women to home, and created a rigidly gendered, essentially male, bourgeois public sphere. The formal adoption of rights actually silenced public women by emphasizing bourgeois conceptions of domestic virtue. In first part of this book, Landes links change in women's roles to a shift in systems of cultural representation. Under absolute monarchy of Old Regime, political culture was represented by personalized iconic imagery of father/king. This imagery gave way in bourgeois thought to a more symbolic system of representation based on speech, writing, and law. Landes traces this change through art and writing of period. Using works of Rousseau and Montesquieu as examples of passage to bourgeois theory of public sphere, she shows how such concepts as universal reason, law, and nature were rooted in an ideologically sanctioned order of gender difference and separate public and private spheres. In second part of book, Landes discusses discourses on women's rights and on women in society authored by Condorcet, Wollstonecraft, Gouges, Tristan, and Comte within context of these new definitions of public sphere. Focusing on period after execution of king, she asks who got to be included as the People when men and women demanded that liberal and republican principles be carried to their logical conclusion. She examines women's roles in revolutionary process and relates birth of modern feminism to silencing of politically influential women of Old Regime court and salon and to women's expulsion from public participation during and after Revolution.