French Women and the Age of Enlightenment

French Women and the Age of Enlightenment PDF Author: Samia I. Spencer
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253207258
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 452

Get Book

Book Description
"The collection is more than the sum of its parts and it will be difficult even for men to look at the French Enlightenment and the French Revolution in quite the same way again." —London Review of Books " . . . a significant contribution to the general history of women. . . . an indispensable complement to our understanding of the eighteenth century." —Romance Quarterly

French Women and the Age of Enlightenment

French Women and the Age of Enlightenment PDF Author: Samia I. Spencer
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253207258
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 452

Get Book

Book Description
"The collection is more than the sum of its parts and it will be difficult even for men to look at the French Enlightenment and the French Revolution in quite the same way again." —London Review of Books " . . . a significant contribution to the general history of women. . . . an indispensable complement to our understanding of the eighteenth century." —Romance Quarterly

The Other Enlightenment

The Other Enlightenment PDF Author: Carla Hesse
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 9780691114804
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 260

Get Book

Book Description
This historical study examines the way women used writing to create themselves as modern individuals in post-Revolutionary France.--From publisher description.

Women and Medicine in the French Enlightenment

Women and Medicine in the French Enlightenment PDF Author: Lindsay Blake Wilson
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 264

Get Book

Book Description
"In Women and Medicine in the French Enlightenment Lindsay Wilson takes a new approach to the social history of medicine by focusing on the key role that women played as both providers and recipients of health care during the Ancien Regime. Wilson pays special attention to three medical controversies involving maladies des femmes in eighteenth-century France: the "miraculous cures" claimed by the Convulsionaries of St. Medard, the uncertainty over the maximum length of pregnancy (and its implications for the legitimacy of heirs) and the debate over the medical effectiveness of mesmerism." "Wilson's analysis of these debates reveals how social and political concerns affected the medical community's efforts to establish an enlightened science of medicine which would, in turn, legitimize its own authority. But because the issues of legitimacy, hierarchy and authority raised by the medical causes celebres resonated so deeply throughout French society, debate extended far beyond medical circles to an increasingly engaged public. Such debate reflected a significant shift in the center of politics from the institutions of court, academy, and parlement to journals, theaters, and the streets." "Wilson's description of these debates provides insight into the forces that were transforming the family, the church, corporate society, and the state on the eve of the Revolution. She argues for a re-assessment of a period that has been all too easily categorized as an age of triumph - either for enlightenment or for repression. Her work also offers concrete examples of the ways in which sexual symbolism can he employed to maintain social order or promote change. Based on medical treatises, medical topographies, official reports, judicial documents, physicians' correspondence, and memoirs of eighteenth-century women, Women and Medicine in the French Enlightenment is a thoroughly interdisciplinary work that will appeal to anyone with an interest in the social history of medicine, women's studies, Enlightenment thought, and French social history."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Minerva's French Sisters

Minerva's French Sisters PDF Author: Nina Rattner Gelbart
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300252560
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 361

Get Book

Book Description
A fascinating collective biography of six female scientists in eighteenth-century France, whose stories were largely written out of history This book presents the stories of six intrepid Frenchwomen of science in the Enlightenment whose accomplishments--though celebrated in their lifetimes--have been generally omitted from subsequent studies of their period: mathematician and philosopher Elisabeth Ferrand, astronomer Nicole Reine Lepaute, field naturalist Jeanne Barret, garden botanist and illustrator Madeleine Françoise Basseporte, anatomist and inventor Marie-Marguerite Biheron, and chemist Geneviève d'Arconville. By adjusting our lens, we can find them. In a society where science was not yet an established profession for men, much less women, these six audacious and inspiring figures made their mark on their respective fields of science and on Enlightenment society, as they defied gender expectations and conventional norms. Their boldness and contributions to science were appreciated by such luminaries as Franklin, the philosophes, and many European monarchs. The book is written in an unorthodox style to match the women's breaking of boundaries.

The Other Enlightenment

The Other Enlightenment PDF Author: Carla Hesse
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691188424
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 233

Get Book

Book Description
The French Revolution created a new cultural world that freed women from the constraints of corporate privilege, aristocratic salons, and patriarchal censorship, even though it failed to grant them legal equality. Women burst into print in unprecedented numbers and became active participants in the great political, ethical, and aesthetic debates that gave birth to our understanding of the individual as a self-creating, self-determining agent. Carla Hesse tells this story, delivering a capacious history of how French women have used writing to create themselves as modern individuals. Beginning with the marketplace fishwives and salon hostesses whose eloquence shaped French culture low and high and leading us through the accomplishments of Simone de Beauvoir, Hesse shows what it meant to make an independent intellectual life as a woman in France. She offers exquisitely constructed portraits of the work and mental lives of many fascinating women--including both well-known novelists and now-obscure pamphleteers--who put pen to paper during and after the Revolution. We learn how they negotiated control over their work and authorial identity--whether choosing pseudonyms like Georges Sand or forsaking profits to sign their own names. We encounter the extraordinary Louise de Kéralio-Robert, a critically admired historian who re-created herself as a revolutionary novelist. We meet aristocratic women whose literary criticism subjected them to slander as well as writers whose rhetoric cost them not only reputation but marriage, citizenship, and even their heads. Crucially, their stories reveal how the unequal terms on which women entered the modern era shaped how they wrote and thought. Though women writers and thinkers championed the full range of political and social positions--from royalist to Jacobin, from ultraconservative to fully feminist--they shared common moral perspectives and representational strategies. Unlike the Enlightenment of their male peers, theirs was more skeptical than idealist, more situationalist than universalist. And this alternative project lies at the very heart of modern French letters.

Through the Reading Glass

Through the Reading Glass PDF Author: Suellen Diaconoff
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 0791483398
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 277

Get Book

Book Description
2005 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Through the Reading Glass explores the practices and protocols that surrounded women's reading in eighteenth-century France. Looking at texts as various as fairy tales, memoirs, historical romances, short stories, love letters, novels, and the pages of the new female periodical press, Suellen Diaconoff shows how a reading culture, one in which books, sex, and acts of reading were richly and evocatively intertwined, was constructed for and by women. Diaconoff proposes that the underlying discourse of virtue found in women's work was both an empowering strategy, intended to create new kinds of responsible and not merely responsive readers, and an integral part of the conviction that domestic reading does not have to be trivial.

Becoming a Woman in the Age of Enlightenment

Becoming a Woman in the Age of Enlightenment PDF Author: Melissa Lee Hyde
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780991262526
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 208

Get Book

Book Description
Becoming a Woman in the Age of Enlightenment: French Art from the Horvitz Collection' is primarily an exhibition of drawings but will include pastels, paintings, and sculptures selected from one of the world?s best private collections of French drawings. The exhibition will feature nearly 120 works by many of the most prominent artists of the eighteenth century, including Antoine Watteau, Nicolas Lancret, François Boucher, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, as well as lesser-known artists both male and female, such as Anne Vallayer-Coster, Gabrielle Capet, François-André Vincent, Philibert-Louis Debucourt. Ranging from spirited, improvisational sketches and figural studies, to highly finished drawings of exquisite beauty, the works included in the exhibition vary in terms of style, genre, and period.0Becoming a Woman will be organized into thematic sections that address some of the most important and defining questions of women?s lives in the eighteenth century. These include: how the stages of a woman?s life were measured; what cultural attitudes and conditions in France shaped how women were defined; what significant relations women formed with men; what social and familial rituals gave order to their lives; what pleasures they pursued; and what work they accomplished. The aim is to bring new insights to the questions of what it meant to be a woman in this period, by offering the first exhibition to focus specifically on representations of women of a broad range of ages and conditions.00Exhibition: Harn Museum of Art, University of Florida, Gainesville, USA (06.10.-31.12.2017).

Women, Gender and Enlightenment

Women, Gender and Enlightenment PDF Author: B. Taylor
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230554806
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 769

Get Book

Book Description
Did women have an Enlightenment? This path-breaking volume of interdisciplinary essays by forty leading scholars provides a detailed picture of the controversial, innovative role played by women and gender issues in the age of light.

Women in the French Enlightenment

Women in the French Enlightenment PDF Author: Anna Maria Marchini
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000623459
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 218

Get Book

Book Description
This volume deals with philosophical, scientific, and ideological images of women during the French Enlightenment, examining their emergence in the reflections of the philosophes, in Catholic morality, in biological and medical knowledge, in novels, in periodicals, and in the law. Alongside the appeals for social and intellectual emancipation advanced by the femmes savantes, typical of the eighteenth-century salons, a new conception pertaining to women’s social role related to the affirmation of the bourgeoisie and of its model of the family took place. Codified in a more complex and organized way within the Rousseauian philosophy, this new conception spread in various cultural debates, gaining a real hegemony: women were meant to be excluded from any "public" space, devoid of cultural aspirations, and only devoted to satisfying the needs of the family. The book adopts a multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and synthetic approach and at the same time highlights the "roots" of some fundamental ways of considering women that are still active in present-day society. It also addresses researchers in the history of philosophy, sociology, literature, and gender studies, and readers with an interest in women’s issues.

The Fiction of Enlightenment

The Fiction of Enlightenment PDF Author: Heidi Bostic
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 280

Get Book

Book Description
"This book argues that women authors of the French eighteenth century claimed reason and contributed to Enlightenment. It begins by framing the Enlightenment as fiction, in two senses: first, what passes under the name of Enlightenment in much current critical discourse is a fiction, or a caricatured construct; second, works of fiction can illuminate Enlightenment. The book offers fresh readings of texts by the three most prominent women among eighteenth-century writers in French: Francoise de Graffigny, Marie Jeanne Riccoboni, and Isabelle de Charriere, These authors challenged the widely held idea that women's reason was inferior to men's. Literary forms - novels, stories, plays, essays, and letters - allowed these authors to approach the question of reason in particularly nuanced ways. Faithful to the eighteenth century, this project is also relevant to the twenty-first." --Book Jacket.