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Natural Mothers and the Changing “Character” of Englishness: A Pitiless Mother, Hic Mulier, and Macbeth

Trubowitz Rachel

in Nation and Nurture in Seventeenth-Century English Literature

This chapter reads Macbeth in relationship to the querelle des femmes. It focuses specifically on two gender-debate pamphlets that characterize “the good woman” as a natural nurturer, in opposition ... More

This chapter reads Macbeth in relationship to the querelle des femmes. It focuses specifically on two gender-debate pamphlets that characterize “the good woman” as a natural nurturer, in opposition to aristocratic customs, such as wet-nursing. For the pamphlet writers, nature conforms to empirically observable laws; the naturalness of maternal nurture is the key to normative English identity. By contrast, in Macbeth, nature is a mysterious realm, beyond the reach of science and reason, associated with the magic of English kingship. Lady Macbeth's contempt for maternal nurture and her disdain for the mysterious nature of dynastic sovereignty go hand-in-hand. Macduff briefly challenges the mystical–monarchical relations between nature and nurture when he insists, in opposition to Malcolm, that his overwhelming grief for his murdered wife and children is manly. Macduff's new, affective insights into nature and gender overlap with the gender debate's anti-customary associations between maternal nurture and national identity.Less

Delacroix

J. A. Hiddleston

in Baudelaire and the Art of Memory

Baudelaire thought that, of all contemporary artists, Delacroix alone excelled in the painting of religious subjects, and that he alone ‘sait faire de la religion’. This chapter focuses on a ... More

Baudelaire thought that, of all contemporary artists, Delacroix alone excelled in the painting of religious subjects, and that he alone ‘sait faire de la religion’. This chapter focuses on a relatively small number of key paintings La Madeleine dans le dé sert, La Mort de Sardanapale, La Lutte de Jacob avec l'ange, Pietà, Les Femmes d'Alger, and Ovide chez les Scythes.Less

Importing Ficino: Gender Balance in Champier

Todd W. Reeser

in Setting Plato Straight: Translating Ancient Sexuality in the Renaissance

Symphorien Champier’s The Ship of Virtuous Ladies is generally considered one of the earliest contributions to the pro-woman side of the French Renaissance version of the querelle des femmes, the ... More

Symphorien Champier’s The Ship of Virtuous Ladies is generally considered one of the earliest contributions to the pro-woman side of the French Renaissance version of the querelle des femmes, the cultural debate over the nature and status of women. Heavily influenced by the work of Ficino, Book 4 helps popularize Ficinian Neoplatonism in France, setting the stage for later representations of male-female love. Yet, unexpectedly, love and desire between men plays a major role in Book 4. While this section of the text purports to teach men and women how to love each other virtuously, Champier also includes a lengthy story illustrating “the power of love of one man for another man.” With its love triangles and its gender complexities, the adaptation from Boccaccio’s Decameron rejects the possibility of Ficinian male-male eroticism as it creates a “balance” model of gender by which male-male and male-female love coexist. Disease is caused by a lack of gender balance whose symptoms require a realignment of gendered desire. This curative realignment for Champier, trained as a doctor and a philosopher, pertains especially to his vision of a balanced France, as distinguished from Italy.Less

Fractured Men: Feminism and Neoplatonism in Mid-Sixteenth-Century France

Todd W. Reeser

in Setting Plato Straight: Translating Ancient Sexuality in the Renaissance

This chapter considers how feminism and male-male love can operate in tension. Same-sex male sexuality was sometimes perceived as misogynistic in pro-woman arguments in the early-modern debate over ... More

This chapter considers how feminism and male-male love can operate in tension. Same-sex male sexuality was sometimes perceived as misogynistic in pro-woman arguments in the early-modern debate over the nature and status of women. As a key case study in this cultural tension, the center of this chapter is a reading of Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptameron, a feminist collection of tales heavily inflected with Neoplatonism. To prepare for a reading of this text, the mid-century French context of the reception of Plato is discussed. A close-reading of the Heptameron reveals that intimacy between men has to be fractured in order to create a version of heterosexuality that can subsequently lead to pro-woman ends. In a number of cases, male-male intimacy is transformed into what might be termed heterosexuality. The text, however, sends a specific message about the nature of male-male love, as the narrative corresponds to techniques of rewriting Plato seen in contemporaneous French translations of Plato, especially the Symposium version by Louis Le Roy. Male-male love, then, is evoked but then visibly written out in Marguerite de Navarre in ways that the French translations use to transform the eroticism in Plato’s text.Less

Feminist Publishing in France 1975–2000: A Quest for Legitimacy

Fanny Mazzone

in Making Waves: French Feminisms and their Legacies 1975-2015

This chapter examines the place of feminist publishing in both the French and international publishing industries from 1975 until 2000. It uses the theories of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu in order to ... More

This chapter examines the place of feminist publishing in both the French and international publishing industries from 1975 until 2000. It uses the theories of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu in order to analyse the ways in which feminist publishers attempted to gain a foothold in an industry that was marked by broader economic, political and cultural shifts in French society in the decades following the 1970s. It considers both the publishing industry and feminism as ‘fields’, following Bourdieu, the intersection of which allowed French feminists and women writers a means of expressing and disseminating their ideas and experiences. Structural and political changes in the 1980s and 1990s, however, meant that the context was generally less favourable for feminist publishing, although some publishers were able to adapt to the shifting context and markets. Internal division and disagreements within the feminist movement also contributed to a decline in specialist collections devoted to feminism.Less

Gender, Migration, and Empire

Marie-Paule Ha

in French Women and the Empire: The Case of Indochina

This chapter traces the evolution of the French female emigration movement launched at the turn of the century. According to its supporters, sending women overseas could solve myriad social and ... More

This chapter traces the evolution of the French female emigration movement launched at the turn of the century. According to its supporters, sending women overseas could solve myriad social and political ills plaguing both the metropole and the colonies: their presence would lead to the establishment of French families in the empire, thereby ensuring the colons’ permanent settlement; it would also bring relief to the nation’s depopulation crisis, and an “outlet” to the “redundant” metropolitan single women who could make good marriage partners to French settlers, thus ending the problem of interracial concubinage. The second part of the chapter surveys two separate initiatives to jump start the female emigration movement: the Société française d’émigration des femmes, created by the Union coloniale to recruit female emigrants; and the Oeuvre coloniale des femmes françaises whose mission was to provide assistance to French women heading to the empire.Less

A Woman’s Place: Marriage and Homemaking in the Early Domestic Press

Siobhán McIlvanney

in Figurations of the Feminine in the Early French Women's Press, 1758-1848

This chapter examines those early French women’s journals that promote a domestic or family-oriented figuration of femininity, providing information on the necessary skills to engage successfully in ... More

This chapter examines those early French women’s journals that promote a domestic or family-oriented figuration of femininity, providing information on the necessary skills to engage successfully in marriage and/or motherhood, or on more practical aspects relating to ‘good housekeeping’ generally. The chapter traces changes to the legal and social positions on marriage and motherhood during this period, changes which help account for the more ‘modern’ post-revolutionary emphasis on women’s emotional fulfilment put forward in contemporary journals such as the remarkably radical Courier de l’hymen ou journal des dames (1791) – a journal which also provides the first ‘problem page’ in French women’s magazines. This chapter suggests that the journals examined here have much in common with contemporary women’s magazines generally, whether by their inclusion of a recipe rubric or dressmaking patterns - as is the case with the remaining two domestic journals, Le Journal des femmes (1832-37) and Le Conseiller des dames (1847-92), which point up French women’s growing association with the domestic realm and their role as family educator. These journals provide cookery tips and recipes, advice on childcare, information on making clothes, general practical shortcuts relating to domestic science, as well as the usual staple selection of fictional excerpts.Less

Reforming the Feminine: Early Feminist Journals

Siobhán McIlvanney

in Figurations of the Feminine in the Early French Women's Press, 1758-1848

This final chapter analyses the most politically radical figurations of womanhood in the early French women’s press that explicitly advocate women’s active participation in the public domain as a ... More

This final chapter analyses the most politically radical figurations of womanhood in the early French women’s press that explicitly advocate women’s active participation in the public domain as a means of achieving both personal fulfilment and social equity. The chapter provides a discussion of employment opportunites for French women during the period in question, and the four journals examined promote the importance of women developing independence - intellectual, emotional and professional – and of their participation in the public realm of work and politics if they want to decide their own future. The final two journals to be examined, the Saint-Simonian La Femme libre and La Voix des femmes, are the most ‘pragmatically’ feminist of all journals considered in this study in their perception of women’s economic independence as prerequisite to feminism’s success, and also point to the broadening social class of the readership of French women’s journals, in that both target working-class readers. The journals seek to promote a cross-class sense of sorority to improve French women’s working conditions but both also signal their inherent pacifism. There is also an articulated awareness of a judgemental social morality in relation to female sexuality, whether prostitution, unmarried mothers or sexually independent women.Less

Prologue: Questions and Their Predecessors

Holly Case

in The Age of Questions: Or, A First Attempt at an Aggregate History of the Eastern, Social, Woman, American, Jewish, Polish, Bullion, Tuberculosis, and Many Other Questions over the Nineteenth Century, and Beyond

This prologue provides an overview of the history of the age of questions, and more specifically how “the x question” emerged and proliferated beginning in the 1830s. It considers when and why people ... More

This prologue provides an overview of the history of the age of questions, and more specifically how “the x question” emerged and proliferated beginning in the 1830s. It considers when and why people started thinking in terms of “the x question,” what the phrase meant, and whether there was such a thing as an age of questions. It examines the role played by the scholastic question, or quaestio disputata, in the age of questions; how the so-called querelle des femmes that was formulated in France in the sixteenth century morphed into the question des femmes, or woman question; catechisms as likely ancestors of questions; and forerunners of later questions, including the Palladium, a publication that opened a venue in the public sphere similar to the one created by the London debating societies. Finally, it explores how official venues lent their forms to the “age of questions”.Less

Our Editorial Policy Is a Poethics: September 1992

Antoinette Fouque and Jean-Joseph Goux

Sylvina Boissonnas (ed.)

in There Are Two Sexes: Essays in Feminology

This chapter explains the editorial policy of the publishing house Des femmes, owned by the Mouvement de Lib ération des Femmes (MLF), or Women's Liberation Movement. There is no difference between ... More

This chapter explains the editorial policy of the publishing house Des femmes, owned by the Mouvement de Lib ération des Femmes (MLF), or Women's Liberation Movement. There is no difference between the translation policy of Des femmes and an editorial project that was itself originally part of the MLF strategy, organized around Psychanalyse et Politique, and is now part of the strategy of the Women's Alliance for Democracy. Or, rather, the only difference is that the field covered by Des femmes's translation policy is more specific, while that of the movement is broader. Des femmes came into existence in 1973 based on the notion that, freed from their age-old servitudes, women would become the translators of the real, messengers of the impossible, and poets. The chapter describes gestation, or the capacity to think, welcome, and be with the other, as the paradigm of the linguistic and fleshly hospitality known as poetry, thought, translation, and publishing.Less

The Police and the Demimonde

Nina Kushner

in Erotic Exchanges: The World of Elite Prostitution in Eighteenth-Century Paris

This chapter examines Jean-Baptiste Meusnier's investigation of elite prostitution in eighteenth-century Paris. In his ten-year career with a police unit, the Département des femmes galantes, he had ... More

This chapter examines Jean-Baptiste Meusnier's investigation of elite prostitution in eighteenth-century Paris. In his ten-year career with a police unit, the Département des femmes galantes, he had observed some 550 women. He was succeeded by his assistant, Inspector Louis Marais, who kept track of an equal number of women. By 1764, Marais combined these Notes with submissions of Anecdotes Galantes, reporting the extramarital affairs of men and women in elite society. Marais and Meusnier's activities show that police attention to kept women was essential to understanding how the demimonde operated. As such, current knowledge about the demimonde came from the police reports.Less

Icon of fashion

Felicity Chaplin

in La Parisienne in Cinema: Between Art and Life

Fashion is ubiquitous in the depiction of la Parisienne and demonstrates perhaps better than any other motif the variations within the type. These variations are reflected in the eclectic array of ... More

Fashion is ubiquitous in the depiction of la Parisienne and demonstrates perhaps better than any other motif the variations within the type. These variations are reflected in the eclectic array of film genres in which a fashionable Parisienne appears. The association of la Parisienne with fashion can be traced back to the nineteenth century, when the image of the chic Parisienne was first exported, both throughout France and abroad, as an ambassador for French luxury goods and style. The relationship between la Parisienne and fashion is perpetuated in cinema primarily through the way the type is costumed, but also includes extra-cinematic considerations such as the actress/couturier relationship and the way a certain look, designed or self-styled, was achieved and marketed. Costume forms an integral part of the mise en scène in Parisienne films and has three primary functions: it denotes the elegance of the Parisienne, aids in periodising a film, and provides meaning beyond denotation by referencing a pre-existing iconography. The films examined in this chapter are: Jules Dassin’s Reunion in France, Stanley Donen’s Funny Face(1956), Vincente Minnelli’s Gigi, (1958), Roman Polanski’s Frantic (1988), François Ozon’s 8 femmes (2001) and Jean-Luc Godard’s A bout de souffle(1960).Less

The Debate of the Academy of the Ricovrati

in The Contest for Knowledge: Debates over Women's Learning in Eighteenth-Century Italy

This chapter focuses on the debate in the Ricovrati Academy in Padua regarding the education of women of the common masses in sciences and the liberal arts. In his introduction to the proceedings, ... More

This chapter focuses on the debate in the Ricovrati Academy in Padua regarding the education of women of the common masses in sciences and the liberal arts. In his introduction to the proceedings, Antonio Vallisneri, head of the Academy, declared the academy's objective in the debate. The debaters, Guglielmo Camposanpiero (1691–1765), poet, scholar, and chief librarian at the University of Padua, and Giovanni Antonio Volpi, a noted scholar, publisher, and professor of philosophy, Greek, and Latin at the University, generally adhered to the conventions of the querelle des femmes. Camposanpiero rested his defense of women's education on a catalog of celebrated and accomplished women already conventional to the genre, from Aspasia to Isabella Andreini, and cited arguments that he deemed sympathetic toward women made by the patriarchs of the Western cultural canon from Plato to Bembo. Volpi, by contrast, relied heavily on ancient humoralism.Less

Sex and Temperament in Postwar Hoaxing: Boris Vian and Raymond Queneau

Christopher L. Miller

in Impostors: Literary Hoaxes and Cultural Authenticity

Two postwar French authors wrote hoaxes passing as American-style hardboiled fiction: Boris Vian’s J’irai cracher sur vos tombes (I Spit on Your Graves), supposedly written by an African American ... More

Two postwar French authors wrote hoaxes passing as American-style hardboiled fiction: Boris Vian’s J’irai cracher sur vos tombes (I Spit on Your Graves), supposedly written by an African American author, Vernon Sullivan; and Raymond Queneau’s On est toujours trop bon avec les femmes (We Always Treat Women Too Well), published as Sally Mara, an Irishwoman. This section argues that the two hoaxes bear quite different relations to their American model: Vian’s text exploits and reinforces the sex and violence, whereas Queneau’s undermines the mindset of exploitation.Less

The Occident and the Oriental Woman: Rescuing the Oriental Man’s Victim?

Zahia Smail Salhi

in Occidentalism: Literary Representations of the Maghrebi Experience of the East-West Encounter

Starting with European images of native women and a presentation of testimonies on colonial violence against them, this chapter explores the work of French feminists and their mission to save ... More

Starting with European images of native women and a presentation of testimonies on colonial violence against them, this chapter explores the work of French feminists and their mission to save Algerian women. A discussion of Hubertine Auclert’s book Les Femmes arabes en Algérie, is central to this chapter as an Occidental woman’s rare testimony on Oriental women in the nineteenth century. Her views on saving native women became deeply anchored in the Occidentals’ mind-set making it not astounding to find that the image of the Oriental victim of her vile men continues to persist in twenty first century western imagination. The discussion of Auclert’s book is juxtaposed with an analysis of Fadhma Aït Mansour Amrouche’s autobiography, Histoire de ma vie as a counter narrative that disputes the mission of saving native women. It is also a testimony of ‘redemption’ through French education, assimilation of French language and culture, followed by conversion to Catholicism, while continuing to live in the midst of her Muslim compatriots. A close reading of this text reveals a very rare account of an Oriental woman’s encounter with the Occident between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.Less

Embodying the nation

Natalya Vince

in Our fighting sisters: Nation, memory and gender in Algeria, 1954-2012

This chapter explores how the collective identity of the newly-independent nation was (re)imagined through women under Presidents Ahmed Ben Bella (1962-65) and Houari Boumediene (1965-78), though ... More

This chapter explores how the collective identity of the newly-independent nation was (re)imagined through women under Presidents Ahmed Ben Bella (1962-65) and Houari Boumediene (1965-78), though examining official speeches, nationality law, discourses about marriage and naming, the creation of the Union Nationale des Femmes Algériennes (National Union of Algerian Women, UNFA) and the selection of women to acts as ‘ambassadors’ for Algeria on the world stage. Challenging familiar visions of 1960s and 1970s Algeria as locked in a struggle between Arabo-Islamic ‘tradition’ and Socialist ‘modernity’, the chapter argues that a puritanical revolutionary fervour could fuse religious and cultural conservatism with the desire to build a socialist state, thus ‘making safe’ women’s entry into the public sphere. As a counterpoint to the obsession with women in official speeches, this chapter concludes with an exploration of how interviewees resisted ‘embodying the nation’ by insisting that they were gender-neutral citizens.Less

Our Movement Is Irreversible: March 8, 1989

Antoinette Fouque and Jean-Joseph Goux

Sylvina Boissonnas (ed.)

in There Are Two Sexes: Essays in Feminology

This chapter reflects on how women are continuing to fight for their rights and asserts that the Women's Movement is irreversible. It considers two events that were celebrated in the Sorbonne on ... More

This chapter reflects on how women are continuing to fight for their rights and asserts that the Women's Movement is irreversible. It considers two events that were celebrated in the Sorbonne on March 8, 1989: International Women's Day and the bicentennial of the French Revolution and of the Declaration of the Rights of Man. It discusses how the Women's Movement has not only reinvigorated existing institutions—for example, Planning Familial (Planned parenthood), which was involved well before 1968 in the battle over contraception—but has also nourished and influenced contemporary thought, from psychoanalysis to literature by way of philosophy. In addition, it has given rise to other movements. Political parties and the state have legitimized the movement over the last fifteen years by creating and recreating an institutional feminism. The chapter also looks at the Mouvement de Lib ération des Femmes (MLF) and how women around the world have been mobilizing on the front lines of the battle for democracy.Less

Women in Movements—Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow: April 1990

Antoinette Fouque and Jean-Joseph Goux

Sylvina Boissonnas (ed.)

in There Are Two Sexes: Essays in Feminology

This chapter presents an interview with Antoinette Fouque about the status of women and the Women's Movement in the past, present, and future. Fouque talks about the Women's Liberation Movement, the ... More

This chapter presents an interview with Antoinette Fouque about the status of women and the Women's Movement in the past, present, and future. Fouque talks about the Women's Liberation Movement, the Mouvement de Lib ération des Femmes (MLF), which was created in the wake of May 1968. She argues that May 1968 was first and foremost an effervescence, an oral explosion, a cry, and that the Women's Movement may have been started by intellectuals—Monique Wittig, Josiane Chanel, and herself—but the cry came first, and the body along with it. Fouque also reflects on what she was doing on the eve of 1968, how she met Jacques Lacan, whether she was a feminist before 1968, whether she was aware of what was going on in American feminism when May 1968 happened, and whether the name Psychanalyse et Politique is elitist. She also cites her meeting with Simone de Beauvoir, what lay behind the rift over the word feminist, and where she situates the Women's Movement within the events of May 1968.Less