In this provocative interdisciplinary essay, Joan B. Landes
examines the impact on women of the emergence of a new, bourgeois
organization of public life in the eighteenth century. She focuses
on France, contrasting the role and representation of women under
the Old Regime with their status during and after the Revolution.
Basing her work on a wide reading of current historical
scholarship, Landes draws on the 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
the extremely personal and patriarchal political culture of Old
Regime France, elite women wielded surprising influence and power,
both in the court and in salons. Urban women of the artisanal class
often worked side by side with men and participated in many public
functions. But the Revolution, Landes asserts, relegated women to
the home, and created a rigidly gendered, essentially male,
bourgeois public sphere. The formal adoption of "universal" rights
actually silenced public women by emphasizing bourgeois conceptions
of domestic virtue.In the first part of this book, Landes links the
change in women's roles to a shift in systems of cultural
representation. Under the absolute monarchy of the Old Regime,
political culture was represented by the personalized iconic
imagery of the father/king. This imagery gave way in bourgeois
thought to a more symbolic system of representation based on
speech, writing, and the law. Landes traces this change through the
art and writing of the period. Using the works of Rousseau and
Montesquieu as examples of the passage to the bourgeois theory of
the 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 the
second part of the book, Landes discusses the discourses on women's
rights and on women in society authored by Condorcet,
Wollstonecraft, Gouges, Tristan, and Comte within the context of
these new definitions of the public sphere. Focusing on the period
after the execution of the 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 the revolutionary process and relates the
birth of modern feminism to the silencing of the politically
influential women of the Old Regime court and salon and to women's
expulsion from public participation during and after the
Revolution.
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