In fin-de-siecle France, politics were in an uproar, and gender
roles blurred as never before. Into this maelstrom stepped the "new
women," a group of primarily urban, middle-class French women who
became the objects of intense public scrutiny. Some remained
single, some entered nontraditional marriages, and some took up the
professions of medicine and law, journalism and teaching. All of
them challenged traditional notions of womanhood by living
unconventional lives and doing supposedly "masculine" work outside
the home.
Mary Louise Roberts examines a constellation of famous new women
active in journalism and the theater, including Marguerite Durand,
founder of the women's newspaper" La Fronde"; the journalists
Severine and Gyp; and the actress Sarah Bernhardt. Roberts
demonstrates how the tolerance for playacting in both these arenas
allowed new women to stage acts that profoundly disrupted accepted
gender roles. The existence of "La men--even" itself was such an
act, because it demonstrated that women could write just as well
about the same subjects as men--even about the volatile Dreyfus
Affair. When female reporters for "La Fronde" put on disguises to
get a scoop or wrote under a pseudonym, and when actresses played
men on stage, they demonstrated that gender identities were not
fixed or natural, but inherently unstable. Thanks to the adventures
of new women like these, conventional domestic femininity was
exposed as a choice, not a destiny.
Lively, sophisticated, and persuasive, "Disruptive Acts" will be a
major work not just for historians, but also for scholars of
cultural studies, gender studies, and the theater.
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