Disruptive Acts: The New Woman in Fin-de-Siecle France

By Mary Louise Roberts

In fin-de-siècle 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 Séverine 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 Fronde 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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Mar 15, 2017
• ISBN: 9780226360751

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MARY LOUISE ROBERTS is professor of history at the University of Wisconsin—Madison. She is the author of Civilization without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France, 1917–1927, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2002 by Mary Louise Roberts

All rights reserved. Published 2002

Printed in the United States of America

11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02——1 2 3 4 5

ISBN: 0-226-72124-8 (cloth)

ISBN: 978-0-226-36075-1 (ebook)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Roberts, Mary Louise.

Disruptive acts : the new woman in fin-de-siècle France / Mary Louise Roberts.

p.   cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-226-72124-8 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. Feminism—France—History—19th century.   2. Sex role—France—History—19th century.   3. France—Intellectual life—19th century.   4. Durand, Marguerite, 1864–1936.   5. Bernhardt, Sarah, 1844—1923.   6. Gyp, 1849–1932.   7. Séverine, 1855–1929.   8. Dreyfus, Alfred, 1859–1935—Influence.   I. Title.

HQ1617 .R55 2002

305.42'0944—dc21

2002004194

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

Disruptive Acts

The New Woman in Fin-de-Siècle France

Mary Louise Roberts

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Chicago & London

for Lissa

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. The New Woman

2. Acting Up

3. Subversive Copy

4. The New Woman and the Jew

5. Caught in the Act

6. The Fantastic Sarah Bernhardt

7. Cabotines to the Core

Conclusion

Notes

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I REALIZE IT’S a tiresome trend to thank everyone you know for your book, but there really are scores of people I would like to acknowledge. First, I would like to thank the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Stanford Institute for Research on Women and Gender, the Stanford Office of Technology Licensing, and the Gordon and Dailey Pattee Fellowship for the funding that made my trips to Paris possible. The Stanford Humanities Center gave me a respite from teaching during the academic year 1994–95. The incredible group of humanists in residence that year, as well as the director of the center, the amazing Wanda Corn, gave this book a solid start in life. My greatest institutional debt is to the Institute for Advanced Study, where I spent a dreamy millennial year in 1999–2000. The institute’s heady mix of stimulation and poetic tranquility made all the difference for this book, recalling it to life and giving it—at last—a final shape.

In France, I would like to thank the staffs of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the Bibliothèque historique de la ville de Paris, and the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, who kindly opened archives, answered questions, and hauled out hundreds of books. Most important, I would like to acknowledge the staff of the Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand, whose friendliness and unerring professionalism made the afternoons I spent there among the very happiest hours of my life. I am particularly indebted to Directrice Annie Didier-Metz, herself a scholar of La Fronde, for her expertise, generosity, and good humor. Thanks also to Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau, Françoise Basch, Pierre Birnbaum, Alain Corbin, Michelle Perrot, Annie Stora-Lamarre, and Françoise Thébaud for their extremely helpful guidance and support.

This book profited enormously from the audiences around the country who read drafts and listened to talks, offering their comments and questions. To them all, I am extremely grateful. Most important, I would like to express appreciation to my hosts and hostesses, who not only invited me and offered insight but who also often opened up their homes, fed me irresistible food, introduced me to their colleagues, and tried (unsuccessfully) to calm me down when the airlines lost my luggage. Profound thanks go to Henry Abelove, Leora Auslander, Kathleen Canning, Hal Chase, Judith Coffin, Josh Cole, Jim Cronin, Joan DeJean, Jacqueline Dirks, Jan Goldstein, Gail Hershatter, Steven Kaplan, Gene Lebovics, Patricia Lorcin, René Marion, Kate Norberg, Tip Ragan, Dan Sherman, Jay Smith, and last but definitely not least, Eve Troutt Powell.

Still other colleagues and friends offered precious resources, criticisms, and encouragement. Many of the questions I try to answer in this book were first posed by Mary Gluck in her seminar on the fin de siècle at Brown University in the fall of 1984. I have also learned so much from Andrew Aisenberg, Elinor Accampo, Mark Antliff, Susanna Barrows, Erin Carlston, Gill I have the Zola reference Chaitin, Rachel Fuchs, Scott Haine, Susan Kent, Pat Leighton, Joby Margadant, Phil Nord, Don Reid, Rebecca Rogers, Kristen Ross, Sylvia Schafer, Tyler Stovall, Karen Sawislak, Vanessa Schwartz, Ann Stoler, and many other people I won’t mention here so there is someone left to review the book. A special thanks to Whitney Walton for not cracking up when I wept over Bernhardt’s grave. An extra special thanks to Keith Baker, Ed Berenson, Jan Goldstein, and Bonnie Smith for being so supportive of my career. Sheila Levine gave me several pieces of expert advice about this book; I am grateful for her generous professionalism. My editor at the University of Chicago, Susan Bielstein, forced me to give myself over to the higher powers of my Word Count and Delete buttons, thus helping me take the first step toward dealing with my little footnote addiction. Although I went down howling, I know the book is better for my road to recovery. Many thanks to her, Yvonne Zipter, and Anthony Burton for the magic—which is really just pure hard work—of making a manuscript a book.

To my colleagues at Stanford, and in particular, Jean-Marie Apostolidès, Philippe Buc, Paula Findlen, Estelle Freedman, Carolyn Lougee Chappell, Norman Naimark, Richard Roberts, Paul Robinson, Jim Sheehan, and Steve Zipperstein, I owe a big, big thanks. I could not have written chapters 4 and 5 without the incredibly generous help of Aron Rodrigue. This book—and life generally—would be much duller indeed if it weren’t for my graduate students, who more than once have struck terror in my heart by skewering books I greatly admire. Teaching them is the greatest challenge and joy of my professional life. In particular, I would like to thank Tim Brown and Emmanuelle Chapin for their insightful readings of chapter 6.

Several brave souls were kind enough to read the entire final draft. Lynn Hunt improved the manuscript a great deal by pointing out some of its inconsistencies. Debora Silverman gave me extremely helpful advice both early on and at the last moment. Profound thanks to her for so willingly sharing her very great knowledge of the period. Sheryl Kroen also offered wonderful insights, encouraging me to think bigger and better. I am most grateful to the anonymous readers at the University of Chicago Press and the University of California Press. Their careful, critical readings forced me to think about several issues for the first time, including the politics of mass culture. My most important reader continues to be Joan Scott, who endured many of these chapters again and again. She was always supportive, always tough, and always right. She remains my most trusted friend in the profession. Gratitude is a feeble word for what I owe her.

Last, I want to thank my friends and family for being so tolerant of my ongoing obsession with this book. I apologize for my wandering eyes, my short attention span, my mysterious absences, for forgetting birthdays, not sending Christmas cards, leaving letters unanswered and calls unreturned. Despite this bad behavior, my three older sisters, Elizabeth, Pam, and Kathie, watch over me like guardian angels, tolerant of my faults, and my parents, Jim and Emmie Roberts, find a way to be unfailing in their love. But Lissa McLaughlin is the most forgiving and forbearing of them all. She has lent her sensitive editorial eye to every word of this book, which has profited enormously from her creative talents. More important, she has taught me how to trust my instincts, how to quiet down and listen patiently for the story as it slowly emerges. Finally, for exactly twenty years now, she has made me extremely happy, and believe me, that is no mean feat. I give this book to her with love.

San Francisco, California

December 2001

INTRODUCTION

IN THE LAST two decades of the nineteenth century, the French chose the term fin de siècle to describe the era they were traversing. In doing so, they described the period as a terminus for the nineteenth century, concluding a long sentence rather than beginning another. The term fin de siècle has found favor among historians, who agree that the 1880s and 1890s, both in England and continental Europe, represented an ending of sorts. Their story goes something like this: while the bourgeois, liberal world of the nineteenth century came to a crashing end during the First World War, this world had been quietly disintegrating since around 1880. Or perhaps not so quietly: from the cultural elite of these decades arose a near-deafening roar concerning a crisis, apocalyptic in size, and dwelling on a multitude of sins, among them, depopulation, labor unrest, political scandals, and sexual transgressions. Historians have analyzed this crisis in great detail, interpreting it as the first death rattle of the liberal age.¹

But fin-de-siècle France has also been portrayed in another way: as a belle epoque of spectacular delight. Paris in particular has been drawn as a city dedicated to pleasure, a spectacle for mass consumption, and a vast theater for herself and all the world where life had become increasingly a special kind of performance presided over by fashion, innovation, and taste.² Contemporaries seemed to take in stride this mix of crisis and amusement. Noting the fin-de-siècle passion for both searing social drama and vaudeville comedy, the critic René Doumic wrote that the theater suggested a fitting image of our society today, with its characteristics of moral disarray and fanatical rage for pleasure.³ But historians have felt less comfortable reconciling these two visions of the period. As Robert Nye once asked, Is it contradictory to link together the terms ‘belle epoque’ and cultural crisis?⁴ Most historians have answered that question in the affirmative, choosing to describe the end of the nineteenth century as either beleaguered or belle.⁵ Some have argued either for cultural crisis or belle epoque; still others have tried to stratify these two interpretations by class, claiming crisis for the cultural elites and belle epoque for the popular classes.⁶

By contrast, I emphasize crucial links between the era’s cultural crisis and its penchant for performance. I do so by construing such theatricality as a form of subversion rather than mere diversion and, therefore, as a cause of cultural crisis itself. I agree with the historical wisdom that bourgeois liberal values met an unprecedented challenge in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. But I also claim that this contest contained elements of playful engagement not captured by the terms we currently use to understand it: as a decay or disintegration of liberal beliefs. The metaphor of decay became dominant largely due to Carl Schorske’s classic Fin-de-siècle Vienna, which begins with a description of Maurice Ravel’s fragmented, cacophonous La Valse—a symbol, Schorske believes, of a disintegrating Austrian culture. As Schorske’s analysis illustrates, the metaphor of decay found its inspiration in the fin-de-siècle obsession concerning the degeneration and decadence of European society.⁷

In their attempts to understand this era, historians have adopted uncritically the rhetorical tropes that suffused contemporary debate. Even Eugen Weber, who does so much to rethink the period in meliorist terms, reverts to such language when he claims that frames of institutions, ways of life and mind, that met their demise in 1914 had, in fact, long been crumbling.⁸ But the organic metaphor of decay does not describe the fate of the one bourgeois, liberal doctrine I examine in this book: the ideology of womanhood. Observers believed that conventional femininity, including the belief that a woman’s primary role was to be a wife and mother, was itself in crisis, and femininity was undoubtedly questioned in new ways at the fin de siècle. But that interrogation was forced by a series of disruptive acts, not captured by the metaphor of decay. Central to the challenge to traditional womanhood was a profoundly subversive form of performance—an acting that was also an acting up.

The New Woman

The so-called crisis of sex roles centered on the phenomenon of the New Woman. As Debora Silverman has shown, even Art Nouveau artists of the 1890s rallied to the celebration of female fecundity and decorative domestic intimacy as a response to the threat of the New Woman.⁹ Beginning in the 1890s and early 1900s, a group of primarily urban, middle-class French women became the object of intensive public scrutiny. Some remained single; some entered nontraditional marriages; some were prominent feminist activists; some took up the professions of medicine and law, journalism and teaching. Despite their differences, all of these women challenged the regulatory norms of gender by living unconventional lives and by doing work outside the home that was coded masculine in French culture.

By regulatory norms of gender, I mean the pervasive set of ideals and practices that attempted to control the terms of male and female in nineteenth-century France. Such norms were materialized in the gendered body and enacted in individual and social behavior. For middle-class women of this period, the most prevalent (but also always disputed) norm of this type defined their roles as wives and mothers. Nature acted as the authorizing fiction here, justifying such a domestic role. Women were thought to possess a maternal instinct that made them inherently nurturing and self-sacrificing. Their natural place was in the familial home, where they also served as the bedrock of social morality. These qualities of maternalism and moral sensibility were believed to be essential rather than contingent. They were said to be fixed in the body and to bind women across class, race, and time—hence their natural status. A woman ignored them at her own risk—chancing neurasthenia, hysteria, and even insanity.¹⁰ Besides acting as wife and mother, a woman’s chief role was decorative—to serve as an ornament for the men in her life. Viewed as frivolous and incapable of rational thought, a woman was expected to beautify herself and her home, as well as attend to her husband and children.

This pervasive set of beliefs and practices can be defined as the liberal ideology of womanhood. By liberal here, I mean the republican or Rousseauist variant of liberalism that prevailed in France during the nineteenth century. Without ignoring the fundamental way that the institutions of the Third Republic structured sexual difference, I choose to describe this ideology as liberal rather than republican because the first term is more broadly cultural. Certainly, by excluding women from the right to vote or hold office, and by defining their primary role as the maternal nurturer of future citizens, republican leaders contributed enormously to the naturalized ideal of female domesticity.¹¹ But the term republican is thought primarily to connote a political posture, while liberal indicates the more general assumptions, ideals, and values of the moderate middle classes dominating French culture by the 1890s. The liberal ideology of womanhood, then, refers to a broadly construed, middle-class vision of sexual difference that includes, but also transcends, republicanism. In fact, the term is contradictory. Inasmuch as liberals destined women for nothing more than domestic motherhood, cutting them off from the opportunity for choice and self-development, they contradicted their own ideal of individual self-fulfillment. In this sense, the liberal ideology of womanhood was distinctly un-liberal, a fact not lost upon the women in this study.¹²

In general, historians have failed to recognize the absolute centrality of this view of womanhood to the bourgeois democratic society that rose up in the wake of the 1789 revolution. In fact, gender norms structured the very foundations of this society: creating two worlds of public and private, organizing the transfer and holding of property, shaping the meaning of work and the professions, honor and virtue.¹³ In rejecting a strictly domestic future, then, the new women could be counted among those fin-de-siècle rebels who broadly challenged liberal ideals, thus initiating their disintegration or decay.¹⁴ But a closer examination of the era reveals that the liberal view of womanhood neither became fragmented nor wasted away, as such language might imply. The metaphor of exposure seems more accurate. For more than a century, the liberal ideology of womanhood had exercised coercive power in French culture only to the extent that it escaped political contestation and legitimated itself as the natural (and therefore unequivocal) destiny of all women. Under the force of new historical circumstances at the turn of the century, however, this vision of sexual difference was betrayed for what it was—an ideology, contingent and precarious, rather than a reality, absolute and fixed. In other words, its instabilities as a cultural artifact were laid bare. And that exposure, much like physical contact with cold or wind or rain, inevitably had a debilitative effect. However, this ideology did not crumble into dust: as we shall see, on the contrary, it found renewed, if different, expression in right-wing nationalism.

In its broadest sense, this book revises the mechanisms at work in the crisis of bourgeois liberal culture at the fin de siècle. It moves away from the then-current rhetoric of disintegration and decay and seeks to rethink the process by which the norms and ideals structuring late-nineteenth-century French society met new challenges. It incorporates, but does not focus on, direct attacks to liberal individualism and free will made by intellectuals like Henri Bergson and psychologists like Jean Charcot. Similarly, it accommodates, but does not center on, political challenges to the liberal republic in the period 1889–1900, including the rise of a nationalist right. Beginning with Boulangism in the late 1880s, right-wing conservatives increasingly voiced their opposition to liberal secular education, parliamentary instability, and government corruption. They developed a new, anti-Semitic brand of nationalism that would reach full maturity ten years later in the political storm over Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish French Army officer wrongly accused of treason. While this study does not focus on the political crisis of French republicanism, its does explore the way in which nationalist, anti-Semitic ideology relied on tropes of gender and linked stereotypes of the New Woman and the Jew.

Rather than revisit the broad political or intellectual crisis of liberalism, this book centers on the more subtle ways in which liberal norms were contested within the context of individual lives. To do so, it examines a constellation of new women all aware of each other, as a group strongly identified in the public mind with the phenomenon of the New Woman, and all connected in some way to the newspaper La Fronde. Founded by Marguerite Durand in December 1897, La Fronde was modeled after the bourgeois daily of the era but with one very important difference: its staff was entirely female. Women edited, wrote, and even typeset La Fronde. Sometimes called "Le Temps in skirts," Durand’s paper was neither an organ of the feminist movement nor a journal devoted to fashion and the domestic arts. Instead it covered politics, news, sports and the stock market. To produce it, Durand gathered around her an extraordinary circle of women, including Clémence Royer, the first woman to teach at the Sorbonne; Séverine, the first woman reporter; Jeanne Chauvin, one of the first women admitted to the Paris Bar; Pauline Kergomard, the first woman admitted to the Conseil supérieur de l’instruction publique; and Daniel Lesueur, one of the first women to receive the Légion d’honneur; as well as the first female pharmacist, Blanche Galien, and the first female astronomer to enter the observatory, Melle Klumke. In short, the editorial staff represented an Olympiad of firsts, a virtual hotbed of new women.¹⁵

The frondeuses, as they were called, were hardly the only women in fin-de-siècle France rebelling against conventional womanhood. But they were commonly thought to typify the New Woman par excellence. How nice it is to see these singular women battle courageously, wrote a journalist of the frondeuses, to prove that the New Woman is imposing herself on the old world.¹⁶ In other words, the frondeuses bore a special exemplary link in the public imagination with the challenge to traditional femininity. Nor were they the first to take on such a contest. Throughout the nineteenth century, female domesticity was subjected to exposure as an ideology rather than a destiny. For example, it was hard to present domestic life as the destiny of all women when it clearly did not apply, at least in the same way, to working-class women who labored outside the house.¹⁷ At the same time, however, new socioeconomic forces operative at the fin de siècle made this ideal even less defensible than usual, particularly among middle-class women. As part of the Third Republic’s effort to curtail the impact of the Catholic Church, secular secondary and higher education became available to women in the 1880s. Thanks to legislation like the Camille Sée Law of 1880, the number of lycée degrees obtained by women jumped from 4,300 to 13,000 in the years 1885–1900. In addition, the reintroduction of divorce in 1884 released many women from restrictive marriages. By the end of the century, then, there existed a sizable group of educated women in France who yearned for work and a life beyond the parlor. At the same time, the feminist movement found a new voice, one no longer muffled by press censorship.¹⁸

These explanations rightfully connect the rise of such new women with that of the Third Republic. But they also leave some crucial questions unanswered. For example, French print culture treated the New Woman obsessively. In the 1890s and early 1900s, readers of such periodicals as the Journal des débats, the Revue des deux mondes, La Nouvelle Revue and La Revue encyclopédique were exposed almost daily to articles, surveys, and editorials concerning the unruly femme nouvelle. Similarly, the New Woman stormed the novel and play, sometimes as a plucky rebel, sometimes as a man-hating virago. One cannot imagine the fin de siècle without thinking of the dramas of Henrik Ibsen, Bernard Shaw, and Frank Wedekind, many of which were performed on the French stage and all of which featured the New Woman. Similarly, such French playwrights as Eugène Brieux and Maurice Donnay used the theater repeatedly to examine changing mores and their impact on relations between the sexes. Underlying such widespread interest seemed to be the anxiety that, preoccupied with her career, the New Woman would not fulfill her domestic destiny.

Historians have interpreted the print-culture preoccupation with the New Woman as the direct effect of a crisis in gender relations already underway.¹⁹ Yet contemporary statistics reveal how few women were actually engaged in so-called male professions at the time: only 3 percent of doctors, 3 percent of pharmacists, 2.6 percent of chemists and engineers, and so on.²⁰ Such an argument must be tempered, then, by the disproportion between the low number of women actually working in male professions and the enormous discursive interest in the phenomenon. Clearly, the debate has a cultural weight of its own and cannot be reduced to the socioeconomic phenomenon it purports to represent. (I will avoid such a deduction throughout by referring to the cultural image of the New Woman and the sociological phenomenon of the new woman.) At the very least, the discursive fixation on the New Woman serves as a measure of her threat, as well as of the importance of gender norms to bourgeois liberal culture. Nor have historians taken into account that these images were themselves agents of change.²¹ Significantly, as a neologism, the New Woman had foreign origins: she was largely an import from the Anglo-American world. Novels and plays portraying her encouraged the female reader’s identification with the so-called Anglo-American model. Fostering fantasies among young, newly educated French women inspired them to dream and ultimately to materialize different lives. But the opposite was equally true. Fictions representing the New Woman as a man-hating amazon could also place limits on the plots in which these young people cast themselves. In other words, they had the power to foreclose choices and reaffirm a more conventional destiny. This book takes seriously such fictional narratives as cultural agents; it seeks to locate the map they charted for a generation of women in the 1890s and 1900s and to see how the frondeuses on Durand’s editorial staff moved forward and backward, on and off that map.

Only a well-developed mass print culture could serve up such fantasies and nightmares of the self on a regular basis. Only an increasingly theatrical, spectacularized urban setting could blur the distinction between fantasy and reality, unloose imaginings, and facilitate a reader’s translation of fictions into probable life plots.²² Fin-de-siècle Paris provided just such a culture and setting. Urban renewal and economic crisis transformed the face of the city in the late nineteenth century, giving rise to a consumer economy, a mass print culture, and a glitzy, spectacular street life centering around the boulevards built by Baron Haussmann. Mass market dreams gave rise to a generation of new women, connecting them not only to the rise of the Third Republic, but also to the increasing commodification of urban French culture.

Feminism and Women’s Culture

The New Woman interests me neither strictly as a sociological phenomenon nor as a cultural image. Rather, I focus on the terrain linking these two: the New Woman as a problem of cultural change. In the new, promising conditions of the Third Republic, how did women begin to imagine themselves as worthy of more than a domestic destiny? How did they subjectively understand socially articulated meanings of womanhood, largely imported from England and America? How did they conceive of themselves in relation to the New Woman of print culture? In framing such questions, I assume that female identity is cultural and historical. In any given era, womanhood is learned within a fixed horizon that limits how the female self can be imagined. In this sense, the question, How did these women make themselves new? is a question of cultural history. Most broadly construed, it poses the problem of how women—or any group in nineteenth-century liberal culture, for that matter—resisted regulatory norms of behavior.

The most easily recognizable language of resistance to such norms was, of course, the feminist movement, which gained great intensity during these years.²³ By providing an explicit affirmation of woman’s right to control her fertility, feminists such as Nelly Roussel challenged the notion that a woman’s maternal role was a biological imperative.²⁴ Even the thinking of such pronatalist social scientists as Paul Leroy-Beaulieu displayed a curious slippage by the 1890s. Maintaining his belief in maternity as the destiny of the female sex, Leroy-Beaulieu was nevertheless forced to acknowledge that feminism had made it feared and incommodious. In other words, pronatalists had to recognize that the natural law of motherhood was no longer acting as an inevitable force but was, instead, becoming a choice women could dismiss.²⁵ In this way, Malthusian feminists undermined the authorizing fiction of female domesticity: the natural maternal instinct.

Despite their similar interests, the figure of the feminist and that of the New Woman cannot be equated.²⁶ Feminists in this period often grounded their demands for legal and political rights precisely in their roles as domestic wives and mothers. By contrast, the new women—at least those examined in this study—only rarely invoked a domestic self in their writings. Several, such as Séverine, bore children but abandoned their care to others. As a group, such new women sought and created independent lives without necessarily understanding their quest in the feminist terms of their day. Some were as interested in beauty and seduction as they were the argument for equality. While Marguerite Durand allowed such feminists as Maria Pognon to contribute to La Fronde, she refused to label the paper itself feminist, at least in its early years. In addition, she was personally a strong antisuffragist and unpopular with feminists. Likewise, Séverine was largely quiet about feminist matters until after 1914. Nor could two other new women in this study, the novelist Gyp and the actress Sarah Bernhardt, be considered conventionally feminist by a long shot.

Because of their lack of explicit feminism, women such as Durand, Séverine, Gyp, and Bernhardt have ill-fit our histories of resistance to gender norms. In a feminist narrative too narrowly focused on legal, political, and social reform, their lives have been deemed exceptional and their adventures in unconventional womanhood dismissed as lacking any larger political import. And they are misfits for other reasons. Some, like the anti-Semitic Gyp, are deeply unlikable. Still others have embarrassed feminist scholars with their quickness to the bedroom, their lingering at the mirror, and their habit of making public spectacles of themselves. Unlike the hard-working institutrices, or the virtuous, matronly suffragists, these women’s lives are not easily captured in the idioms of struggle and achievement used by women’s historians. Although biographies exist for all the individuals studied in detail here, no attempt has been made to understand them as a group or to analyze the commonalities of their exploits. In attempting to do just that, I hope to show that their efforts were neither isolated nor idiosyncratic. In other words, I posit resistance in women’s lives as a diverse language, in which feminism is simply one, albeit very important, dialect.

Women’s historians have tended to reduce such resistance to a function of female culture. According to the historian Carol Smith-Rosenberg, for example, the first generation of American new women reworked, rather than rejected, female domesticity, transforming a shared culture as wives and mothers into a vibrant female solidarity. These bonds of womanhood, to use Nancy Cott’s famous phrase, in turn, empowered the new women (as well as feminists) to fight for more independent lives.²⁷ Such a unique female discourse, according to Smith-Rosenberg, enabled these women to defend themselves against hostile critics who, as in France, portrayed them as man-hating viragoes. By contrast, argued Smith-Rosenberg, when women appropriated dominant male discourses, such as British sexology, they suffered from self-alienation, loss of identity, and political failure.²⁸

In this study, I seek new answers to the question of how women resisted gender norms and moved beyond a domestic destiny. In a culture where language operates through the play of meaning, and is constantly appropriated and reenacted in new contexts, something as pristine as a uniquely female discourse seems impossible to conceive. In addition, in many cases, the adoption of dominant discourses enabled new women to challenge the liberal ideology of womanhood. We will see, for example, how Séverine and Gyp used Dreyfusardism and right-wing nationalism, respectively, to define their political agency as disenfranchised women.

Journalism and Theater

If these new women neither relied on an explicitly articulated feminism to challenge conventional femininity nor relied on a distinct women’s culture, how, then, did they become new women? The frondeuses drew on the custom of sexual conviviality in the salon and on what Jo Burr Margadant has called the originally aristocratic notion that individuality was a creative process, not undertaken once and for all, but performed daily, selectively.²⁹ And they made use of still other traditions associated primarily with early modern aristocratic culture. For example, the paper’s name linked it to the frondeur tradition of journalism that originated in the seventeenth-century noble uprising. More comically, the offices of La Fronde featured a room specifically designed for fencing, which was Marguerite Durand’s favorite sport.³⁰ That the frondeuses would draw on resources predating or existing outside of nineteenth-century bourgeois liberal culture is not surprising, given their challenge to its notions of womanhood.

Despite their use of aristocratic traditions, however, the new women clustered in worlds that could not have been more modern: journalism and theater. Colette, whose early career spanned both the stage and the newsroom, typifies the way in which they moved in and out of these two realms. Although best known as a novelist, Colette also made her living in the prewar years as a vaudeville actress, both in Paris and on tour throughout France. In addition, she wrote a column for Le Matin, where she worked as a reporter.³¹ There is also good evidence that she wrote for Durand’s La Fronde using the pseudonym Eddy.³² When Durand herself, following a career as an actress, entered the world of journalism, she joined a legion of women who wrote commentary, edited articles, submitted serialized novels, or drew caricatures. As one contemporary put it, the new women were nothing more than rebels with ink on their fingers.³³ The Tout-Paris théâtral swarmed with new women as well. Like Durand, many of them had been actresses or playwrights at one time.³⁴ Performers like the diseuse Yvette Guilbert enjoyed unconventional marriages with husbands who accommodated their professional needs.³⁵ Most well-known among the actresses of the era, Sarah Bernhardt wielded enormous professional and financial power in the world of the theater. Beginning in the 1880s, she not only produced plays but owned and managed a number of theaters. Although she took a myriad of lovers, Bernhardt married only briefly, choosing instead to lead an independent—and lavish—life supported by her own earnings.

Journalism and theater: why did these two career choices exercise such a strong pull on the new women? To begin with, both enjoyed a strong legacy as empowering worlds for women. In addition, as part of the germinating mass culture of the 1890s, both journalism and theater offered women paid work, new means of expression, financial independence, and cultural visibility. For example, in the same year that Marguerite Durand established her all-female daily, the Polish dramatist Marya Chéliga founded the Théâtre féministe at the Menus-Plaisirs in Paris. Like Durand’s daily, the theater aimed to give women an exclusive forum where they could, in Chéliga’s words, freely demonstrate their talent, bring their ideas to light, and give away the secret of their supposedly indecipherable soul.³⁶ To give talented women a means to make themselves known in the theatrical world: this, according to a journalist, was the mission of the Théâtre féministe.³⁷ During 1897–98, devoting itself to plays written by women, it addressed such issues as adultery, divorce, and single motherhood. Daniel Lesueur, the first playwright honored with a production at the Théâtre féministe in June of 1897, went on to join Marguerite Durand’s staff in December.³⁸

Though this kind of move was not surprising at the fin-de-siècle, when newsroom and theater were closely linked, both sociologically and in the popular imagination, the linkage represented a dramatic change from previous eras, when the two had roughly served different purposes in French culture. Up until the mid-nineteenth century, journalism had a largely pedagogical end: to educate the French concerning politics. By contrast, theater served as a vehicle for amusement; its aim was to create a world of artifice. Throughout the nineteenth century, the worlds of theater and journalism began to resemble each other, however, embracing many of the same social circles and becoming dependent on each other.³⁹ For example, the success of plays increasingly relied, as they do now, on good press reviews. Knowing that a journalist as powerful as Francisque Sarcey sat in the audience could raise goose bumps on the arms of even a seasoned actress like Sarah Bernhardt. Frequently, journalists were theater owners, directors, or playwrights; almost always, they were theater buffs. Paul Ginistry, for example, was a well-known journalist and theater critic, as well as the director, between 1896 and 1906, of the Parisian theater, L’Odeon.⁴⁰ In his 1897 manual for gens de lettres, Tanneguy de Wogan urged prospective playwrights to become newspaper theater critics in order to ingratiate themselves with both other critics and star actors.⁴¹ When the journalist Octave Mirbeau attacked the stage as morally corrupt in 1883, the actor Coquelin responded by threatening to say the same about journalism, since, he argued, our professions have many points in common.⁴²

One of these points was success: both reached their golden age or apogee at the fin de siècle. Delivered from the threat of government censorship in 1881 and bolstered by technological innovations and a skyrocketing literacy rate, the Parisian mass press almost tripled its circulation between 1880 and 1914.⁴³ Furthermore, it played a growing role in such large-scale national events as the Dreyfus Affair, shaping public opinion and even the course of events. Similarly, the theater was transformed in the second half of the nineteenth century from a popular pastime into a booming entertainment business. While a play run of sixty to eighty performances was considered a success during the July monarchy, anything under one hundred was considered a failure at the fin de siècle. The number of theaters in Paris doubled by the end of the century as plays, like newspapers, became commodities consumed by the masses.

At the peak of the pyramid stood the state-supported Comédie-Française, then came boulevard theater, at once more contemporary and topical, then the café-concerts and music halls, such as the Folies-Bergères, where profits were drawn from food and drink and where Parisians enjoyed comics, singers, and other kinds of entertainers.⁴⁴ After 1900, the café-concerts began to drain Parisian audiences from the more traditional theaters. In general, though, there were more than enough stage-lovers to go around: in 1888, an observer estimated that half a million Parisians visited the theater at least once a week and that over a million went at least once a month.⁴⁵ Theater grosses doubled from 32 to 68 million francs between 1893 and 1913.⁴⁶ Observed one journalist, The population of Paris lives in the theater, for the theater, by the theater.⁴⁷ No literary genre has a more vigorous, immediate and lasting hold on the masses, wrote Jacques Duval in 1912.⁴⁸ A popular joke advised: Don’t knock down the theater—it’s the last religion in France!⁴⁹

Journalism and theater also shared a certain disrepute: both were considered seedy, marginal professions. Throughout the modern period, critics had dismissed the honor of the press as compromised by party politics and private interest.⁵⁰ Acting had also long been a pariah profession in France, in part thanks to the refusal of the Old Regime Church to admit actors and actresses into the community of the faithful. Although the Church officially changed its policy in 1830, the old stigma persisted throughout the century.⁵¹ These traditional prejudices found new life in fin-de-siècle Paris. Theaters and newspaper offices clustered in the second, ninth, and tenth arrondissements, near the department stores and the boulevard Haussmann.⁵² It was easy, then, for conservatives and literati to condemn both professions as the culturally degraded offspring of Haussmannized Paris.⁵³ The newspaper, they argued, was producing violence as a pièce de theâtre, transforming daily events into a spectacle.⁵⁴ Theater, they agreed, had also sunk to new moral depths in its hunger to sell tickets. As professions, both were relatively accessible, open to upwardly mobile, culturally marginal persons (like the new women), and therefore marked by amateurism in the eyes of critics.⁵⁵

For the anti-Semite Edouard Drumont, the moral corruption of these two worlds was explained by the fact that both were financed and managed by Jews.⁵⁶ As we shall see, this perception of Jewish control over journalism and theater had profound implications for the new women. The Jew and the New Woman became linked in the cultural imagination as nationalist anti-Semitic voices emerged on the right in the 1890s. This study explores such links by examining how tropes of race and gender intersected in the debates surrounding the Dreyfus Affair. Just as the cultural imperative of domestic womanhood was inscribed in a woman’s body, so was the exclusion of the Jew and/or colonized Other decided by their racialized blood. Inasmuch as the category of race was increasingly defined in organic, essentialized terms during this period, it became homologous with that of gender. The strategies used by the new women to disrupt essentialized gender notions were transferable to those who sought to do the same for the regulatory norms of race. For the purposes of this study, however, race is a term quite specifically preoccupied with the Jewish question. The New Woman was not circumscribed by the tropes of race defining la mission civilisatrice and justifying France’s Empire in Africa and southeast Asia, nor was she, as a type, considered in need of civilizing, educating, or assimilation.⁵⁷ Rather, like the Jew, she was a cosmopolitan, foreign influence that threatened France’s moral and national integrity.

Finally, in both the worlds of journalism and theater, playacting and performance were acceptable forms of behavior. This argument is obvious in the case of theater, but journalism also encouraged a high level of theatricality. The very aim of fin-de-siècle journalism was theatrical: to document modern life in the most dramatic, entertaining way possible. In a world of faits-divers, voyeuristic reporters, and pseudonymous writers, role-playing and performing became the norm. The new eyewitness method of reportage encouraged journalists to don disguises and go undercover to get the inside dope. At points in her career as a journalist, Séverine masqueraded as a miner in Saint-Étienne and a striking worker in a Parisian sugar refinery. Both male and female journalists often hid behind pseudonyms, which allowed them to elaborate cross-gender personas. For example, the journalist Henri Fouquier often signed his articles Colomba, whom Charles Maurras identified as an implacable, impetuous woman. The novelist Gyp got her start writing anonymous vignettes for La Vie parisienne, using the voice of a male military officer. Similarly, the editorial staff at La Fronde hid behind such colorful names as Chevreuse, Harlor, Urgèle, Thécla, Savioz, Eddy, and Pug (the last borrowed from the resident dog).

The histrionics characterizing behavior in the newsroom and on the stage threatened conventional gender norms, understood in essentialized terms. If Gyp could fashion herself so persuasively as a man in print, it was a little harder to believe her natural destiny was to be a woman. Similarly on stage, when Sarah Bernhardt played the Duc de

Reviews for Disruptive Acts

[mattypsaidso · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Extremely well-written. The book has some flaws in its arguments and presentations, but there's no such thing as a flawless monograph. I really found Roberts' writing to be clear and engaging - very enjoyable. One of the best books I've read for my history seminar on "dangerous women" so far!