The Other Enlightenment: How French Women Became Modern
By Carla Hesse
3.5/5
()
About this ebook
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.
Carla Hesse
Carla Hesse is Dean of Social Sciences and Peder Sather Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley.
Related to The Other Enlightenment
Related ebooks
The Labor of the Mind: Intellect and Gender in Enlightenment Cultures Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsEdith Wharton in France Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsFloridoro: A Chivalric Romance Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAm I French Yet Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMabel Dodge Luhan: New Woman, New Worlds Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Modernist Mentor: A Biography of Gertrude Stein Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Charles de Gaulle: A Biography Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Disruptive Acts: The New Woman in Fin-de-Siecle France Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Apology for the Woman Writing and Other Works Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5We'll Always Have Paris: American Tourists in France since 1930 Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Last Love of George Sand: A Literary Biography Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWar Tourism: Second World War France from Defeat and Occupation to the Creation of Heritage Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsFrench Legends: The Life and Legacy of Marie Antoinette Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings<i>La Parisienne</i> in cinema: Between art and life Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBecoming Bourgeois: Love, Kinship, and Power in Provincial France, 1670–1880 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWomen's Work?: American Schoolteachers, 1650-1920 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Little Tour in France Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsFeeding Gotham: The Political Economy and Geography of Food in New York, 1790–1860 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsCulture Briefing: France - Your Guide to French Culture and Customs Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDialogues and Addresses Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBoule de Suif Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Love-charm of Bombs: Restless Lives in the Second World War Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Love, Fiercely: A Gilded Age Romance Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Spiritual Economies: Female Monasticism in Later Medieval England Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDiscourse to Lady Lavinia His Daughter Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Sister Parish: The Life of the Legendary American Interior Designer Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Pioneers: Or the Sources of the Susquehanna, a Descriptive Tale, Fourth of the Leatherstocking Tales Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5No Woman's World: From D-Day to Berlin Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWriting Occupation: Jewish Émigré Voices in Wartime France Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
European History For You
Mein Kampf: English Translation of Mein Kamphf - Mein Kampt - Mein Kamphf Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Short History of the World: The Story of Mankind From Prehistory to the Modern Day Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Killing England: The Brutal Struggle for American Independence Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Forgotten Slave Trade: The White European Slaves of Islam Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Negro Rulers of Scotland and the British Isles Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Violent Abuse of Women: In 17th and 18th Century Britain Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in the Conquered City: A Diary Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Hitler's Monsters: A Supernatural History of the Third Reich Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Book of English Magic Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Rise and Fall of the Third Reich Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Anglo-Saxons: A History of the Beginnings of England: 400 – 1066 Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Celtic Mythology: A Concise Guide to the Gods, Sagas and Beliefs Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Forgotten Highlander: An Incredible WWII Story of Survival in the Pacific Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A Victorian Lady's Guide to Fashion and Beauty Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Oscar Wilde: The Unrepentant Years Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Quite Nice and Fairly Accurate Good Omens Script Book: The Script Book Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Dark Queens: The Bloody Rivalry That Forged the Medieval World Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Law Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Discovery of Pasta: A History in Ten Dishes Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsCeltic Charted Designs Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Origins Of Totalitarianism Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Rise of the Fourth Reich: The Secret Societies That Threaten to Take Over America Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Jane Austen: The Complete Novels Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Psychedelic Gospels: The Secret History of Hallucinogens in Christianity Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Related categories
Reviews for The Other Enlightenment
3 ratings0 reviews