Conclusion

Summary

THE ORIGINS of the French women's press and its evolution over the subsequent 90 years represent a key period in the history of French women's self-expression and political and cultural consciousness. As the Introduction to this study highlights, the women's press is the first literary organ to interpellate women as a collective entity, to aid in the construction of a unifying sense of sexual identity. The historical constraints governing women's rights and roles throughout this period make the achievements of these early journals all the more remarkable. As Suellen Diaconoff states in Through the Reading Glass: Women, Books and Sex in the French Enlightenment:

That a press for, by, and about women could succeed in a century so frequently driven by the dual principles of patriarchy and paternalism is a tribute, first, to the resourcefulness and talents of the female editors, and second to the female readership that supported it financially, emotionally, and philosophically. (2005: 201)

For the first time, women readers were encouraged not to consume text passively but to dialogue with it actively and to articulate their own opinions in a public forum – in other words, to be textual producers as well.

If French women had previously enjoyed certain forms of ‘oral’ self-expression, whether in the salons or in the marketplace and streets of Paris, the women's press rendered such expression more politically durable and wide-reaching: personal expression was endowed with public authority. Early French women's journals gave their readers a stronger sense of both self and of belonging to a gendered community, encouraging them to ratify that self through the written representation of it, through communication with others about their personal and political aspirations. Simply providing women writers and readers with a vehicle for written expression constituted a fundamentally radical move and one that in no small measure contributed to women's sense of collectivity and self-perception as a section of the population with shared interests and valid ambitions. This altruistic, sororal drive to foster the female reader's self-worth spans the entire gamut of publications examined in this study, from the salon journals that encouraged their upper-class readers to contribute written articles to the journal's content to the feminist political journals that encouraged their working-class women readers to strive for better employment conditions.