Introduction

Summary

THE PRINCIPAL OBJECTIVE of this book is a simple one. Through an examination of the most important early women's journals in France and the evolving female roles and aspirations they portray, it seeks to highlight the political and social significance of this literary medium produced for, and typically by, women. Its overriding focus is on the textual representations of women – the figurations of the feminine – promoted by the early French women's press, a medium whose social influence and interest have been ignored by the majority of critical and literary analyses of the period. The political potential of the periodical press is particularly relevant during the period under study, when journals were often more accessible to the public – in terms of both format and availability – than were, for example, the texts of the philosophes. Jean Sgard, in an article entitled ‘La Multiplication des périodiques’ (1984), remarks that periodicals could be viewed as more pivotal to the proliferation of Enlightenment ideas and the establishment of the eighteenth-century reading market generally than more ‘heavyweight’ literary and philosophical texts. The periodical medium is one that, more than any other, fuses the extra-textual reality and experiences of its readers with their textual representation, giving the impression of a writer–reader relationship that exists in the ‘real’ world. As Hilary Fraser, Stephanie Green and Judith Johnston write in their Introduction to Gender and the Victorian Periodical (2003: 5): ‘The periodical press, offering a liminal space between public and private domains, was a critical mediating agent between these two worlds.’ The early women's press thus represented an important means of allowing women to access and contribute to the key cultural, intellectual and political debates that dominated French society at the time and which directly influenced their position within it.

Despite being one of the most popular forms of written textual production consumed by female readers, women's magazines have been a much-neglected subject of academic criticism in French. This academic reluctance to study the women's journalistic press partly originates in a misogynous snobbery that considers women's magazines vapid frivolities whose principal function is to plaire through escapism rather than instruire through any ‘meaningful’ content.