4 - A Woman's Place: Marriage and Homemaking in the Early Domestic Press

Summary

THIS CHAPTER examines three early French women's journals that promote a domestic or family-oriented figuration of femininity, whether providing information and advice on the requisite skills to engage successfully in marriage and/or motherhood or on more practical aspects relating to ‘good housekeeping’ generally: Le Courier de l’hymen (1791); Le Journal des femmes (1832–37); and Le Conseiller des dames (1847–92). The ideologies of femininity espoused by these journals, which begin in 1791, centre above all on woman as caring domestic nurturer and organiser of others, yet also characterise her as someone more than capable of making her own decisions and life choices. All three posit woman's ‘natural’ place as the home. If the wealthy reader addressed in the fashion journals studied in Chapter 3 was encouraged to decorate herself and her person in order to be aesthetically pleasing to her husband, all the while serving national economic interests, the bourgeoise represented in the domestic journals studied in this chapter reveals her worth through the acquisition both of objects to adorn less her appearance than her home and, above all, of the maternal qualities necessary to help fashion her offspring. These journals aim to teach the female reader the skills to guarantee the smooth functioning of the household and the general wellbeing of the family unit, pointing up the ideological valorisation of female self-sacrifice in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century France and positing the female reader as the repository of national and civic virtue.

When work is mentioned at all in these middle-class journals, it relates to the list of domestic tasks upon whose efficient completion a happy and healthy home depends. On the rare occasions that domestic journals encourage women to focus on themselves and their appearance, such encouragement is typically presented within strict economical and pragmatic parameters. Rather than squander the family budget on buying clothes, for example, women are provided with the information to make them. The innovative introduction of the paper dressmaking pattern by L’Iris (1832–34) in 1832 meant that women from less affluent backgrounds who could read and sew now had top fashions at their fingertips, and that a limited budget was no longer a major obstacle to keeping up to date with the latest trends.