2 - Women Writers and Readers: The Beginnings of French Women's Journals and Le Journal des dames (1759–1778)

Summary

THIS CHAPTER examines the beginnings of the French women's press – beginnings anchored in the eighteenth-century Ancien Régime – and concentrates specifically on the first French women's journal of any substance and longevity, Le Journal des dames. It introduces the community of ‘scribbling women’ who produced and consumed the earliest women’s journals in France; the main objectives sustaining their writing projects; and the rhetoric and forms employed by women's journals to better achieve these. Since, as Chapter 1 details, press censorship inevitably affected the degree of overt politicisation in early women's journals, an analysis of the implicit and explicit gendering agenda behind much of their journalistic discourse helps illuminate the desires and goals of the first writers and readers of the women’s press in France. As epitomised by Le Journal des dames, the earliest examples of established women's journals in France have literature and the arts, not fashion, as their recurrent focus, a focus pointing up the press's early interest in cerebral as opposed to corporeal self-improvement, and one intimated by Simone de Beauvoir in Le deuxième sexe I: ‘à travers tout l’Ancien Régime, c’est le domaine culturel qui est le plus accessible aux femmes qui tentent de s’affirmer’ (1949; 1976: 180). In an age when French women's exposure to formal education was severely constrained and a key means by which wealthy and upper-class women could access the public realm was through participation in the literary salons, it is unsurprising that the arts represented their predominant intellectual outlet and means of expression. The writing and reading of texts, both journalistic and literary, allowed women authors and readers to experiment with more radical figurations of womanhood, to vicariously don the guises these models held out to them, to transiently inhabit other selves.

As Chapter 1 observes, the women writers participating in the production of these earliest examples of the women's press typically originated from the higher echelons of French society, and thereby enjoyed many privileges unavailable to other strata of Frenchwomen. Yet, as subsequent chapters contend, there is a recurrent emphasis on the potential pedagogical contribution made by the arts – and by journalism and literature in particular – in providing all women with a source of intellectual stimulation and education whatever their class, an inclusive rhetorics of autodidacticism that characterises the early French women's press in general and which, as Chapter 5 in particular demonstrates, becomes more pronounced as that press establishes itself.