Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on contributors
- Introduction
- 1 Female voices in convents, courts and households: the French Middle Ages
- 2 To choose ink and pen: French Renaissance women's writing
- 3 Altering the fabric of history: women's participation in the classical age
- 4 The eighteenth century: women writing, women learning
- 5 Eighteenth-century women novelists: genre and gender
- 6 The nineteenth century: shaping women
- 7 1900–1969: writing the void
- 8 From order to adventure: women's fiction since 1970
- 9 Changing the script: women writers and the rise of autobiography
- 10 Women poets of the twentieth century
- 11 Voicing the feminine: French women playwrights of the twentieth century
- 12 Feminist literary theory
- Bibliographies
- Index
6 - The nineteenth century: shaping women
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on contributors
- Introduction
- 1 Female voices in convents, courts and households: the French Middle Ages
- 2 To choose ink and pen: French Renaissance women's writing
- 3 Altering the fabric of history: women's participation in the classical age
- 4 The eighteenth century: women writing, women learning
- 5 Eighteenth-century women novelists: genre and gender
- 6 The nineteenth century: shaping women
- 7 1900–1969: writing the void
- 8 From order to adventure: women's fiction since 1970
- 9 Changing the script: women writers and the rise of autobiography
- 10 Women poets of the twentieth century
- 11 Voicing the feminine: French women playwrights of the twentieth century
- 12 Feminist literary theory
- Bibliographies
- Index
Summary
While the eighteenth century allowed a considerable degree of intellectual freedom to women in the upper echelons of society, the Revolution of 1789 and its aftermath mushroomed forth a series of depictions of the Republic, symbolized by woman as devouring virago, driving young men into the destruction of conflict and war. Intimately connected with such iconography, the removal of women's suffrage, in 1793, remains a potent symbol of just what fraternité can mean. The puritanism of Napoleon's public ethics used the changing iconography of the times in an attempt to restrict women to roles connected with children, the Church and the kitchen. The Napoleonic code of 1805 formalized the dichotomy between masculine public space and female private space, assigning to women the legal and metaphorical role of minors in the new society, controlling the way they dressed and the kinds of work they could do. Typical of this restriction of women's freedom was the suppression of the 1792 divorce law in 1816: divorce would not be made legal again until 1884. Adultery was punishable by imprisonment, with the female offender technically liable to remain incarcerated for as long as the husband wanted. As the century progressed and as women came to be seen as possessing a powerful role as consumers in an increasingly industrialized state, their intellectual and physical freedoms went through various revolutions reflected in a wide range of genres.
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- A History of Women's Writing in France , pp. 120 - 146Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2000
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