Taking a different approach than Landes and Scott, Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall examines male support of women’s inclusion in the public sphere. Although certain historians would disagree with her, she argues that certain Jacobins, including Robespierre, were in fact Old Regime feminists, and that their revolutionary arguments for women’s inferior status did not stem from the general atmosphere of chauvinism during the Old Regime, but represented a conservative retreat from their previous position on the issue. Sepinwall uses archival materials from the Academy of Arras and works published by Léon Berthe to examine the admission of two women to the Academy in 1787, Robespierre’s support of the decision, and his support for the inclusion of …show more content…
Through the analysis of Thérésia Cabarus’s portrait, Amy Freund attempts to examine Cabarus’s failure to “create a feminine version of political agency through portraiture” in order to provide insight into the unfulfilled promises of female citizenship during the French Revolution. She asserts that, through the use of a combination of imagery associated with revolutionary femininity, including the emphasis on the sitter’s physical passivity and sentimental attachments, and conventions usually associated with male portraiture, Cabarrus and Laneuville, the painter, attempted to present her portrait as an argument for women to be granted an active role in revolutionary politics. Freund suggests that the portrait failed to achieve its goals because it recalled the Terror and the disunity of France in addition to invoking the “anxiety surrounding the increased visibility of women in post-Thermidorean social life and visual representation.” Because of its relative failure, Freund considers Cabarrus’s portrait a symbol of the “possibilities and limitations of female agency in Revolutionary portraiture and politics” as well as a shift in portraiture; as she remarks, “portraiture after 1789 shouldered the burdens formerly borne by history …show more content…
Another, broader approach to the study of women during the French Revolution is the examination of the everyday woman. One example of this type of scholarship is Dominique Godineau’s groundbreaking The Women of Paris and their French Revolution, which she originally published in 1988 as Citoyennes tricoteuses: Les Femmes du peuple à Paris pendant la Révolution française. In this work, Godineau ambitiously attempts to merge women’s history with political history; through examination of the common woman, she argues that one can return the women’s revolutionary movement to its proper context, reminding readers that “women too have a political past that is often ignored and crushed under the weight of representations inherited from the nineteenth century.” She claims that “studying women during the Revolution allows us to enrich our comprehension of the revolutionary phenomenon.” She utilizes police records to find traces of the ordinary, working-class women, who Godineau argues
The book of “Revolutionary Mothers: Women in the Struggle for America’s Independence” is written by Carol Berkin, a professor of American history at Baruch College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She has been considered as an expert on the subject of women's history in colonial America. Through her research, Professor Berkin has provided vivid interpretations of seventeenth and eighteenth-century women as active participants in the creation of their societies in addition to the existing stories regarding the American Revolution.
In Carol Berkin Revolutionary Mothers, Berkin goes beyond the history books, and argues that the Revolutionary period was not just a romantic period in our nation history, but a time of change of both men and women of race, social class, and culture. Berkin describes women involvement in boycotts, protest, and their experiences during the war and on the home front. She goes into a whole different level and focuses her views on women of lower social classes, the Native Americans and African Americans – groups whom faced difficult obstacle during the Revolution. She brings to life the importance of Revolutionary Women. Berkin gives us true stories introducing us to ordinary women of all social classes who were involved and affected by the Revolution War.
Often historical events leading up to the twentieth century are dominated by men and the role of women is seemingly non-existent outside of reproduction. When one thinks of notable and memorable names and events of the Revolution, men are the first to be mentioned. The American Revolution was mainly dominated by men including George Washington, Samuel Adams, and Benjamin Franklin. There is no denying that men were vitally important to the American Revolution, but what were the women doing? Often overlooked, the women of the Revolution played a key role in the outcome of the nation. The women of the American Revolution, although not always recognized, were an influential society that assumed risky jobs like soldiers, as well as involvement
Throughout history, women have struggled with, and fought against oppression. They have been held back and weighed down by the sexist ideas of a male dominated society which has controlled cultural, economic and political ideas and structure. During the mid-1800’s to early 1900’s women became more vocal and rebuked sexism and the role that had been defined for them. Fighting with the powerful written word, women sought a voice, equality amongst men and an identity outside of their family. In many literary writings, especially by women, during the mid-1800’s to early 1900’s, we see symbols of oppression and the search for gender equality in society. Writing based on their own experiences, had it not been for the works of Susan Glaspell, Kate Chopin, and similar feminist authors of their time, we may not have seen a reform movement to improve gender roles in a culture in which women had been overshadowed by men.
Linda Kreber's Women In The Republic: Intellect And Ideology In Revolutionary America was written to focus on the role of women after the revolution. Kreber analyzed the various roles of women in the revolution, and the impact these roles had on women in the republic following. ...
With the onset of the feminist movement, Lerner realized that most contribution to women’s history was not by historical scholars, but rather by feminist scholars. In her article, “New Approaches to the Study of Women,” she conceded that the feminist “frame of reference has become archaic and fairly useless.” She in turn posed new ways on how historians and students could broaden this scope—adding fresh approaches to already known material or diving into newly found primary sources. Lerner helped by acting as an organizer in Women’s History Sources, which made it possible to find primary sources that included women without the need to search through a woman’s male family. She also pointed to the Notable American Women sources, which included subject bibliographies. Additionally, Lerner believed the study of ‘women’ was too vast, that historians should notice the roles and status of women, and that we should see women as subjugated instead of oppressed. Also, Lerner noticed that women have by and large been deprived of equal education, as she noted in her article “A View from the Women’s Side.” She wrote that society had come far, noting that while 10.4% of women in the 50’s were awarded Ph. D degrees, by the early 1980’s women had been awarded 32.6% of Ph. D degrees. More so, she helped lobby for appointments of women to the A.H.A. and O.A.H.
Gundersen, Joan R.. To Be Useful to the World: Women in Revolutionary America, 1740-1790. Rev. ed. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006.
The Revolutionary was was different for all women. Women reported their memories to be a “time of constant danger, anxiety, harassment, and unfamiliar and different responsibilities” (Berkin, Cherny, Gormly, Miller, 2013, 156). Women would watch their men go off to war
The French Revolution was a period of time in which France underwent many changes, many which could be considered revolutionary. France’s whole system and way of being was completely changed. New ideas were proposed everyday. An idea is revolutionary when it is a new idea, when it is something that has never been thought of before. The Declaration of the Rights of Women written by Olympe de Gouges on September 1791, was one of the ideas proposed to the National Assembly (Hunt, Web 1). The document proposed that since the French Revolution was all about finding equality for all people, women should be equal to men and therefore, should have the same rights as men did. Women at the time live in terrible conditions. They had little access to education, and therefore could not enter professional occupations that required advanced education, were legally deprived of the right to vote, and were not considered citizens (Class Discussion Notes). If equal rights were not given to women, the French Revolution had not reached its full potential, according to Gouges. She expressed this idea in her document, saying, “This revolution will only take effect when all women become fully aware of their deplorable condition, and of the rights they have lost in society” (Gouges, Web). Anyone that questioned the Revolution was immediately put to death (Class Discussion Notes). If Gouges’ document and ideas were important enough to catch the attention of the National Assembly and for her to be put to death, her ideas could be considered important and revolutionary (Britannica, Web 1) But, the document was not revolutionary. The Declaration of the Rights of Women was not a revolutionary document because its ideas were taken from other people and were no...
Gloria Steinem, a renowned feminist activist and co-founder of the women’s rights publication Ms. Magazine, gives a commencement speech at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, on May 31, 1970. Steinem’s speech “Living The Revolution” is delivered to the graduating class of Vassar College, founded in 1865 as a liberal arts college for women and then became coeducational a year before the speech was delivered in 1969. The intent of this speech is to inform the listeners and to shed light on the fact that women are not treated equally to their white male counterparts, though society has been convinced otherwise and to argue that it is crucial for all minorities, and even white males, to be relieved of their “stereotypical” duties in order for balance to exist. Steinem executes her speech’s purpose by dividing it up into four parts to explain the four different “myths” put against women while using a few rhetorical strategies and logical, ethical, and emotional appeals.
Aristotle once claimed that, “The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.” Artists, such as Louise-Elizabeth Vigée Le Brun and Mary Cassatt, captured not only the way things physically appeared on the outside, but also the emotions that were transpiring on the inside. A part no always visible to the viewer. While both artists, Le Brun and Cassatt, worked within the perimeters of their artistic cultures --the 18th century in which female artists were excluded and the 19th century, in which women were artistically limited-- they were able to capture the loving relationship between mother and child, but in works such as Marie Antoinette and Her Children and Mother Nursing her Child 1898,
As widely cited the French Revolution served as the greatest war of liberation of the human race and decried as bloodthirsty lesson on the working of mob mentality. Women despite their extensive participation in the relatively legitimate and orderly legislative and political process, which characterized the first phase of the Revolution, as well as in the violence of the Terror were no better off in 1804 after the formulation of the Napoleonic Code. The question asked is plain. How did women after achieving hard-earned triumph, slip back to the controlling rule of men? The answer lies in the contemporary notions about women, and the image of the ideal revolutionary mother and wife propounded by philosophers, political leaders, and even women of the time. This is essentially the focus for this paper, as the paper expounds on the seemingly elusive women rights
When Simone de Beauvoir died in Paris in 1986, the wreath of obituaries almost universally spoke of her as the 'mother' of contemporary feminism and its major twentieth century theoretician. De Beauvoir, it was implied as much as stated, was the mother-figure to generations of women, a symbol of all that they could be, and a powerful demonstration of a life of freedom and autonomy (Evans 1).
The study of gender and its historical analysis has, itself, evolved. Linda Kerber in her essay Seperate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman’s Place: The Rhetoric of Women’s History argues that the metaphor of a separate women’s sphere which she traces back to the Victorian era and to de Tocqueville’s analysis of America—and which may, indeed, have been useful at one point, i...
“Confronted by the expressive, powerful or victimized images of Gentileschi’s women, writers have been unable to fit her paintings into the usual feminine stereotype: they cannot trace the expected signs of femininity, weakness, gracefulness or delicateness. Thus, unable to put her work into a stereotype, they turn instead to the dramatic events of her life” (10)