Did women have a civic identity in eighteenth-century France? In Citoyennes: Women and the Ideal of Citizenship in Eighteenth-Century France, Annie Smart contends that they did. While previous scholarship has emphasized the ideal of domestic motherhood or the image of the republican mother, Smart argues persuasively that many pre-revolutionary and revolutionary texts created another ideal for women – the ideal of civic motherhood. Smart asserts that women were portrayed as possessing civic virtue, and as promoting the values and ideals of the public sphere. Contemporary critics have theorized that the eighteenth-century ideal of the Republic intentionally excluded women from the public sphere. According to this perspective, a discourse of “Rousseauean” domestic motherhood stripped women of an active civic identity, and limited their role to breastfeeding and childcare. Eighteenth-century France marked thus the division between a male public sphere of political action and a female private sphere of the home. Citoyennes challenges this position and offers an alternative model of female identity. This interdisciplinary study brings together a variety of genres to demonstrate convincingly that women were portrayed as civic individuals. Using foundational texts such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile, or on Education (1762), revolutionary gouaches of Lesueur, and vaudeville plays of Year II of the Republic (1793/1794), this study brilliantly shows that in text and image, women were represented as devoted to both the public good and their families. In addition, Citoyennes offers an innovative interpretation of the home. Through re-examining sphere theory, this study challenges the tendency to equate the home with private concerns, and shows that the home can function as a site for both private life and civic identity. Citoyennes breaks new ground, for it both rectifies the ideal of domestic Rousseauean motherhood, and brings a fuller understanding to how female civic identity operated in important French texts and images.

First published in 1984, this book filled an acknowledged gap in the social history of the eighteenth century. Drawing on newspapers, journals, memoirs, diaries, courtesy books, county surveys and records, it also does so on the literature of the period. It examines the role assigned to women in society and explores attitudes of the time and the real experience of women.

In the eighteenth century, French women were active in a wide range of employments-from printmaking to running whole-sale businesses-although social and legal structures frequently limited their capacity to work independently. The contributors to Women and Work in Eighteenth-Century France reveal how women at all levels of society negotiated these structures with determination and ingenuity in order to provide for themselves and their families. Recent historiography on women and work in eighteenth-century France has focused on the model of the "family economy," in which women's work existed as part of the communal effort to keep the family afloat, usually in support of the patriarch's occupation. The ten essays in this volume offer case studies that complicate the conventional model: wives of ship captains managed family businesses in their husbands' extended absences; high-end prostitutes managed their own households; female weavers, tailors, and merchants increasingly appeared on eighteenth-century tax rolls and guild membership lists; and female members of the nobility possessed and wielded the same legal power as their male counterparts. Examining female workers within and outside of the context of family, Women and Work in Eighteenth-Century France challenges current scholarly assumptions about gender and labor. This stimulating and important collection of essays broadens our understanding of the diversity, vitality, and crucial importance of women's work in the eighteenth-century economy.

Was the century of Voltaire also the century of women? In the eighteenth century changes in the nature of work, family life, sexuality, education, law, religion, politics and warfare radically altered the lives of women. Some of these developments caused immense confusion and suffering; others greatly expanded women’s opportunities and worldview – long before the various women’s suffrage movements were more than a glimmer on the horizon. This study pays attention to queens as well as commoners; respectable working women as well as prostitutes; women physicists and mathematicians as well as musicians and actresses; feminists as well as their critics. The result is a rich and morally complex tale of conflict and tragedy, but also of achievement. The book deals with many regions and topics often under-represented in general surveys of European women, including coverage of the Balkans and both European Turkey and Anatolia, of Eastern Europe, of European colonial expansion (particularly the slave trade) and of Muslim, Eastern Orthodox, and Jewish women's history. Bringing all of Europe into the narrative of early modern women's history challenges many received assumptions about Europe and women in past times, and provides essential background for dealing with issues of diversity in the Europe of today.

The eighteenth century was an age when not only the aristocracy but a burgeoning middle class could enjoy a remarkable flowering of the arts. But it was a man's world; any woman who wished to succeed as an artist had to overcome numerous obstacles. In a society in which women were required to marry, reproduce, and conform to rigid social conventions a professional artist risked becoming an object of gossip and hostility. Nevertheless, for a woman who had charm and good looks, was ambitious, and allied talent with hard work, success was attainable. This book examines the careers and working lives of celebrated artists like Angelica Kauffman and Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun but also of those who are now forgotten. As well as assessing the work itself - from history and genre painting to portraits - it considers artists' studios, the functioning of the print market, how art was sold, the role of patrons and the flourishing world of the lady amateur. It is enriched by up to 55 illustrations in glorious colour.

This anthology gathers together various texts by and about women, ranging from `conduct' manuals to pamphlets on prostitution, from medical texts to critical definitions of women's writing, from anti-female satires to appeals for female equality. By making this material more widely available, Women in the Eighteenth Century complements the current upsurge in feminist writing on eighteenth-century literary history and offers students the opportunity to make their own rereadings of literary texts and their ideological contexts.

This book contributes to the literary history of eighteenth-century women’s life writings, particularly those labeled “scandalous memoirs.” It examines how the evolution of this subgenre was shaped partially by several innovative memoirs that have received only modest critical attention. Breashears argues that Madame de La Touche’s Apologie and her friend Lady Vane’s Memoirs contributed to the crystallization of this sub-genre at mid-century, and that Lady Vane’s collaboration with Tobias Smollett in The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle resulted in a brilliant experiment in the relationship between gender and genre. It demonstrates that the Memoirs of Catherine Jemmat incorporated influential new strategies for self-justification in response to changing kinship priorities, and that Margaret Coghlan’s Memoirs introduced revolutionary themes that created a hybrid: the political scandalous memoir. This book will therefore appeal to scholars interested in life writing, women’s history, genre theory, and eighteenth-century British literature.

Through both longer essays and shorter case studies, this book examines the relationship of European women from various countries and backgrounds to collecting, in order to explore the social practices and material and visual cultures of collecting in eighteenth-century Europe. It recovers their lives and examines their interests, their methodologies, and their collections and objects—some of which have rarely been studied before. The book also considers women’s role as producers, that is, creators of objects that were collected. Detailed examination of the artefacts—both visually, and in relation to their historical contexts—exposes new ways of thinking about collecting in relation to the arts and sciences in eighteenth-century Europe. The book is interdisciplinary in its makeup and brings together scholars from a wide range of fields. It will be of interest to those working in art history, material and visual culture, history of collecting, history of science, literary studies, women’s studies, gender studies, and art conservation.

Women's everyday choices can engender revolutionary acts. This collection gathers essays that build upon this premise and examines the ways in which eighteenth-century women defied not only the restrictions their own culture sought to enforce, but also the restrictions our historical and literary understandings have created.