The Other Enlightenment: How French Women Became Modern - Book Review

Journal of Social History, Summer, 2003 by Linda L. Clark

The Other Enlightenment: How French Women Became Modern. By Carla Hesse (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001. xx plus 233 pp. $35.00).

This stimulating study of French women and publishing between 1789 and 1800 contributes significantly to both the cultural history of the French Revolution and current debate about the Revolution's impact on women. Hesse explicitly challenges the interpretation of scholars such as Joan Landes and Joan Scott, who see the Revolution setting women back by diminishing the societal role in the sphere of public discussion enjoyed by prominent eighteenth-century salonnieres and not awarding them the new political rights of citizens (citoyens) who were, by definition, male. (1) Hesse, however, finds progress indicated by women authors' publication record during the revolutionary decade. Her focus is thus not on the pre-revolutionary Enlightenment but rather on what women's absorption of the Enlightenment's "critical reason" enabled them to do during the Revolution (p. xii). Yet placing women in the "other" Enlightenment also indicates that they, like servants, non-Europeans, or children, were often understood to be e xcluded from the Enlightenment's "universal laws" (p. xi).

Hesse's statistical and thematic analysis of women's authorship is highly revealing. Identifying 55 women with works in print in France between 1766 and 1777, and 78 women between 1777 and 1788, she then records a fourfold increase from 1789 to 1800, when 329 women (312 of them still alive in 1789) were in print (p.37). Furthermore, despite the policy changes later wrought by Napoleon Bonaparte and the Bourbon Restoration, 299 women had publications between 1811 and 1821. Hesse situates explanations for the increases squarely within the Revolution. Although the Old Regime's censorship did vary in efficacy, the Revolution clearly eased controls on printed materials and thus opened the competitive market for published works to more authors. Revolutionary legislatures' enactments also enlarged the literary marketplace by heightening readers' interest in current developments. A comparison of men and women authors' relative representation as publishing outlets expanded reveals that although women were never more t han a small minority of published French authors before and after 1789, their place among authors rose from 2 percent in 1784 to 4 percent by 1820 (p. 38). Whereas English women had been somewhat more likely to publish than French counterparts during the 1780s, after 1789 "the proportions evened our" (p. 39). A sixty-four-page appendix listing women's publications during the Revolution provides valuable supporting detail, but, in the absence of a full bibliography, scholars must use footnotes to trace secondary works cited.

Women's publishing record is central to Hesse's convincing challenge to the argument that the Revolution imposed a greater exclusion of women from the public sphere of discussion and action. In addition, she analyzes the women writers' identity, subject matter, and engagement with changing political realities. Fully one-third of the 329 women in print between 1789 and 1800 were aristocratic by birth or marriage (p. 45). Most of the others had bourgeois backgrounds, their families frequently positioned among the upper professional echelons. Such social origins were anything but marginal and seem unsurprising because of the importance of family support for young women's access to education, and hence writing ability, during this period. They also dovetail with data on continuities among elites across the revolutionary and post-revolutionary eras. Certainly legislators and opinion brokers after 1789 or 1800 increasingly contended that women belonged in the private sphere of the home rather than in any public are na, but women could write at home and did not necessarily create scandal if they did. Indeed, the majority of the women in print between 1789 and 1800 (198 of 329) were married (p.45). What led to some famous instances of repression, such as the execution of Olympe de Gouges in 1793 or Napoleons exiling of Mine Germaine de Stael, Hesse contends, was not the act of writing but, rather, controversial content. Nonetheless, writing inevitably heightened women's awareness of themselves as "self-creating" individuals and so made them more modern (p. xii). Not surprisingly, then, Hesse also documents a backlash against women authors, just as, previously, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, among others, had attacked women's prominence in the oral culture of salons.

An analysis of the content of 657 publications by women during the Revolution reveals that their most common genre was the political pamphlet (251 examples). These plus 96 novels, 49 plays, 39 educational treatises, 38 volumes of poetry, and other works add up to the conclusion that there were then no specifically feminine genres and that women actively engaged with political issues, whether defending or criticizing aspects of the Revolution (p. 53).