La France, les femmes et le pouvoir, II: Les Résistances de la société (XVIIe–XVIIIe siècle) (review)

This is the companion volume to Éliane Viennot's La France, les femmes et le pouvoir: l'invention de la loi salique (V^e–XVI^e siècle) (2006) and will be immensely valuable to those researching women's lives in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Treating the period within four hundred and thirty or so pages means that this is inevitably a general study, but the book nevertheless casts its net over a wide range of women and men, across social ranks and in many areas of life, and accords equal consideration to each century. It is intent on presenting women's achievements and the power that women acquired, both in the narrower, political sense and in fields such as art, writing, and the theatre, among others. Set against these, however, as the book's subtitle suggests, is the unabating opposition of certain powerful elements in society, whether they be the Church, the Parlements, or individuals. Viennot shows that, despite the evident progress women made between the beginning of the seventeenth century and the end of the eighteenth, improvement was by no means gradual. Rather, she emphasizes the start–stop nature and the extreme fragility of the process of advancement, arguing that, although women in the eighteenth century benefited from broad social changes, such as increasing tolerance or some blurring of class boundaries, it was men who enjoyed the greater advantages. Throughout, the author examines the tension between modernizing, progressive forces and those ranged against any kind of experimentation; the issue of change and continuity is therefore a central concern of the book. Viennot concludes on an optimistic note, outlining the fundamental transformation that had occurred since the sixteenth century, and linking the achievements on behalf of women with other movements of liberation in the second half of the eighteenth. On occasion, the study is perhaps overly reliant on secondary sources, but these are fluently synthesized and usefully bring together the work that has been done so far. Moreover, we are continually made aware of areas in which further research is needed: the 'battle of the sexes', for instance, and the ground on which it was fought; Viennot states that this battle was increasingly outside the 'littérature "de combat"', and that the 'gens du monde' were open to the notion of equality for women. Greater investigation into the balance between progressive and conservative forces, in both centuries, and the extent to which the new ideas were championed in society would no doubt prove rewarding. With regard to the increase in the number of women writers during the period, Viennot stresses the significance of advances in publishing; here again, the rise of cheap editions and the appearance of journals, as well as the nature of the female readership and its desire for different types of material, would repay further research. But these are only two areas suggested by a book that is full of possibilities.