Sex, Honor and Citizenship in Early Third Republic France (review)

Andrea Mansker’s fine volume on the gender of French citizenship adds to an already impressive corpus of recent North American scholarship on gender identities and relations in France between the Franco-Prussian War and the First World War. One of Mansker’s many virtues is her ability to assimilate that scholarship without reproducing its assumptions in an unquestioning fashion. In particular, she interrogates the capacity of the temporal limits of the long nineteenth century to frame accounts of gender history adequately: first, by questioning the ‘widely accepted contention’ that modern Western feminisms stemmed solely from the gendered paradoxes of the French Revolution, which she refers to as ‘the Pateman-Scott paradigm’ (p. 239); and second, by stressing the ‘centrality of French honor codes to women’s civic participation prior to the Great War’ (p. 5). As such, she responds to ‘the paradox of the “French lag” in obtaining women’s suffrage’ (p. 14), despite the Third Republic’s revolutionary heritage and its distinction as one of the first European states to grant universal manhood suffrage in 1870. By adopting an approach that focuses on the ‘cultural environment’ in which women articulated their claims for citizenship, she challenges the scholarly narrative that analyses post-revolutionary feminism simply in terms of abstract individualism or ‘republican motherhood’. She argues that scholars have failed to focus sufficiently on the importance of ‘the sexual question’ in both moderate and radical activists’ struggle for citizenship (p. 13). Robert Nye’s influential work argues that the honour system’s enforcement of gender division held sway until the Great War, when women entered the public sphere in large numbers and thereby deprived the social codes of their distinctly masculine character. Mansker contends that during the Belle Époque the meaning of honour was already in a constant state of renegotiation: in the divorce court (in Chapter 3, via a large sample of divorce pleadings and judgments between 1884 and 1914), in eleven years of legislative deliberations and lawsuits over the divorced woman’s married name between 1882 and the new law of 1893 granting autonomous civil capacity to separated women (Chapter 4), in a national debate about women’s capacity for the duel, in a suffrage bill of 1901 proposing that single women be granted the vote (Chapter 5), in feminist grassroots organization against the venereal peril, and in women’s fight for acceptance in the violent professional world of journalism (Chapter 6). Chapters 1 and 2 exemplify the ways in which women appropriated masculine honour codes to contest men’s monopoly of public space by bringing to light the fascinating case of the militant journalist Arria Ly, who made national headlines in 1911 when she challenged a prominent male editor-in-chief to a duel, at a public lecture in Toulouse, for ‘outraging’ her honour by publishing a letter accusing her of lesbianism. As Ly was to write in 1903: ‘L’honneur n’a pas de sexe’ (p. 250 n. 6).