The Virtuous Marketplace: Women and Men, Money and Politics in Paris, 1830-1870 (review)

In the Virtuous Marketplace, Victoria E. Thompson argues that between 1830 and 1879 Parisians reconceptualized the gendered nature of the economy. She focuses on the shift in literary and press imagery of specific female cultural types between 1830 and 1879 and posits that there was an economic corollary to the political exclusion of women from civil society articulated during the French Revolution and then re-affirmed by the Napoleonic Code. She traces the interplay between misogynistic images of women who sold their bodies, retailed commodities, or speculated in the stock market and the rise of domestic ideologies that asserted women’s inherent weaknesses and natural inabilities to participate independently in the expanding commercial economy. Thompson asserts that new cultural images of women whose virtuosity was defined by separation from the marketplace paved the way for public policies that excluded women from particular types of economic activity. She also shows how this process formed part of a larger articulation of bourgeois values that concerned itself to a very great extent with the drawing of social boundaries. In so doing, Thompson makes a contribution to our understanding of the changes in women’s social roles that took place in nineteenth century industrial society.

Thompson begins her analysis with the prostitute and the grisette, as free women whose interaction with the market was deemed in popular imagery of the 1830s as immoral and ultimately unsuccessful, if not tragic. Yet while the fate of the prostitute was to fall under tighter public control, the grisette became a romanticized figure in the 1840s, one more closely associated with the student and with selfless if socially self-destructive love for him. Grisettes supposedly attended to the sexual and domestic needs of students in small attic apartments until they were abandoned for more proper middle-class brides at the completion of their lovers’ studies. Though the frequency with which this domestic arrangement actually took place remains unclear, Thompson shows how the grisette became a nostalgic figure for the bourgeoisie by the time of the Second Empire, one whose command of literary admiration rested on her abandonment of earlier materialistic motivations in favor of selfless love for her man. The domestication of literary and press images of women workers followed suit with the emergence during the Second Empire of the virtuous ouvrière as a popular figure. Working for wages but staying as close to home as possible, the image of the virtuous ouvrière sanctified the woman who gave up active participation in the labor force at marriage and then devoted the rest of her life to the domestic needs of her family. Thompson’s extensive reading of literary sources enables her to very beautifully illustrate how the ideal of separation of home from workplace was prescribed to the popular classes.

Thompson also treats market women in Paris and the efforts of the police and of municipal authorities to regulate the sale of commodities in streets, squares, and open air markets. Her argument is that the Second Empire crackdowns on ambulatory vendors and the reform of the Halles and Temple used clothing market were driven by suspicion of women retailers, by fear that female vendors sold their bodies on the side, and by the desire to re-make market women into more virtuous merchants. Thompson characterizes open air retail as popular, and therefore culturally suspect, commerce. By moving market vendors indoors where they could be subjected to social control, Thompson believes that petty women traders were transformed into bourgeois merchants. Whether that transformation was in fact or in the cultural imagery, or both, is somewhat unclear. Her analysis of the 1868 regulations governing commerce at the Halles market emphasizes sexual control of female vendors over all other municipal objectives. Thus the pressing issues of increasing available food supply to the burgeoning population and regulating quality through greater levels of accountability receive short shrift. So too does the symbolic import...