Finding Contradictions in French Women’s History

The five books under review here are in many ways quite different from one another. Two are first monographs, one is a series of case studies, and two are synthetic works; two treat the early modern period, one the Revolution and early nineteenth century, and two the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Despite their differences in topic, period, and approach, the books share some common interests and together help to illuminate current trends in the field of French women’s history. All three of the narrower studies make use of legal cases to reflect on the issue of discourse versus practice, and to a degree the two synthetic works highlight the same theme. Throughout the past five hundred years, women may have received clear messages about their capacities and ideal roles, but their actual lives often contradicted such normative formulations. Implicitly or explicitly, the authors criticize works that, in focusing purely on the realm of discourse, present a skewed view of women’s experiences.

Another overarching conclusion to be drawn from reading these five books together is that some of the debates that dominated this subfield during the past twenty years or so seem to be calming in intensity. Much early work in the field sought to explain how a particular event or trend sped up or slowed down the process of women’s emancipation. These newer studies, in contrast, tend to emphasize the dual or contradictory nature of their findings rather than stating unequivocally that this or that event had purely negative or positive implications for women. So, for example, the French Revolution, a topic shared by all five books, is depicted as an event that simultaneously opened and closed doors to women’s empowerment, whereas earlier work tended to present the Revolution as either “good” or “bad” for women.¹ In moving beyond such either/or arguments, these authors seem instead to be seeking a middle ground, placing emphasis on ambiguities that make a single, coherent interpretation of the Revolution and other key events or trends impossible.

The title alone of Tracy Rizzo’s A Certain Emancipation of Women reflects this shift in perspective. It is meant to highlight how women were moving towards a certain (i.e., limited) degree of emancipation as well as the idea that such emancipation was certain to take place. Rizzo researched a legal publication called the Causes célèbres which was published in Paris between 1773 and 1789 by a lawyer named Des Essarts. Covering various “interesting” trials, the Causes célèbres recounted the events leading up the trial, presented the lawyers’ arguments, and discussed the judges’ decisions. Rizzo describes the publication as a mixture of fact and fiction; these were true stories told through melodramatic narratives of virtue under attack. After a chapter on the publication and its editor, Rizzo’s book has three short chapters, each focused on a particular kind of case: seductions, separations, and finally rapes. A brief concluding chapter connects her analysis of virtue in the Causes célèbres to the Republic of Virtue during the Revolution.

Throughout the book she argues that on the eve of the Revolution we can find much of the ground laid for what was to come in...