The Origins of Modern Gender in French Theory and Practice: Complicating the Picture

Carla Hesse. The Other Enlightenment: How French Women Became Modern. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001. xvi + 256 pp.

Clare Haru Crowston. Fabricating Women: The Seamstresses of Old Regime France, 1675-1791. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001. xviii + 508 pp.

Read individually, each of these books makes an original and important intervention into the history of modern Western gender relations, particularly in France. Each offers revisions of commonly argued theses about the nature of patriarchy in Ancien Regime France, about the construction of gender in the process of state formation, about women and work, and about the place of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution in the construction of modern gender. Crowston and Hesse individually present impressive scholarship and persuasive revisionist arguments regarding this history. Read together, their books demonstrate the continually increasing sophistication of scholarship and argumentation on the history of women and gender, as well as the persistence of very different readings of that history and how it fits (or does not fit) into historical narratives of long standing. In particular, these two scholars draw somewhat different pictures of the gender order of early modern France and then about the impact of the Enlightenment and the Revolution on women and gender.

Both authors embed their arguments in the historiography of women and gender in Europe, although they begin from critical, indeed tendentious, characterizations of that historiography. They ironically summarize their predecessors with quite differing emphases. Hesse frames her book as a response to a historiographic tradition that sees the Ancien Regime as "benign" with respect to women, especially when compared to the rigid gender polarization and exclusions associated with post-Enlightenment modernity. She agrees with the temporality that assigns a special place in the evolution of modern gender relations to the eighteenth-century Enlightenment era and the Revolution, but argues a more liberal interpretation of those historical moments. Emergent Republicanism, influenced by some Enlightenment theory, may indeed have placed limitations on women's moral and political autonomy. But the practices of the literary marketplace, as reformed in the Revolutionary era, opened new possibilities for women. In contrast with many other feminist readings of this history, Hesse asserts her view that "women were initially excluded from active citizenship not because citizenship was conceived of as inherently masculine, but because women were not perceived to be either capable of self-governance or of reasoning about general rather than particular interests" (xiv). Her book focuses on gender struggles, to be sure; it nevertheless highlights a particular set of French women who despite limitations "used the cultural resources of modern commercial society to . . . (stake) a successful claim for themselves as modern individuals in the public world" (xv).

Crowston's alternative but similarly tendentious view of previous historiography emphasizes instead arguments that point to the "patriarchalism" of the Ancien Regime and the combined power of the guilds and the early modern state to suppress female autonomy. Crowston is interested in the theoretical reframing of gender that occurred in the Enlightenment and Revolutionary eras, but she argues that some important innovations in the construction of modern gender in France (in particular the naturalization of a prevailing gender division of labor) can be located beginning with the late-seventeenth-century creation in Paris of the guild of seamstresses, who are the focus of her study.

Her focus on these seamstresses undermines many common assumptions about women's history: about the place of women in the guild system and the public sphere in the Ancien Regime, about the relationship between women workers and the state, and about the origins of the modern association between gender and fashion and self-fashioning. In Crowston's history, the seamstresses of Ancien Regime France emerge as relatively powerful and autonomous figures whose work, civic, and gender identities drew upon many sources, but were institutionalized in important ways because of the existence and practices...