The Virtuous Marketplace : Women and Men, Money and Politics in Paris 1830-1870 by Victoria E. Thompson (review)

Book Reviews123 Throughout much of the century it was considered hazardous for a woman's feminine reputation to undertake serious writing, especially with the goal ofpublication. This risk is aptly illustrated by Marie-Claude Shapira in her article on the careers ofAmable Tastu and Delphine Gay. Both romantic poets aspired to fame and at first realized publication and renown. Later Delphine Gay incurred the critic's wrath for her "virility." Amable Tastu, despite the favor of Sainte-Beuve, also grew disillusioned and abandoned her poetic vocation. Barbel Plötner, in her article on the literary début of Elisa Mercosur, traces a similar scenario for this provincial poetess who enjoyed early fame in her native Brittany yet failed to achieve a lasting reputation when she attempted to live by her pen in Paris, where her poetry was treated as the tepid œuvre of a naïve girl. Michèle Fontana's essay ". . . Louise Ackerman face à Ia critique" explores the innovations of a serious poet who was first maligned for her atheism and later for supposedly dissimulating her sex by composing philosophical poetry. By contrast, in her article on the œuvre ofAnna de Noailles, Gayle Levy presents a poetess who met with enduring success by capitalizing upon an appeal to intimacy and the turn-of-the-century taste for the exotic. Hélène Millot, in her informative article on the little journals of the era, credits La Plume, although misogynist in its debut, with achieving a breakthrough when it published a review in 1 903 by Stuart Merrill. He recognized in the poetry of Lucie Delarue-Mardrus and Renée Vivien that l'écritureféminine had found its voice. Fortunately, as Planté and the authors of this collection affirm, many of these previously neglected poetesses enjoy an enthusiastic reading today. I heartily recommend these essays, with their extensive bibliographical footnotes, as a valuable resource for scholars and advanced students. Adele Olmstead SullivanIndependent scholar Victoria E. Thompson. The Virtuous Marketplace : Womenand Men, Money and Politics in Paris 1830-1870. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. ISBN: 0-8018-6414-3. Pp. 240. $41.95. Victoria E. Thompson's The Virtuous Marketplace, already recognized in the field of French history, offers feminist scholars in literature and interdisciplinary studies rich insights for deciphering the textual representation of women in a society where identity comes to revolve around the marketplace and money. Thompson first documents how women of what she calls the "popular class" had dominated the central city marketplace in the 1 8th and early nineteenth century as workers, merchants, street-sellers, and small business owners. She recalls that when the 1 804 Civil Code reclassified women as legal minors, female merchants were the only women who retained their right to bind their own property , and even their husbands' property, through legal contracts. She then demonstrates how, as money came to define social identity and prestige throughout the 19th century, women's visibility and power in the 124Women in French Studies popular markets became problematic. In markets such as the renovated Halles, women lost the right to circulate and to address passers-by as they pleased. When the notion ofthe male breadwinner in working families became prevalent , government officials began to grant women stalls on the basis of their worthiness for charity rather than their market experience or skills. Thompson also investigates the importance of women merchants and producers as images ofthe social fears created by the new economy, arguing convincingly that the prostitute became a social image of feared effects of unregulated market activity. In the name of controlling prostitution and protecting public health, men soon claimed the right to limit women's role and movements in the several domains of the marketplace. Other women engaged in trade in Paris became increasingly associated with the prostitute and the social danger she represented. The grisettes, used originally simply a term for women merchants and producers of popular origins, became identified specifically as "young milliners, flower-makers, seamstresses, fringers, embroiderers, and book decorators" (Huart, Physiologie de la grisette, 1 850). These women became increasingly suspected of using their work in these trades as a front for trading themselves. Similarly, as represented...