Introduction

10 Introduction Laurence M. Porter How do women collaborate, and how do they compete? These questions have profound implications for our understanding of society; and yet, literary and cultural studies have tended to seek answers in only two spheres—the familial and the erotic. We believe that Women's Studies in general could benefit from encouraging more research on interactions among real as well as fictive women beyond the traditional topics of love relations and the family. Because the record of women's activities often is dismissed or ignored by the masculinist historical record, even their creative and independent achievements—to say nothing of their influence on society—are obscured and forgotten. The open-minded outlook of the New Historicism and its equivalents in literary studies must be adopted to form a more accurate image of our heritage and of our society. For example, if book sales were considered in determining the literary canon, la comtesse de Ségur (with well over 30,000,000 copies of her works sold by Hachette) might well emerge as the most culturally important nineteenth-century French author. Such considerations need not disparage or attack "high culture," but can instead highlight both its singularity and its commonality with popular art. In terms of the sociolect (our "received wisdom" or "common knowledge"), Emma Bovary is a horrible example of what a young person can become if she is not harshly disciplined like Ségur's naughty Sophie (with her teleological tag-name). Of course, giving women their due involves not only paying respectful attention to everyday life, but also—and above all— to recognizing expressions of women's autonomy and artistic power in their fictional transpositions ofbiography and history, and in their mythopoeia. For this special issue of Women in French Studies, we sought essays on historical or fictional collaborations and competition among women not only in the cénacle but also in other areas such as education, the workplace, the professions, politics, salons, courts, or convents. The famous cliché of art historians—" 'Anonymous' was a woman"—obtains throughout the social and humanistic disciplines, except that in many areas women's activities and contributions to society remain even more obscure than anonymity itself, when no artifact or historical record remains to lead us back to discover the creator. Moreover, in the areas of dyadic and group friendships outside the family, while male bonding and "homosociality" have always been recognized and are being increasingly studied, female equivalents that have attracted critics' attention are usually limited to Lesbian examples (such as Monique Wittig's Les Guérillères or L'Opoponax), or lightly dismissed as somehow insignificant Introduction1 1 ("Chick Lit" or "Chick Flicks" for example). We know that supportive fathers tend to produce creative daughters, but otherwise, according to our sociolect, intellectual inspiration flowing from either a female or a male source to a male creator seems the norm (we have some idea how both Maxime Du Camp and George Sand influenced Flaubert), but intellectual inspiration flowing from a female to a female tends to be overlooked in favor of interpretations depending on sexuality or devotion as explanations. How did Grace Frick influence Marguerite Yourcenar as a writer? In writings on national literatures other than French, one woman's intellectual influence on another seems to receive more attention. Our current collection of studies, however, brackets this issue in order to concentrate on broader social trends. We formed an editorial team consisting of a woman and a man, a medievalist and a modernist, each with a keen long-term interest in women's studies, in order to encourage, evaluate, and help refine feminosocial work from a wide variety of perspectives, but focused on two relatively neglected areas— one chronological (the Middle Ages and the Renaissance), the other social (groups other than the erotic dyad and the family). Although the long-term decline of the church and family as institutions may have contributed to a decline of social connectivity in recent times, we believe that the following set of essays by members of Women in French can help map and elucidate women's often neglected contributions—in both task and maintenance—toward fostering social bonds. Julia Holderness studies...