Integrating Women and Gender into the Teaching of French History, 1789 to the Present

Whether one teaches a seminar on the French Revolution or on Vichy, or a survey course on modern France to three hundred students, the challenge to integrate any new subfield is daunting because of the obvious limits on time and space in a syllabus; to incorporate new material other topics or reading assignments might have to be eliminated, a brutal reality that has fed the ongoing "culture wars" in academia. The purpose of this essay is twofold: first, to persuade those who have not taught gender of its centrality in understanding modern France; and second, to suggest ways of integrating gender into topics usually taught in a survey or in more narrowly defined specialized courses. My approach is also twofold: on the one hand, I suggest here a new periodization for modern France that is based on the fruit that scholarship in women's and gender history has borne during the past twenty-five years; on the other, I also follow the standard textbook chronology of major events and regimes so that instructors can choose readings without having to reformulate an entire syllabus. Thus my intent is not to propose a specific syllabus but to suggest ways to enhance parts of existing courses and to suggest new ways of thinking about French history for those who do wish to revamp their courses.

The argument implicit in this essay is that the course of French history is closely linked to the history of gender. French gender identity, while having a good deal in common with other modernizing countries, also has its particularities, and being aware of them helps us better understand national identity. Stated rather simplistically, eighteenth-century philosophy, coupled with the experience of revolution, created an essentialist conception of womanhood. The Revolution of 1789, in abandoning the estates-based order determined by blood and birth and replacing it with the principles of the universality of human rights and equality before the law, created a new need for more precisely defined gender distinctions. As Joan Wallach Scott and others have argued, the "universality" of rights was based on a white, male concept of the individual; women were viewed as different, and the application of rights to them would be "exceptional" and undermine the universal quality of rights. Moreover, the potential application of human rights and equality to women (and nonwhite races) threatened to denaturalize differences deemed to be dictated by nature (instead of, or in addition to, God). Because the experience of revolution did erode differences between men and women, by 1793 it became necessary to reinscribe those differences. ¹

Unlike the early modern period treated in Kathryn Norberg's essay, in which the main story line is state building, the late modern period is more about the "rise of the masses" and its challenges to the state in the assertion of individual rights, as well as rights based on class, gender, and race. What happens to women at every twist and turn in this transition from an absolutist state to one based on representation? As Norberg notes, women are better able to exert power during periods of tumult. Each successive revolution and war from 1789 on created the language for women to demand new rights, and the opportunities for them to engage in new kinds of political, social, and cultural activities. But these same tumultuous events in turn created new regimes whose integrity depended on women returning to "traditional" roles and on reinforcing the essentialist notions that took hold at the end of the eighteenth century. Other experiences unique to the French—their precocious fertility decline, their particular form of imperialism (as discussed in Patricia Lorcin's essay), the military defeats of 1870 and 1940, and the traumatic war experience of 1914–18—also shaped perceptions of gender and reactions to women and men who transgressed their prescribed roles or sexual identities.

This interpretation is not meant...