Figurations of the Feminine in the Early French Women's Press, 1758–1848 by Siobhán McIlvanney (review)

Siobhán McIlvanney's thought-provoking contribution to the growing field of French media and gender studies focuses on how the early French women's press fostered a sense of collective identity based on gender, and promoted women's intellectual, familial, and professional contributions to French society. The historical sweep of this study is ambitious, extending from the earliest French women's journal for elite readers in 1758, through the tumultuous years of Revolution and Empire, to the July Monarchy when women's journals began to flourish and target diverse readerships. McIlvanney argues that the early presse féminine played a pivotal role in blurring the public–private divide for the 'ordinary French female subject' and contends that such journals 'play a more intellectually, politically, and emotionally significant role in lives of female readers than has been accounted for critically' (p. 4). Countering longstanding critical prejudice that dismisses the feminine press as 'soporifically vacuous and surreptitiously indoctrinating' (ibid.), McIlvanney argues that women writers and readers, across and within journals, found pleasure even as they engaged in 'ideological wrestling' that could generate a feminist consciousness (p. 5, n. 7). Taking feminism here as that which challenges male domination or questions women's status, McIlvanney claims that feminist sentiments do appear in press forms figuring the feminine. She identifies three key major themes in the press during this long period of women's disenfranchisement: their education, their role in the family, and their employment. The study is structured around a threefold perspective that contextualizes women's roles and their press within a changing French society, analyses the figurations of womanhood in that press, and examines the role of reader reception of their content. The introductory chapter offers a useful albeit familiar account of women's place in the French socio-political context from 1758 to 1848 and an overview of concomitant developments in the women's press. The subsequent four chapters examine examples of women's press subgenres identified as the 'drawing room' journal, the fashion journal, the domestic journal, and the feminist journal. McIlvanney analyses the discursive treatment of the major themes and the reader relationship in some ten journals spanning the period, starting with the Journal des dames (1758–86) and ending with the radical Saint-Simonian women's journal La Femme libre (1832–34) and Eugénie Foa's daily newspaper, La Voix des femmes (1848). Building on foundational scholarship on the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French women's press, this study overlooks some recent scholarship that could have enriched the conversation. Readers unfamiliar with French history may have trouble keeping their bearings whereas others may wish for more indepth discussions of the journals. Nonetheless, one strength of this study is that it looks beyond the limits of historical periodization to follow the trajectory of the early French women's press leading to a 'distinct for(u)m of sisterhood during a period of domestic and class isolation' (p. 244). A rich contribution to the history of French women and their press, this book will undoubtedly generate dialogue among scholars interested in the history and role of women in French print culture.