In this vividly written and amply illustrated book, Gay L. Gullickson analyzes the representations of women who were part of the insurrection known as the Paris Commune. The uprising and its bloody ...suppression by the French army is still one of the most hotly debated episodes in modern history. Especially controversial was the role played by women, whose prominent place among the Communards shocked many commentators and spawned the legend of the pétroleuses, women who were accused of burning the city during the battle that ended the Commune. In the midst of the turmoil that shook Paris, the media distinguished women for their cruelty and rage. The Paris-Journal , for example, raved: Madness seems to possess them; one sees them, their hair down like furies, throwing boiling oil, furniture, paving stones, on the soldiers. Gullickson explores the significance of the images created by journalists, memoirists, and political commentators, and elaborated by latter-day historians and political thinkers. The pétroleuse is the most notorious figure to emerge from the Commune, but the literature depicts the Communardes in other guises, too: the innocent victim, the scandalous orator, the Amazon warrior, and the ministering angel, among others. Gullickson argues that these caricatures played an important role in conveying and evoking moral condemnation of the Commune. More important, they reveal the gender conceptualizations that structured, limited, and assigned meaning to women as political actors for the balance of the nineteenth and well into the twentieth century.
This article contains a cross-cultural comparison of constructions of politically militant women, beginning with Charlotte Corday of the French Revolution, continuing with Louise Michel of the 1871 ...Paris Commune, and concluding with Emmeline Pankhurst and the British suffragettes. The study reveals that as Michel's opponents attempted to ridicule and discredit her, they resurrected representations of Corday, modifying and aging them to fit her. The suffragettes' opponents similarly resurrected representations of Michel to ridicule them, but not as successfully. In response, Pankhurst's and the suffragettes' self-representations skillfully countered the anti-suffragists' dated and inaccurate representations of militant women as unhappy and unattractive spinsters.
In 1913, the British suffragette Emily Wilding Davison was killed when she ran onto the race course at Epsom Downs during the running of the Derby. Davison's goals are unclear, but she was ...immediately hailed as a martyr to the women's cause by her comrades in the Women's Social and Political Union. Others denounced her as a suicidal fanatic. This article evaluates Davison's death by examining the WSPU's emphasis on self-sacrifice, the actions of other women who risked their lives for the right to vote, and Davison's political writings and activities. Combined, these features of the militant suffrage movement support the WSPU's identification of Davison as a martyr. They also raise questions about the ideological integrity of the concept of secular martyrdom. Adapted from the source document.
Analyzing historical and literary accounts of the French revolutions of 1789, 1848, and 1871, Neil Hertz pointed out in 1983 that it is not unusual for a political threat to be represented as a ...sexual threat. Indeed, he observed, revolutionary violence has often been emblematized not simply in female form but “as a hideous and fierce but not exactly sexless woman.”¹ In 1986, Joan Scott called our attention to the similar tendency of both right-wing and left-wing authoritarian regimes to perceive political threats in gendered terms; to represent “enemies, outsiders, subversives, and weakness” as feminine; and, when they acquire political
Gendered Domains Helly, Dorothy O; Reverby, Susan M
08/2018
eBook
For over two centuries the notion that societies have been sharply divided into women's (private) and men's (public) spheres has been used both to describe and to prescribe social life. More ...recently, it has been applied and critiqued by feminist scholars as an explanation for women's oppression. Spanning a rich array of historical contexts—from medieval nunneries to Ottoman harems to Paris communes to electronics firms in today's Silicon Valley—the twenty essays collected here offer a pathbreaking reassessment of the significance of the concept of separate spheres. After a theoretical introduction by the editors, certain essays reexamine historians' definitions of public and private realms and show how the imposition of these categories often obscures the realities of power structures and the alterable nature of gender roles. Other chapters consider how the concept of separate domains has been used to control women's actions. Additional essays explore the limits of public/private distinctions, focusing on women's working lives, the role of the state in the family, and the ways in which women including Native North Americans, African-Americans in the birth control movement, and participants in the lesbian bar culture have themselves reshaped the model of separate spheres. Making available the best papers on the public/private theme delivered at the 1987 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Gendered Domains will be welcomed by anyone interested in women's studies, including historians, political scientists, feminist theorists, anthropologists, sociologists, and philosophers.
The cotton textile industries in Normandy and the U.S. piedmont developed along different paths. The manufacture of cotton cloth was introduced into Normandy at the turn of the eighteenth century and ...progressed gradually from a rural to an urban and from a cottage to a factory industry. By midcentury, the cotton industry rivaled farming as a source of income in much of Normandy, and peasants and rural villagers divided their work time between the putting-out merchants, the large farmers who employed them as day laborers and harvesters, and their own small plots of land. This period of large-scale rural manufacturing,
