HIST 358: The Remarkable Body of Marie Antoinette (HC)

Becoming a Woman is organized into thematic sections that address defining questions of women’s lives in the 18th century. These include: how the stages of a woman's life were measured; what cultural attitudes shaped how women were defined; what significant relations women formed with men; what social rituals gave order to their lives; what pleasures they pursued; and what work they accomplished.

This volume accompanies the first exhibition to recreate Casanova's visual world, from his birthplace of Venice to the cultural capitals of Paris and London. Summoning up the people he met and the cities, salons and masked balls he frequented, it provides a survey of important works of eighteenth-century European art.

At the same time that secular and religious authorities suppressed women's efforts to read, conduct books written specifically for girls and young unmarried women emerged as a new genre. Nadine Bérenguier offers an in-depth analysis of this development in eighteenth-century France, situating conduct books in the context of Enlightenment concerns about improving education, including the radically new notion of educating girls and young women.

This museum exhibition catalog introduces the pastoral theme of the fête galante, reproduces and describes paintings from the exhibit, and includes three essays from art historians.

This book investigates the gendered, eroticized, and xenophobic ways in which the controversies in the 1760s surrounding the political figure John Wilkes (1725-97) legitimated some men as political subjects, while forcefully excluding others on the basis of their perceived effeminacy or foreignness. Rather than emphasizing politics, Effeminate Years examines the cultural crisis of effeminacy that made Wilkes's politicking so appealing. The central theoretical problem is the argument about what is and is not political: where does individual autonomy begin and end?

Caroline of Ansbach (1683-1737), Augusta of Saxe-Gotha (1719-1772), and Charlotte of Mecklenberg-Strelitz (1744-1818) were three German princesses who became Queens--or, in the case of Augusta, Queen in Waiting, Regent, and Princess Dowager--of Great Britain, and were linked by their early years at European princely courts, their curiosity, and investment in Enlightenment thought. This sumptuously illustrated book considers the ways these women left enduring marks on British culture. Objects included range from spectacular state portraits to pedagogical toys to plant and animal specimens, and reveal how the new intermingled with the traditional.

Focuses on the professional mistresses who dominated it. In this demimonde, these dames entretenues exchanged sex, company, and sometimes even love for being "kept." Most of these women entered the profession unwillingly, either because of poverty or because they were sold by family members to brothels. A small but significant percentage of kept women, however, came from a theater subculture that actively supported elite prostitution. Kushner shows that in its business conventions, its moral codes, and even its sexual practices, the demimonde was an integral part of contemporary Parisian culture.

The residence of the last three French kings of the ancien regime, Versailles, was also the residence of their wives: Marie-Thérèse, who died there in 1683, Marie Leszcynska, who lived there from 1725 to 1768, and Marie Antoinette from 1770 to 1789. Each of these women left their imprint on Versailles as did the king's favorites and the intimates of the queens.

Exploring the ways in which French women went public through publication, this book shows how they contributed to the formation of the public sphere in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

How did educated and cultivated men in early modern France and Britain perceive and value their own and women's cognitive capacities, and how did women in their circles challenge those perceptions, if only by revaluing the kinds of intelligence attributed to them? The Labor of the Mind plumbs the social and cultural logic of the Enlightenment's trope of the manly mind; offers new readings of the textual representations of it; and examines the ways in which the trope was subverted or at least subtly questioned.

A richly illustrated literary anthology that explores the fantasies, seductions, and intrigues of the eighteenth-century French lover. This sumptuous volume presents more than eighty selections from eighteenth-century French literature, each concerning some facet of the game of love as practiced by the libertine, or the freethinking aristocratic hedonist, a type that flourished-not least in literature-in the declining years of the Ancien Regime. Each selection is illustrated by well-chosen period artworks, many rarely seen, by Watteau, Boucher, Fragonard, and numerous others.

In Market à la Mode, Erin Mackie examines the role that The Tatler and The Spectator, two eighteenth-century British lifestyle magazines, played in the growth of fashion and how they influenced their readers. She traces the commercial context in which they operated, focusing on the processes of commodification, fetishization, and revisions of gender identity. Mackie's study makes clear that fashion publications, far from being commentaries on passing trends, assumed a leading role in defining women's legitimate sphere of activities as well as in the development of commerce as recreation.

Collectively, these essays by art historians and museum professionals argue for a more complex understanding of the relationship between objects and subjects in gendered terms. The objects under consideration include beds, guns, fans, needle paintings, prints, drawings, mantillas, almanacs, reticules, silver punch bowls, and collage. These material goods may have been intended to enforce and affirm gendered norms, however as the essays demonstrate, their use by subjects frequently put normative formations of gender into question, revealing the impossibility of permanently fixing gender.

"A Mother's Love: Crafting Feminine Virtue in Enlightenment France chronicles the emergence of an idealized mother figure whose reforming zeal sought to make French society more just. Lesley H. Walker contends that this attempt during the eighteenth century to "rewrite" social relations in terms of greater social equality represents an important but overlooked strand of Enlightenment thought. During this period, popular domestic novels, the ever-raging debates about women's social roles, and highly sought-after genre paintings produced a remarkable image of motherhood. Through a focus on feminine virtue, Walker studies female writers and artists to argue that these women theorize the domestic sphere as a site of significant social and ethical productivity."--BOOK JACKET.

Each summer, a 'perpetual fair' plagued eighteenth-century London, a city in transition overrun by a burgeoning population. City officials attempted to control disorderly urban amusement according to their own gendered understandings of order and morality. Frequently derided as locations of dangerous femininity disrupting masculine commerce, fairs withstood regulation attempts.

Shaped by competing currents of religious dogma, atheist materialism and bourgeois morality, eighteenth-century France marked the beginning of what Michel Foucault called une fermentation discursive on matters related to sex. But when we consult the educational theorists or philosophes of the time for their opinions, we are met with a telling silence. Did an Enlightenment era that dared to make sex an object of discourse also dare to make it an object of pedagogy? This book brings together specialists from a range of disciplines to address these issues. Using a wide variety of literary, historical, religious and pedagogical sources, contributors explore the nexus between sex and instruction.

In the great age of English garden design, eighteenth-century women working in the “sister arts” of painting, poetry, and landscape gardening adapted the Linnaean system of plant classification and the tradition of the erotic garden to create art with and for other women that celebrated everything from classical friendship to erotic love. In this book, filled with lush illustrations and intriguing stories, Lisa L. Moore reveals how these women artists used flowers, gardens, and landscapes to express their love for other women.

"In this extraordinarily rich book, Madelyn Gutwirth examines over one hundred prints and paintings, dozens of texts, and the work of a great many cultural critics in order to consider how gender politics were played out during a highly volatile era. Finding evidence of a crisis in gender relations during the eighteenth century, she traces its evolution in the politics of rococo art, demographic trends, plans for the control of prostitution, maternal nursing and wet-nursing practices, folklore, the salon, and in the theater of Diderot and the polemics of Rousseau." --BOOK JACKET.

Unbounded Attachment is about the uses of the language of sentiment in British women's writing from Mary Wollstonecraft to Jane Austen. It focuses on a range of writers for whom this language has the potential to hold together disparate elements in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century society.

This microhistory investigates the famous and scandalous 1731 trial in which Catherine Cadière, a young woman in the south of France, accused her Jesuit confessor, Jean-Baptiste Girard, of seduction, heresy, abortion, and bewitchment. Generally considered to be the last witchcraft trial in early modern France, the Cadière affair was central to the volatile politics of 1730s France, a time when magistrates and lawyers were seeking to contain clerical power. The case contributed significantly to the French people's ever-increasing disenchantment with the church and the king.

"During the long eighteenth century, ideas of society and of social progress were first fully investigated. These investigations took place in the contexts of economic, theological, historical and literary writings which paid unprecedented attention to the place of women. Combining intellectual history with literary criticism, Karen O'Brien examines the central importance to the British Enlightenment both of women writers and of women as a subject of enquiry. She examines the work of a range of writers, and explores the way in which Enlightenment ideas created a language and a framework for understanding the moral agency and changing social roles of women, without which the development of nineteenth-century feminism would not have been possible."--BOOK JACKET.

This anthology gathers together various texts by and about women, ranging from `conduct' manuals to pamphlets on prostitution, from medical texts to critical definitions of women's writing, from anti-female satires to appeals for female equality.

In this provocative interdisciplinary essay, Joan B. Landes examines the impact on women of the emergence of a new, bourgeois organization of public life in the eighteenth century. She focuses on France, contrasting the role and representation of women under the Old Regime with their status during and after the Revolution.

"The promises of "liberty, equality, and fraternity" did not extend to women, but with the publication of Blood Sisters, the voices of the women who witnessed the French Revolution are finally restored to history."

Did women have a civic identity in eighteenth-century France? In Citoyennes: Women and the Ideal of Citizenship in Eighteenth-Century France, Annie Smart contends that they did.

Germaine de Staël (1766-1817) is perhaps best known today as a novelist, literary critic, and outspoken and independent thinker. Yet she was also a prominent figure in politics during the French Revolution. Biancamaria Fontana sheds new light on this often overlooked aspect of Staël's life and work, bringing vividly to life her unique experience as a political actor in a world where women had no place. During the Revolution, when the lives of so many around her were destroyed, she succeeded in carving out a unique path for herself and making her views heard, first by the powerful men around her, later by the European public at large.

When feminists argued for political rights in the context of liberal democracy they faced an impossible choice. On the one hand, they insisted that the differences between men and women were irrelevant for citizenship. On the other hand, by the fact that they acted on behalf of women, they introduced the very idea of difference they sought to eliminate. Award-winning historian Joan Wallach Scott focuses on four French feminist activists including Olympe de Gouges, who wrote the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen during the French Revolution.

Includes an extensive bibliography of French women authors, 1789-1800.

Based on a true story, Ourika relates the experiences of a Senegalese girl who is rescued from slavery and raised by an aristocratic French family during the French Revolution. Brought up in a household of learning and privilege, she is unaware of her difference until she overhears a conversation that suddenly makes her conscious of her race--and of the prejudice it arouses. From this point on, Ourika lives her life as a black woman who feels "cut off from the entire human race." As the Reign of Terror threatens her and her adoptive family, Ourika struggles with her unusual position as an educated African woman in France. A best-seller in the 1820s, Ourika captured the attention of Duras's peers, including Stendhal, and became the subject of four contemporary plays.

This book surveys prostitution at the time of the French Revolution. This is a key period because it marks an unprecedented turning point by decriminalizing this activity while maintaining police control over the women involved with the result of making prostitutes, "infamous women" of the Ancien Régime and diminished citizens of the Republic.

This interdisciplinary collection of essays examines the important andparadoxical relation between women and the French Revolution. Although the maleleaders of the Revolution depended on the women's active militant participation,they denied to women the rights they helped to establish. At the same time thatwomen were banned from the political sphere, "woman" was transformed into anallegorical figure which became the very symbol of (masculine) Liberty andEquality. This volume analyzes how the revolutionary process constructed a newgender system at the foundation of modern liberal culture.

Popular images of women were everywhere in revolutionary France. Although women's political participation was curtailed, female allegories of liberty, justice, and the republic played a crucial role in the passage from old regime to modern society.

During the French Revolution, hundreds of domestic and working-class women of Paris were interrogated, examined, accused, denounced, arrested, and imprisoned for their rebellious and often hostile behavior. Here, for the first time in English translation, Dominique Godineau offers an illuminating account of these female revolutionaries.