Feminism,

Masculinity, and
Gender

Dr Chris Pearson

Lecture outline
Gender history
Femininity and feminism
Masculinity

Gender history: An
overview
Associated with postmodernism
Gender identities are fluid and historical
they change over time
Against biological determinism: nothing
about the body determines univocally
how social divisions will be shaped
Joan Scott, Gender: a useful category of
historical analysis, in Shoemaker and
Vincent (eds.), Gender and History in
Western Europe, (1998), 2

Man and women are at once empty

and overflowing categories. Empty
because they have no ultimate,
transcendent meaning. Overflowing
because even when they appear contain to
be fixed, they still within them alternative,
denied, or suppressed definitions.
Joan Scott, Gender: a useful category of
historical analysis, in Shoemaker and
Vincent (eds.), Gender and History in
Western Europe, (1998), 61

Histories of masculinity
White, European masculinity
constructed against outsider males,
such as Blacks and Jews
George L. Mosse, The Image of Man,
The Creation of Modern Masculinity
(1996)
Masculinities come into existence at
particular times and places and are
always subject to change.
R. Connell, Masculinities (1995), 185

Gender relations
Masculinity and femininity exist and
change in relationship to each other
Masculine and feminine identities are
not distinct and separable
constructs, but parts of a political
field whose relations are characterized
by domination, subordination, collusion
and resistance.
Michael Roper and John Tosh (eds),
Manful Assertions: Masculinities in
Britain since 1800 (1991), 8

The new women

The new women was most
commonly represented as a
dangerous creature, masculinsed
but man-hating, emancipated
politically and sexually, a
perversion of the natural order of
things and a threat to morality
and civilisation itself.
James McMillan, France and
Women, 1789-1914 (2000) 142

Mademoiselle Ly a new
women
As a women who fashioned her
identity around her professional
accomplishments and her call for
womens political and sexual
emancipation, she subverted the
traditional domestic image of the
honorable woman.
Andrea Mansker, Mademoiselle Arria Ly
Wants Blood! French Historical Studies
29:4 (2006), p.630

Changes to womens lives

during the belle poque
Republican expansion of education
in the 1880s e.g. Camille Ses law
of 1880 introduces female secondary
schools
More and more women enter
university; 2,772 French women
enrolled at the universities by 191112, a twentyfold increase from the
1889-90 period. (Mansker, p. 639)

Professional women
Teachers; 57,000 female teachers by
1906, almost 50% of the profession
Office and clerical work for banks,
railway companies etc
By 1914, 30% of the female
workforce were employed offices
and department stores
McMillan, France and Women, 148-9

Marie Deraismes (1828-1894)

Lon Richer (1824-1911)

Gradualist, liberal
feminism
Feminism could best advance by
making small dents in the hard wall that
patriarchy had constructed against
womens claims. The feminists task was
to locate the loose brick and hammer
against it. It was a realpolitik.
Claire Goldberg Moses, French Feminism
in the Nineteenth Century (1984), 199

Richer on the family:

Since man alone was enfranchised he alone
moved on. Woman, his daily companion,
excluded from this benefit, stayed behind, and
within the passing of half a century an
enormous distance, an abyss, inexorably
divided the two sexes. Out of this division was
soon born, within the heart of families,
irreparable dissatisfaction, ruptures that one
had not suspected.
Quoted in Moses, French Feminism in the
Nineteenth Century, 201

Women not ready for the

vote, according to Richer:
I believe that at the present time it
would be dangerous in France to
give women the political ballot. They
are in great majority reactionaries
and clericals. It they voted today,
the Republic would not last six
months.
Quoted in James McMillan,
Housewife or Harlot (1981), 84

Hurbertine Auclert (1848-1914)

Hurbertine Auclert, speaking in 1876:

In spite of the benefits that came from our

revolution of 1789, two kinds of individuals are
still enslaved: proletarians and women. Women
proletarians have an even more deplorable
fate...
We have no rights. As interested as we may be
in the happiness of our country, we are pitilessly
turned away from all meetings, whether elective
or legislative... We count for less than noting in
the state. A stupid and profoundly ignorant man
counts for more in France than the best
educated woman. He can name his legislators;
woman cannot. She is a creature apart who is
born with many duties and no rights.

Madeleine Pelletier

For a feminist, the extreme care of

ones person and a studied sense of
elegance are not always a diversion, a
pleasure, but rather often excess work,
a duty that she nevertheless must
impose upon herself, if only to deprive
shortsighted men of the argument that
feminism is the enemy of beauty and a
feminine aesthetic.
Margerite Durand, Acting Up, French
Historical Studies (1996), 1119

In mimicking the real woman, they

exposed its artifice as a role that can
be staged even in the most
unconventional of lives. By
mimicking femininity, Durand...
[was] able to defang [her] opponents
and at the same time reveal the
artifice of gender identity.
Roberts, Acting Up, French
Historical Studies (1996), 1130

Modern femininity in
Femina
Beyond the domestic ideal; showed
women performing professional and
other roles
Its coverage presumed that women
could achieve important advances on
their own by raising their sights and
exploring their own individuality.
Lenard Berlanstein, Selling Modern
Femininity, French Historical Studies,
30:4 (2007), 635

Achievements of French
feminism by 1914
No vote for women but
Married women allowed to
dispose of their own incomes
(1908)
Paternity suits allowed (1912)
Raised issue of womens rights

Perhaps the greatest tribute to the

force of feminist ideas and activism in
fin-de-sicle France was that it
precipitated a major public debate and
gave rise to a vitriolic antifeminism that
forced men (especially those in political
power) to take a position on the women
question.
Karen Offen, Depopulation,
Nationalism, and Femininsm, American
Historical Review (1984), 661

French masculinity under

threat?
Defeat to Prussia (1870) and the
Commune shook the confidence of
middle class Frenchmen
French men feared deep down that
foreigners saw them as lacking in
the honor and warriorlike virility still
widely believed to embody
masculinity itself.
E Berenson, Trial of Madame
Caillaux, p. 114

The First Empires women had been

overwhelmed by the intense and
magnificent whirl of activity
accomplished by men who returned
home between two battles to get them
with child, only to hasten back to the
front having left behind the
overpowering image of conquerors.
Le Gaulois (1900), quoted in Berenson,
Trial of Madame Cailloux (1993), 115

Male honour codes

Hangover from the ancien rgime
In private, men must display sexual
vigour and potency
In public, they must be ready to
defend their reputation and honour,
hence the popularity of the duel
See Robert Nye, Masculinity and
Male Codes of Honor in Modern
France (1993)

Sketch by Alfred Grvin (c.1880)

Culture of force (1890s+)

See Christopher Forth, The Dreyfus Affair

and the Crisis of French Manhood (2004)