Citoyennes

<div> <p>Did women have a civic identity in eighteenth-century France? In <i>Citoyennes: Women and the Ideal of Citizenship in Eighteenth-Century France</i> Annie Smart contends that they did. While previous scholarship has emphasized the ideal of domestic motherhood or the image of the republican mother Smart argues persuasively that many pre-revolutionary and revolutionary texts created another ideal for women-the ideal of civic motherhood. Smart asserts that women were portrayed as possessing civic virtue and as promoting the values and ideals of the public sphere.</p> <p>Contemporary critics have theorized that the eighteenth-century ideal of the Republic intentionally excluded women from the public sphere. According to this perspective a discourse of Rousseauean domestic motherhood stripped women of an active civic identity and limited their role to breastfeeding and childcare. Eighteenth-century France marked thus the division between a male public sphere of political action and a female private sphere of the home.</p> <p><i>Citoyennes</i> challenges this position and offers an alternative model of female identity. This interdisciplinary study brings together a variety of genres to demonstrate convincingly that women were portrayed as civic individuals. Using foundational texts such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau's <i>Emile</i> or <i>on Education</i> (1762) revolutionary gouaches of Lesueur and vaudeville plays of Year II of the Republic (1793/1794) this study brilliantly shows that in text and image women were represented as devoted to both the public good and their families.</p> <p>In addition <i>Citoyennes</i> offers an innovative interpretation of the home. Through re-examining sphere theory this study challenges the tendency to equate the home with private concerns and shows that the home can function as a site for both private life and civic identity.</p> <p><i>Citoyennes</i> breaks new ground for it both rectifies the ideal of domestic Rousseauean motherhood and brings a fuller understanding to how female civic identity operated in important French texts and images.</p> Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.<br>  </div>