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A History of Women in the West: v. 4: Emerging Feminism from Revolution to World War

Volume editor Genevieve Fraisse, Edited by Georges Duby, Edited by Michelle Perrot

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With its Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, the French Revolution opened a whole new stage in the history of women, despite their conspicuous absence from the playbill. The coming century would see women put in their place as never before, their subordination to men codified in all manner of new laws and rules; and yet the period would also witness the birth of feminism, the unprecedented emergence of women as a collective force in the political arena. The fourth volume in this series covers the distance between these two poles. It gives a vibrant picture of a bourgeois century, dynamic and expansive, in which woman's role in the home was stressed more and more, even as the economic pressures and opportunities of the industrial revolution drew her out of the house; in which woman's growing role in the family as the centre of all morals and virtues pressed her into public service fighting social ills. Here we see the world of women as it evolved between two cataclysmic events, the French Revolution and World War I. Once women's revolutionary usefulness had exhausted itself, this world came to revolve ever more narrowly around the home. The authors show us how woman was at once cast as the housewife, the - acquisitive consumer who acted as a counterpart to the bourgeois man, but also as a possession to be decorated and flaunted, and as well as the repository of all the values that had no place in business: tenderness, compassion, sentimentality, idealism, charity, and pity. Though focusing primarily on Europe, this volume also describes these feminine virtues affecting such public issues as abolition, temperance, and social work in the United States. Drawing on a wide range of sources in art, literature, and the new anthropology, the authors fashion an innovative history, one that documents the transformations in women's lives during this period, but also reveals the changes in perspectives on women.