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French female models9/2/2023 While Smith was concerned solely with the provincial bourgeoisie, the writers of Les Français, while members of the bourgeois class themselves, were steeped in urban culture, and set their observational eye on people of all classes. It is difficult to compare such a text to Smith's research on the 19th century Nord. In his essay, "Same Difference: The French Physiologies, 1840-1842," Richard Sieburth writes that Les Français, was "designed to take place within the cozy confines of the bourgeois intérieur," where readers could use urban types to help them make sense of rapidly changing, and sometimes seemingly threatening, city (166). The urban "types" represented by the essays in Les Français, written by both male and female authors, some of them highly respected writers such as Honoré de Balzac, are an attempt to define modernity by characterizing the people who live within it, and to show how these characters, almost half of them women, helped to shape the modern city. These handsome leather-bound books were bestsellers among the urban bourgeoisie, who exhibited them in their parlors much the way we would display a coffee-table book of paintings today. One collection of these representations is Les Français peints par eux-mêmes: Encyclopédie morale du dix-neuvième siècle, a panorama text published in eight volumes between 18. Representations of women produced by established bourgeois writers and artists of 19th century France show that bourgeois gender ideology was both more fluid than Smith depicts it, and also less successful in keeping women locked within the home and out of the bustling public marketplace that defined modernity. In this paper I will argue that examples of popular 19th century literature dispute Smith's conception of modernity as a step backward for women, and thus raise questions about her prescriptions for the contemporary feminist project. But were women really ancillary to the process of modernization, and did women as a group really experience significant social and political setbacks over the course of the nineteenth century? This is an argument of difference feminism, the idea that women can contribute to society is that which is inherently female, as opposed to that which is common to both men and women, hence Smith's focus on the domestic, private sphere's centrality in women's historical experience. Smith focuses on the women of the Nord because their lives confirm an overall critique she makes of 20th century feminism - that it deemphasizes women's private sphere experiences at its own ideological and political peril. Smith's argument - that bourgeois women of the nineteenth century inhabited a "world apart" from their husbands and were thus excluded from shaping or experiencing public modernity - complicates our intuitive understanding of human history as a constant march toward a freer and more egalitarian society. Birth rates soared, volunteer work became the primary way upper-class women contributed to society, and feminism and reactionary Catholic politics developed as two oppositional ways bourgeois women responded to a project of modernity that excluded them (Smith 13). Smith argues that because mechanization shifted the site of production from the home shop to the factory, and bourgeois wives no longer worked alongside their husbands as producers in the modern economy, their labor became solely that of reproduction. Bonnie Smith, for example, author of the 1981 book Ladies of the Leisure Class, applies a Marxist understanding of the specialization of labor to her study of the bourgeois women of the nineteenth century Nord, the region along the France-Belgium border. They have examined the nineteenth century "cult of domesticity" that valorized middle-class women's roles as wives and mothers, and the new labor opportunities that opened up for working-class women in urban areas. When assessing the growth of capitalism and industrialization, some women's historians have tried to determine whether or not these epochal shifts increased women's social and economic capital. The Women of Modernity, the Gendering of Modernity:īourgeois Respectability and the Forgotten Female Types of French Panorama by Dana Goldstein
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