Published in 1991
312 pages
Sara E. Melzer, Associate Professor of French, University of California, Los Angeles.
Leslie W. Rabine, Professor of French, University of California, Irvine.
What is this book about?
This interdisciplinary collection of essays examines many facets of the important and paradoxical relation between women and the French Revolution. Recent research has unearthed evidence that women of all classes participated actively in the French Revolution, demanding bread for their families, and fighting for the same rights of equality and liberty that men claimed for themselves. The authors contend that although the male leaders of the Revolution depended on the women’s active militant participation, they denied to them the rights women helped to establish. At the same time that women were being banned from the political sphere, “woman” was transformed into an allegorical figure which became the very symbol of (masculine) Liberty and Equality. Bringing together the work of historians and literary critics, this book’s multidisciplinary approach provides readers with diverse interpretations of representations of history and culture.
Containing the work of some of the most distinguished feminist scholars working today, Rebel Daughters analyzes how the revolutionary process constructed a new gender system at the very foundation of modern liberal culture. This compelling study will be essential reading for students and scholars of French literature, history, art history, and political theory.
