Joan B. Landes's Books

Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution

By: Joan B. Landes

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Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution

By: Joan B. Landes

In this provocative interdisciplinary essay, Joan B. Landes examines the impact on women of the emergence of a new, bourgeois organization of public life in the eighteenth century. She focuses on France, contrasting the role and representation of women under the Old Regime with their status during and after the Revolution. Basing her work on a wide reading of current historical scholarship, Landes draws on the work of Habermas and his followers, as well as on recent theories of representation, to re-create public-sphere theory from a feminist point of view.Within the extremely personal and patriarchal political culture of Old Regime France, elite women wielded surprising influence and power, both in the court and in salons. Urban women of the artisanal class often worked side by side with men and participated in many public functions. But the Revolution, Landes asserts, relegated women to the home, and created a rigidly gendered, essentially male, bourgeois public sphere. The formal adoption of "universal" rights actually silenced public women by emphasizing bourgeois conceptions of domestic virtue.In the first part of this book, Landes links the change in women's roles to a shift in systems of cultural representation. Under the absolute monarchy of the Old Regime, political culture was represented by the personalized iconic imagery of the father/king. This imagery gave way in bourgeois thought to a more symbolic system of representation based on speech, writing, and the law. Landes traces this change through the art and writing of the period. Using the works of Rousseau and Montesquieu as examples of the passage to the bourgeois theory of the public sphere, she shows how such concepts as universal reason, law, and nature were rooted in an ideologically sanctioned order of gender difference and separate public and private spheres. In the second part of the book, Landes discusses the discourses on women's rights and on women in society authored by Condorcet, Wollstonecraft, Gouges, Tristan, and Comte within the context of these new definitions of the public sphere. Focusing on the period after the execution of the king, she asks who got to be included as "the People" when men and women demanded that liberal and republican principles be carried to their logical conclusion. She examines women's roles in the revolutionary process and relates the birth of modern feminism to the silencing of the politically influential women of the Old Regime court and salon and to women's expulsion from public participation during and after the Revolution.

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Page Count

294

Publisher

Cornell University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0801494818

ISBN 13

9780801494819

Visualizing the Nation

Gender, Representation, and Revolution in Eighteenth-Century France

By: Joan B. Landes

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Visualizing the Nation

Gender, Representation, and Revolution in Eighteenth-Century France

By: Joan B. Landes

Popular images of women were everywhere in revolutionary France. Although women's political participation was curtailed, female allegories of liberty, justice, and the republic played a crucial role in the passage from old regime to modern society. In her lavishly illustrated and gracefully written book, Joan B. Landes explores this paradox within the workings of revolutionary visual culture and traces the interaction between pictorial and textual political arguments. Landes highlights the widespread circulation of images of the female body, notwithstanding the political leadership's suspicions of the dangers of feminine influence and the seductions of visual imagery. The use of caricatures and allegories contributed to the destruction of the masculinized images of hierarchic absolutism and to forging new roles for men and women in both the intimate and public arenas. Landes tells the fascinating story of how the depiction of the nation as a desirable female body worked to eroticize patriotism and to bind male subjects to the nation-state. Despite their political subordination, women too were invited to identify with the project of nationalism. Recent views of the French Revolution have emphasized linguistic concerns; in contrast, Landes stresses the role of visual cognition in fashioning ideas of nationalism and citizenship. Her book demonstrates as well that the image is often a site of contestation, as individual viewers may respond to it in unexpected, even subversive, ways.

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273

Publisher

Cornell University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1501727532

ISBN 13

9781501727535

Visualizing the Nation

Gender, Representation, and Revolution in Eighteenth-Century France

By: Joan B. Landes

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Visualizing the Nation

Gender, Representation, and Revolution in Eighteenth-Century France

By: Joan B. Landes

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273

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Cornell University Press

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ISBN 10

1501727532

ISBN 13

9781501727535

Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution

By: Joan B. Landes

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Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution

By: Joan B. Landes

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294

Publisher

Cornell University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0801494818

ISBN 13

9780801494819

Gorgeous Beasts

Animal Bodies in Historical Perspective

By: Joan B. Landes,Paula Young Lee,Paul Youngquist

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Gorgeous Beasts

Animal Bodies in Historical Perspective

By: Joan B. Landes,Paula Young Lee,Paul Youngquist

A collection of essays examining the place of animals in history and culture and their influence on life and art, from the Renaissance to the present"--Provided by publisher.

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Page Count

259

Publisher

Penn State Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0271054018

ISBN 13

9780271054018

Book's by Joan B. Landes

Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution

Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution

Visualizing the Nation

Visualizing the Nation

Visualizing the Nation

Visualizing the Nation

Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution

Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution

Gorgeous Beasts

Gorgeous Beasts

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