Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of tables
- List of figures
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introductory positions
- 2 The French nation and its peasants
- 3 The landscape in the early nineteenth century
- 4 Changes in the landscape
- 5 Gender, places, people
- 6 The ambiguities of schooling
- 7 Inside the parish church
- 8 A new site: electoral politics
- 9 Conclusion: toward a new rural history
- Sources and references
- Index
5 - Gender, places, people
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of tables
- List of figures
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introductory positions
- 2 The French nation and its peasants
- 3 The landscape in the early nineteenth century
- 4 Changes in the landscape
- 5 Gender, places, people
- 6 The ambiguities of schooling
- 7 Inside the parish church
- 8 A new site: electoral politics
- 9 Conclusion: toward a new rural history
- Sources and references
- Index
Summary
The chapter organization of this book artificially separates different aspects of the cultures of France and the countryside, a separation that could lead to the false conclusion that, for example, the economic and reproductive discourses examined in previous chapters were not linked to the other sites of cultural contact that will be discussed in the remainder of this book. In no respect is this analytic separation more misleading than in the subject of this chapter, for gender – the social and cultural constructions of women and men – pervaded every aspect of the cultures of France and the countryside, providing and utilizing models that circulated through economic, familial, educational, religious, and political sites. It is impossible to find some aspect of French or rural culture that was not thoroughly imbued with notions about gender. For this reason, it deserves specific attention.
The pervasiveness of gender in French culture is readily apparent in national intellectual, literary, and political discussions. Masculinisme, the presumption of male predominance over women, was a “totalitarianism of the commonplace” in nineteenth-century France, operating through the legal system, the Catholic church, the economy, the educational system, and subtle customs and practices. Even as the political ideals of the Revolution of 1789 seemed to be achieved, women were placed apart. Jules Michelet expressed the common view that women had to be married to have an identity; Alexandre Dumas fils found a divine analogy to describe the power of men over women, drawing from the Bible the lesson that woman is to man as man is to God; man was divinely conceived as movement, woman only as form.
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- Information
- Peasant and FrenchCultural Contact in Rural France during the Nineteenth Century, pp. 108 - 129Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1995