Born to a noble family in Tournai, Marie Dentière (1495-1561) left her convent in the 1520s to work for religious reform. She married a former priest and with her husband went to Switzerland, where she was active in the Reformation's takeover of Geneva. Dentière's Very Useful Epistle (1539) is the first explicit statement of reformed theology by a woman to appear in French. Addressed to Queen Marguerite of Navarre, sister of the French king Francis I, the Epistle asks the queen to help those persecuted for their religious beliefs. Dentière offers a stirring defense of women and asserts their right to teach the word of God in public. She defends John Calvin against his enemies and attacks the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church. Her Preface (1561) to one of Calvin's sermons criticizes immodesty and extravagance in clothing and warns the faithful to be vigilant. Undaunted in the face of suppression and ridicule, this outspoken woman persisted as an active voice in the Reformation.

This volume represents the first book-length study of attitudes toward women in revolutionary France. Based on extensive research in the libraries and archives of Paris, the book examines the impact of the Revolution's ideology of liberty and equality. When the men of 1789 wrote the Declaration of the Rights of Man, they were thinking in terms of man the male, not man the species. But there were some men and women who interpreted it in terms of all humanity. The outrage of these individuals over what they perceived as a discrepancy between the principles and the practice of the Revolution motivated them to produce some of the most unhesitating declarations of sexual equality that had ever been seen in history. Dr. Proctor demonstrates, however, these claims of equality were not simply ignored; they were categorically rejected by the mainstream revolutionaries. The book examines the typical 18th-century concept of women as alien and in some ways inferior beings and traces the striking continuity between pre-Revolutionary and Revolutionary thought on the subject. Against this background, Proctor addresses a number of important questions: How widespread was the support for a movement in favor of sexual equality? What was the response of the Revolution itself to demands for equal rights for women? How did the men of the French Revolution justify the contradiction between their suppression of women and the ideologies for which they claimed to be fighting? To arrive at the answers, an abundance of material produced in France in the 18th century is identified and analyzed, and cited in an extensive bibliography of original sources. What finally emerges is not only a clearer picture of the French Revolution and its attitude toward women, but a deeper understanding of the ambivalent attitudes toward women that still affect our society today. This book will be an important resource for courses in European history, the French Revolution, and women's studies, as well as a valuable reference for college, university, and public libraries.

Focusing on the vastly understudied area of how women participated in the book trades, not just as authors, but also as patrons, copyists, illuminators, publishers, editors and readers, Women and the Book Trade in Sixteenth-Century France foregrounds contributions made by women during a period of profound transformation in the modes and understanding of publication. Broomhall asks whether women's experiences as authors changed when manuscript circulation gave way to the printed book as a standard form of publication. Innovatively, she broadens the concept of publication to include methods of scribal publication, through the circulation and presentation of manuscripts, and expands notions of authorship to incorporate a wide sample group of female writers and publishing experiences. She challenges the existing view that manuscript offered a "safe" means of semi-public exposure for female authors and explores its continuing presence after the introduction of print. The study introduces a wide and rich range of unexamined sources on early modern women, using an extensive range of manuscripts and the entire corpus of women's printed texts in sixteenth-century France. Most of the original texts, uncovered during the author's own extensive archival and bibliographical research, have never been re-published in modern French. Most of the citations from them are here translated into English for the first time. The work presents the only checklist of all known women's writings in printed texts, from prefaces and laudatory verse to editions of prose and poetry, between 1488 and 1599. Women and the Book Trade in Sixteenth-Century France constitutes the most comprehensive assessment of women's contribution to contemporary publishing yet available. Broomhall's innovative approach and her conclusions have relevance not only for book historians and French historians, but for a broad range of scholars who work with other European literatures and histories, as well as women's studies.

The Third Republic, known as the ‘belle époque’, was a period of lively, articulate and surprisingly radical feminist activity in France, borne out of the contradiction between the Republican ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity and the reality of intense and systematic gender discrimination. Yet, it also was a period of intense and varied artistic production, with women disproving the critical nearconsensus that art was a masculine activity by writing, painting, performing, sculpting, and even displaying an interest in the new "seventh art" of cinema. This book explores all these facets of the period, weaving them into a complex, multi-stranded argument about the importance of this rich period of French women’s history.

This reader is the first of its kind to present the work of leading French women philosophers to an English-speaking audience. Many of the articles appear for the first time in English and have been specially translated for the collection. Christina Howells draws on major areas of philosophical and theoretical debate including Ethics, Psychoanalysis, Law, Politics, History, Science and Rationality. Each section and article is clearly introduced and situated in its intellectual context. The book is necessarily feminist in inspiration but draws on an unusually wide range of thinkers, chosen to represent the philosophy of women rather than feminist philosophy. It will be ideal for anyone coming to this area for the first time as well as those seeking to extend their understanding of French thought and Continental Philosophy. Articles by the following writers are included: Francoise Collin, Sylviane Agacinski, Catherine Chalier, Luce Irigaray, Francoise Proust, Francoise Dastur, Barbara Cassin, Natalie Depraz, Elisabeth de Fontenay, Elisabeth Badinter, Francoise Heritier, Helene Cixous, Monique Schneider, Julia Kristeva, Sarah Kofman, Monique David Menard, Francoise d'Eaubonne, Genevieve Fraisse, Michele Le Doeuff, Natalie Charraud, Francoise Balibar, Anne Fagot-Largeault, Colette Guillaumin, Dominique Schnapper, Myriam Revault-D'Allonnes, Nicole Loraux, Mireille Delmas-Marty, Blandine Kriegel.

The first Yale French Studies issue on photography, examining French photography's place in art, identity, and society through a lens of diversity and interdisciplinary investigation In its first issue on photography, this volume of Yale French Studies presents multiple avenues of interdisciplinary investigation designed to intersect and open up new areas of inquiry in the twenty-first century. These intersections push beyond traditional geographic and gender boundaries, exploring women's photography, new cultural contexts, trans orientalism, and minority and marginalized bodies. As they do so, they ask us to reconsider the way that we conceive of photography's place in the past and in our lives today.