Causes Celebres

Author : Tracey Rizzo
Publisher : Susquehanna University Press
ISBN 13 : 9781575910871
Total Pages : 148 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (18 download)

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Download or read book A Certain Emancipation of Women written by Tracey Rizzo and published by Susquehanna University Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Best-selling court cases in eighteenth-century France provide ample evidence of a certain emancipation of women. Certain in the sense of tentative, qualified: women won their cases in surprising numbers yet were represented by their lawyers via limiting stereotypes. Certain also in the sense of sure: lawyers and editors contributed to a liberatory moment, particularly in the two decades leading up to the radical phase of the French Revolution, in which late eighteenth-century constructions of female citizenship offered virtuous women, regardless of rank or even race, "strategic possibilities" for establishing modern identities - defined as self-creating, autonomous, and capable of moral judgment and reason." "Few scholars have attempted to demonstrate the means by which representations both reflect and transform the lives of historical actors. This study offers a rare opportunity to glimpse that intersection as the causes celebres contain representations and lived experience, fact and fiction." "Lawyers and editors called for the liberation of women from tyrannical fathers, abusive husbands, public opinion, and even oppressive laws, like that maintaining the stigma of illegitimacy, in the dozens of seductions, separations, rapes, and infanticides on which this study is based."--Jacket.