Women authors too, such as Madame de Savignac – who published educational fiction for young people – writing in Le Journal des femmes in May 1833, appreciated the role played by women’s journals in supporting women’s intellectual achievements and in giving women authors the confidence to renounce their male pseudonyms. Many women writers, such as George Sand, chose to adopt male pseudonyms when publishing. For the first time, French women readers – largely confined to the domestic realm – were encouraged to articulate their “private” opinions in a public forum. What is clear is the pleasure expressed by many women readers at engaging in dialogue with a community of like-minded individuals and the resulting sense of collective identity and political consciousness based on gender. Both literacy levels and the expense of the earliest women’s journals clearly limited their readership, although journals were passed among friends and within households – and, according to the correspondence of readers in Le Journal des dames et des modes (July 1803) were even read aloud. The actual readership of early French women’s journals, aside from what we can glean from articles and letters submitted by readers, is more difficult to establish and circulation claims are notoriously unreliable. Just as the Revolution of 1789 provided an impetus for women’s journals and pamphlets, such as Les Étrennes nationales des dames(1789) to intensify their demands for sexual equality, journals during the Restoration adopt a moralistic tone ( Le Journal des dames et des modes, focusing on more light-hearted subjects such as fashion and characterising female readers as guardians of the hearth and paragons of virtue. These publications had a variety of target readerships, depending on the sorts of issues they covered – and these, in turn, partly depend on their historical period of publication. The early French women’s press spans a range of genres, from the literary review (Le Journal des dames) to the fashion journal (Le Journal des dames et des modes ) to the more socially conscious feminist journal, La Femme libre (1832-34), which strove to improve employment conditions for women. So how did these earliest women’s journals engage with the rights and roles of French women at the time? Building communities of women The Napoleonic Code of 1804 legally obliged wives to obey their husbands and gave the latter complete control of all property. The playwright and social reformer Olympe de Gouges famously drafted her own Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Citizen in 1791 in response to what she viewed as the gendered inequalities of the original Declaration in 1789. Olympe de Gouges (1748-1793) Unknown artist Their education was significantly less extensive than men’s in terms of both subjects taught and duration, resulting in high levels of illiteracy. Despite the Enlightenment emphasis on the rights of the individual, women were not considered of equal status to men. During this period, French women had no right to political representation. It was my interest in the “political” potential of these representations of French women’s daily lives that gave rise to my book Figurations of the Feminine in the Early French Women’s Press, 1758-1848. Over the next few decades a variety of different subsections and types of article emerged – many of which, whether the domestic magazine or the problem page, remain current in today’s women’s press. The first women’s journal of any substance and longevity, Le Journal des dames, was published from 1759 until 1778. The origins of the French women’s press date back to the 18th century. The content of much of the early French women’s press presents a very different picture. They are seen to promote a limited range of feminine role models and to reinforce norms regarding women’s position within patriarchal society. Women’s magazines today are often thought of as ideologically somewhat conformist. Straddling the private and public domains, the early French women’s press – the various published journals and pamphlets that began to appear in the 18th and early 19th centuries – can provide a unique insight into women’s everyday struggles and successes during a particularly turbulent period in France’s history.
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