Fictions Of Feminine Citizenship

Reading novels by contemporary women in the Caribbean dyaspora alongside and against law, history and anthropology, the book argues that Caribbean women's sexuality has been mobilized for various imperialist and nationalist projects from the nineteenth century to present.

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In the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States, ideas of genius did more than define artistic and intellectual originality. They also provided a means for conceptualizing women's participation in a democracy that marginalized them. Widely distributed across print media but reaching their fullest development in literary fiction, tropes of female genius figured types of subjectivity and forms of collective experience that were capable of overcoming the existing constraints on political life. The connections between genius, gender, and citizenship were important not only to contests over such practical goals as women's suffrage but also to those over national membership, cultural identity, and means of political transformation more generally. In The Genius of Democracy Victoria Olwell uncovers the political uses of genius, challenging our dominant narratives of gendered citizenship. She shows how American fiction catalyzed political models of female genius, especially in the work of Louisa May Alcott, Henry James, Mary Hunter Austin, Jessie Fauset, and Gertrude Stein. From an American Romanticism that saw genius as the ability to mediate individual desire and collective purpose to later scientific paradigms that understood it as a pathological individual deviation that nevertheless produced cultural progress, ideas of genius provided a rich language for contests over women's citizenship. Feminist narratives of female genius projected desires for a modern public life open to new participants and new kinds of collaboration, even as philosophical and scientific ideas of intelligence and creativity could often disclose troubling and more regressive dimensions. Elucidating how ideas of genius facilitated debates about political agency, gendered identity, the nature of consciousness, intellectual property, race, and national culture, Olwell reveals oppositional ways of imagining women's citizenship, ways that were critical of the conceptual limits of American democracy as usual.

This edited collection showcases the contribution of women to the development of political ideas during the Enlightenment, and presents an alternative to the male-authored canon of philosophy and political thought. Over the course of the eighteenth century increasing numbers of women went into print, and they exploited both new and traditional forms to convey their political ideas: from plays, poems, and novels to essays, journalism, annotated translations, and household manuals, as well as dedicated political tracts. Recently, considerable scholarly attention has been paid to women’s literary writing and their role in salon society, but their participation in political debates is less well studied. This volume offers new perspectives on some better known authors such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Catharine Macaulay, and Anna Laetitia Barbauld, as well as neglected figures from the British Isles and continental Europe. The collection advances discussion of how best to understand women’s political contributions during the period, the place of salon sociability in the political development of Europe, and the interaction between discourses on slavery and those on women’s rights. It will interest scholars and researchers working in women’s intellectual history and Enlightenment thought and serve as a useful adjunct to courses in political theory, women’s studies, the history of feminism, and European history.

Moscovici proposes a new understanding of how gender relations were reformulated by both male and female writers in nineteenth-century France. She analyzes the different versions of gendered citizenship elaborated by Friedrich Hegel, George Sand, Honore de Balzac, Auguste Comte and Herculine Barbin revealing a shift from a single dialectical (or male-centered) definition of citizenship to a double dialectical (or bi-gendered) one in which each sex plays an important role in subject-citizenship and is defined as the negation of the other sex. Moscovici further argues that a double dialectical pattern of androgyny endows women with a (relational) cultural identity that secures their paradoxical roles as both representatives and outsiders to subject-citizenship in nineteenth-century French society and culture.

Rewriting Citizenship provides an interdisciplinary approach to antebellum citizenship. Interpreting citizenship, particularly how citizenship intersects with race and gender, is fundamental to understanding the era and directly challenges the idea of Jacksonian Democracy. Susan J. Stanfield uses an analysis of novels, domestic advice, essays, and poetry, as well as more traditional archival sources, to provide an understanding of both the prescriptions for womanhood espoused in print culture and how those prescriptions were interpreted in everyday life. While much has been written about the cultural marker of true womanhood as a gender ideology of white middle-class women, Stanfield reveals how it served an even more significant purpose by defining racial difference and attaching civic purpose to the daily practices of women. Black and white women were actively engaged in redefining citizenship in ways that did not necessarily call for suffrage rights but did claim a relationship to the state. The prominence of true womanhood relied upon a female-focused print culture. The act of publication gave power to the ideology and allowed for a shared identity among white middle-class women and those who sought to emulate them. Stanfield argues that this domestic literature created a national code for womanhood that was racially constructed and infused with civic purpose. By defining women’s household practices as an obligation not only to their husbands but also to the state, women could reimagine themselves as citizens. Through print sources, women publicized their performance of these defined obligations and laid claim to citizenship on their own behalf.

“A tour de force . . . speaks powerfully to questions that are being currently debated in Romania, Poland, and Hungary.” —Jeffrey C. Isaac, author of Democracy in Dark Times What is it like to be a woman living through the transition from communism to democracy? What effect does this have on a woman’s daily life, on her concept of herself, her family, and her community? This book presents the stories of women in Romania as they describe their experiences on the journey to democratic citizenship. In candid and revealing conversations, women between the ages of 24 and 83 explain how they negotiated their way through radical political transitions that had a direct impact on their everyday lives. Women who grew up under communism explore how these ideologies influenced their ideas of marriage, career, and a woman’s role in society. Younger generations explore how they interpret civic rights and whether they incorporate these rights into their relationships with their family and community. Beginning with an overview of the role women have played in Romania from the late eighteenth century to today, Birth of Democratic Citizenship explores how the contemporary experience of women in postsocialist countries developed. The women speak about their reliance on and negotiations with communities, ranging from family and neighbors to local and national political parties. Birth of Democratic Citizenship argues that that the success of democracy will largely rely on the equal incorporation of women in the political and civic development of Romania. In doing so, it encourages frank consideration of what modern democracy is and what it will need to be to succeed in the future.

"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.