Professor Brophy
History 102

Women in European Society

Introduction
-women in traditional economy: household vs. home
-The eighteenth century: new vistas for upper-class women
Maria Agnesi (1718-99), professor in math and natural philisophy at Bologna
Gabrielle-Emilie du Chatelet (1706-49) translated Newton’s Principia
Caroline Herschel (1750-1848), a recognized astronomer
-women and the transformation of culture: salons, bluestockings, academies, education, writing
-Enlightenment’s premises for equality

II. The French Revolution, Napoleonic Code, Romanticism
-role of women in democratizing revolution (e.g. October Days)
-Olympe de Gouges, Mary Wollstonecraft, Theodore von Hippel: contemporary advocates of women’s rights
-the exclusion of women after 1789-why?
-impact of Napoleonic Code: defined women’s space as marital and domestic; lacked right of legal person
-forcibly removes women from liberalism’s values of property and individualism
-impact of Romanticism on image and function of women; exalted for sensibility, tenderness, and higher morality

III. The Nineteenth-Century Ideal of Domesticity
-bourg. women: domesticity & the cult of motherhood—the moral superiority of the ‘angel in the house’
-new concern for children’s education
-marriage and fertility: 7.3 births per marriage in France, 1870s; Germany, 6.8.
-the bourgeois stigma of women earning money
-the gendering of Victorian culture:  social space, education, work, etc.
-division of private and public spheres; prescribed ideals and actual practice
-bourgeois women’s early role in reform movements and charity associations

IV. Working Women in the Nineteenth Century
-work as a way of life in town and country
-1866: 45 percent of all French textile workers were women
-exclusion of laboring women from Victorian value system; bourgeois moralists criticize working women
-impact of working women on Industrial Revolution and modern society

V.  The Widening Spheres of Women, 1870-1919
-ideology of separate spheres challenged
-education and legal reforms: Girton College at Cambridge (1869); property and marriage laws
-‘New Women’ and independence: a cultural challenge to restricted female roles
-changed norms of femininity
-anti-feminism: cultural crisis, crisis of social obligation; crisis of social roles

VI. Women as Political Citizens
-universal manhood  suffrange between 1866 and 1884; exclusion from suffrage now based solely on sex
-Suffragist movement in Britain and on the continent
-Millicent Fawcett’s National Union of Women Suffrage Societies (1897)
-Emiline Pankhurst’s Women’s Social and Political Union (1903); use of militant tactics
-bourgeois and socialist societies on continent
-conclusions: a) women’s enfranchisement; b) struggle for civic and economic equality