The French Revolution created a new cultural world that freed women from the constraints of corporate privilege, aristocratic salons, and patriarchal censorship, even though it failed to grant them legal equality. Women burst into print in unprecedented numbers and became active participants in the great political, ethical, and aesthetic debates that gave birth to our understanding of the individual as a self-creating, self-determining agent. Carla Hesse tells this story, delivering a history of how French women have used writing to create themselves as modern individuals. Beginning with the marketplace fishwives and salon hostesses whose eloquence shaped French culture low and high and leading us through the accomplishments of Simone de Beauvoir, Hesse shows what it meant to make an independent intellectual life as a woman in France. She offers portraits of the work and mental lives of many fascinating women - including both well-known novelists and now-obscure pamphleteers - who put pen to paper during and after the Revolution.
We learn how they negotiated control over their work and authorial identity - whether choosing pseudonyms like Georges Sand or forsaking profits to sign t