Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution
"Landes explores from the critical perspective of feminist political theory the historical evolution of 'the public sphere'—its definition as male space and the exclusion of women from it."—Women's Review of Books"Filled with stunning hypotheses and brilliant insights."—Choice"In this intelligent and readable book, Joan Landes argues that women's exclusion from the modern public sphere is neither accidental nor incidental but a central feature of its incarnation."—Journal of Modern History"It is in reading Joan Landes's Women and the Public Sphere that we can best see the power and problematic character of democratic thinking as Tocqueville understood it . . . .Both female domesticity and modern feminism, as well as the difficulties that attend each, originated in liberal republicanism."—The Review of Politics"Should become part of the increasingly varied repertoire available to everyone interested in the formation of the discourse of modern politics as well as specifically feminist issues."—Eighteenth-Century Studies"Joan B. Landes's theoretical analysis of the public sphere organizes a wide spectrum of events and texts in order to examine, from a feminist viewpoint, the passage from absolutism to bourgeois society during the period between 1750 and 1850. Responding especially to the work of Habermas, Landes investigates the way in which the emerging bourgeois public sphere was constituted to exclude women."—The French Review"Compelling and thought-provoking. . . . Ranging across several disciplines and the critical historical divide of the French Revolution, it gives us women's voices, classical political thory, and an analysis of political culture all at the same time. Landes has opened an exciting path in the study of gender and politics."—Lynn Hunt, University of Pennsylvania