Chapter 1. Reception

Until recently de Gouges was known almost uniquely for her

Déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne (Declaration of the Rights of

Woman and of the [female] Citizen)* (1791), which she wrote in reply to

the French Constituent Assembly’s Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du

citoyen (Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen) (1789), expanding

and correcting the latter by stating the rights and needs of

women and children. Her other works were rarely mentioned until

1978 when Samia Spencer called her to the serious attention of

literary and social historians by describing her eloquent

application of natural right to the powerless. Interest in her

work increased shortly thereafter. In 1989, the historian Olivier

Blanc wrote a biography based on archival materials and augmented

it in 2003, having meanwhile published two volumes of her

political writings (1993). In 1997 Mary Trouille published a work

on the relation between each of seven female writers and

Rousseau: de Gouges was among this number. Not having the benefit

of Blanc’s revised biography, the critic presented her by listing

the epithets that have carried her devaluation for over two

centuries and that have mostly insisted on her violent death: a

“semi-literate woman of working-class origins turned courtesan

and then playwright, whose radical feminist and republican

manifestoes eventually led her to the guillotine” (237). In 1991

and 1993, Gisela Thiele-Knobloch published two volumes of her

plays and in 1997 issued “Quelques thèses sur l’oeuvre littéraire

d’Olympe de Gouges” (Several Theses on the Literay Work of Olympe de Gouges),

which crisply contradict the distortions her reputation has

suffered. In 1996

*French titles will be translated into English the first time they appear.

Subsequent references will be abbreviated by a noun from the French title.

Mary Cecilia Monedas urged reading her texts, citing the kinds of

disdain and insults that have led to her neglect (43-44). The

French government has begun to acknowledge her importance: the

Place Olympe de Gouges was inaugurated in 2004 (Arguelles-Ling

250), and a plaque stands at the site of one of her dwellings on

the rue St. Honoré. She was neither illiterate nor unlettered, as

Blanc has definitely shown and as readers of her plays can see.

* * *

La Déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne

The Déclaration has been much circulated: in the last fifteen

years, at least five editions have appeared.i The rediscovery of

her writings that has been occurring bears new motivators: some

want to reveal her as an early feminist; others, as a republican

revolutionary, which she was not solely; and most recently, some

historians have deprecated her by calling her self-contradicting

and “self-fashioning.”ii Such descriptors have contexts, both

past and present forces that propel them through time and that

motivate the tortured revisionisms I have just named. The most

vicious of these is misogyny. An article written by an

apparently misogynist woman, Megan Conway, (“Cruel Fortune …”)

qualifies the author as an “obnoxious personality” (231) and as

having a “persecution complex” (212). It cites no sources for

these characterizations.iii

Re-printings of the Déclaration pay homage to its remarkable

demands for women’s political equality and for the protection of

all children, rights soon to be only partially granted by the

Revolution and most then to be swiftly abolished by Napoleon’s

Code civil. At the same time, the history of focus on this document

seems due to its claims to gender-parity. After being either

ignored or the target of various calumnies, its author is now

viewed by some as prescient and modern because she expressed back

then parts of what we think now (Kadish et al). It does not

belittle her genius to qualify the Déclaration as political—women

have the right to participate in government—and practical—all

children are valuable—rather than as an essentialist reflection

on the profound implications of sexual difference.iv She seized

upon the concept of natural right and followed its legal and

financial consequences for persons viewed as ciphers. She

included herself in this number. In a brief article of 2006 and

without distorting her life or thought, Edmond Jouve, for

example, celebrates the courage of the Déclaration and of her other

beliefs. Already in 1989, quoting one of Benoîte Groult’s

phrases, Marie Maclean declared that the text was a revolution

within the Revolution, that it based its claims on inclusion and

not on tactics of opposition between male and female (172). De

Gouges is not asking for “fair play” within the given

circumstances but puts forth a truly transformative vision based

on the equality of natural right.

* * *

L’Esclavage des noirs (Black Slavery)

A further example of current values’ influencing choice of

emphasis on the past consists of the attention paid almost

exclusively to a single play, the one called L’Esclavage des noirs (The

Enslavement of Blacks) in the printing of 1792.v It was reissued alone

in 1989 and in 2007 and was presented and translated along with

three other women’s writings on slavery in 1994. This is a very

early clamor for the rights of a suffering underclass. (Its title

in 1788 was Zamore et Mirza, ou le heureux naufrage [Zamora and Mirza or the

lucky shipwreck].) It is typical of de Gouges’s moral vision that

the group of island-dwelling natives is both victim and

beneficiary of French colonialism. This characteristic attracts

the attention of today’s so-called cultural studies, part of

which ceaselessly deplores colonialism’s negative effects on

various peoples, but that is not her thesis. Misread by seeing

her only as a very early abolitionist—it is true that rich slave

traders opposed the representation of her play--the pedagogy of

her drama is more revolutionary in that it erases both class- and

race-related value systems and judges each character according to

her or his actions. Some of them imagine peaceful cooperation

among classes and races. Masters are cautioned against cruelty;

slaves, against bloody revolt. The attitudinal result protests

contemporary slave trade—no human being should be in bondage to

another--but it does not preach violent revolution.vi In a recent

chapter on teaching this author, Lisa Beckstrand (2011) writes of

the same two texts—the Declaration and The Enslavement of Blacks—

explaining their opposition to exclusion from rights on the basis

of gender and of race. The article makes errors of fact regarding

details of the play’s plot.vii

* * *

Calumny

Beaumarchais was de Gouges’s contemporary. He refused to

support her as a fellow playwright and launched some of the long-

lived epithets that have kept her works out of standard

curricula. Blanc ascribes to Beaumarchais’s hostility much of the

calumny that she has suffered for over two-hundred years, in sum,

that she was an illiterate woman of loose morals and questionable

mental health.viii Her struggle to get his attention was

prolonged. The preface to the printed play says that she wrote to

him after sending him the first version of her Mariage inattendu de

Chérubin (Cherubino’s Unexpected Marriage). He answered her courteously

but without promising any action. She also sought to interest the

whole Société des Auteurs Dramatiques (Society of Playwrghts) in her

cause since they were all at one time or another badly treated by

the committee (v): out of the forty letters she wrote, she

received only four replies (among which that from La Harpe, who

had written favorably of her Chérubin in the periodical Mercure.de

France [Blanc. 2003: 65]). Finally, in the printed play itself,

she writes a plea for the recognition of women writers, inserting

a reference to herself into a conversation between Figaro and the

count (II.25, p. 60). She also has Figaro break frame at the end

of the play (III.15, p. 66) and plead for tolerance of female

authors.

In his introduction to the first volume of Ecrits politiques

(Political Writings), Blanc describes some of the eighteenth- and

nineteenth-century accounts of her (24 ff); they reveal stunning

hatred and fear. Presenting the second volume, the historian says

that many contributed to blackening her memory, and he names

Desessarts, Rétif and Dulaure (36). Furthermore, he refuses the

comparisons made between her and Théroigne de Méricourt and

Marie-Antoinette, associations by which she too was accused of

loose morals (36-37).

In spite of Blanc’s work-- the first version of the

biography appeared in 1989--several recent critics have

contributed their deprecation of the author. Bonnell avers that

she makes contradictory descriptions of herself (82-85).ix Vanpee

sees the variety of her self-descriptions as a series of

“performances” (“Révendication,” in Cragg, Sexualité ). Similarly

and repeatedly, Gregory Brown calls her presentations “self-

fashioning.” Vanpee and Brown appear deliberately to ignore what

classical rhetoric calls ethos, any and every author’s creations

of the personas s/he designs in order to gain the confidence of

readers. Brown labels her Cherubin a “parody” of the Mariage de

Figaro, which makes one wonder if he has read either play (Ch. 5).

Blanc classifies Joan Scott’s and Brown’s commentaries as

anachronistic and misogynist, respectively (2003: 171, 25l).

Their misogyny, not to mention some apparent ignorance of both

literary history and social custom, takes the form of name-

calling in her regard: she is a fake who believes nothing that

she claims. To cite only one example of Scott’s “paradoxes,”

repeated by Trouille (277), de Gouges compares the good

functioning of executive and legislative arms of government to a

good marriage, even though she was not married. According to

both, this is troubling. In fact it is naïve to imagine that a

writer’s words and acts must be consistent, either with each

other or with themselves over time. Study of the plays shows the

careful attention she pays to preserving marriages. For her, for

most of her contemporaries, and for most civilizations, the

institution of marriage assures order. The metaphor of state as a

family headed by a good father has powerful currency even today.

Stable unions, viewed as small states, guarantee the safety of

their child-citizens, which is of permanent importance to the

author, both personally and politically. This is not a paradox.

Unlike her critics, she is not prisoner of a consistency that gives

rise to distortions when applied in other contexts.

Superior to recent critics, La Harpe, her contemporary,

recognized that her Chérubin was neither parody nor criticism of Le

Mariage de Figaro but a sequel (Blanc, 1989: 53). A cursory glance

at the status and age of its characters shows it to be an

imagined continuation and a very serious one, as I shall elaborate

below.

The epithets I have just quoted illustrate only some of the

discounting of de Gouges’s works and of her person. One reason

her writings are belittled is that they respond immediately to

events. Another, related to the former, is that they are written

in haste, as she often says. Haste and immediacy would then make

them uninteresting or at least lacking in artistry, or so goes

the negative reasoning. A third, following from the previous two,

says that since she contradicts herself, that is, changes her

positions or holds contradictory opinions at the same time, we

cannot take her seriously since that is the sign that she is

faking. Further, since she is supposedly illiterate and

uncultured, her writings are naive and superficial in form and

content. If she displays her works—this was said of most women

who wrote—it is because having been of easy virtue and having now

lost her charms, she turns to writing as a substitute for gaining

sexual attention.x Further denigration consists in repeating that

she was ignorant of the French language and probably did not

write the works she signed. Once again, Blanc brings reason and

historical information to bear on this topic (2003: 26-27),

presents documents written in her hand, and observes the rapidity

with which this speaker of Occitan learned French once she

arrived in the capital, no doubt inspired in part by the example

of her natural father, a poet and playwright. She had been no

more ignorant than the other six million subjects who spoke first

of all the dialect of their regions.

Where two descriptors—that her writings are occasional and

are written in haste--are acknowledged by the author herself, the

conclusions drawn by male contemporaries and by later critics do

not follow. Where assertions are false—that she is illiterate,

uncultured, and immoral—the supposed consequences in her works

have never been shown, except to dismiss her and them from

consideration. The entire history of her reception bristles with

misogyny’s influence on assessment and on canon-formation, which

has until recently excluded most other female writers as well.

The threat must be formidable.

Her work’s occasional nature and speedy production are

undeniable. The compression of her writing life is a fact: born

in 1748, she had married at seventeen, given birth at eighteen

and was widowed soon after. She had arrived in Paris by 1774,

absorbed the language, society and culture of the capital,

composed her first play in 1784 and published her own complete

works in 1788. Besides the many pamphlets and letters she wrote

in response to political events, the here-and-now is indeed

reflected in many of her plays. Like the ephemera, they react to

specific events—the death of Mirabeau (Mirabeau aux Champs-Elysées

[Mirabeau in the Elysian Fields]), Dumouriez’s defense of the revolution

against foreign royalists (L’Entrée de Dumouriez à Bruxelles [Dumouriez’s

Entry into Brussels]) and the National Assembly’s discussion of

allowing divorce (La Nécessité du divorce [The Necessity for Divorce]), and

others. The immediate theatrical representation of dramatic

happenings creates an acceleration and compression that might be

said to elide history altogether by displaying the immediate. The

word occasional perfectly captures her fresh reactions and her

passionate commitment to the stakes of political struggle. Of

course, by writing in this way, she ran the risk of transience.

That is probably not, however, the reason for literary history’s

neglect of her. The French Revolution continues after all to be

an endless source of speculation, commentary and re-reading. She

does not seem to have thought in any case that she was writing

for eternity, and therein lies the real modesty exhibited in her

passionate effort to influence events. One critic who takes

seriously her efforts to do so, Wendy C. Nielsen, studies her

idea of civic or public festivals and explores her relationship

to part of Rousseau’s thought on fêtes nationales (national

celebrations), making a distinction between performance,

available to the citizen-as-subject (as agent), and theatre,

which imposes the status of object upon the spectator. Through

four of the plays, Arguelles-Ling presents the author’s expanding

vision of the French people and of their new republic.xi

The rapidity of composition, the avowal of which served as

prolepsis (responding in advance to eventual objections) and of

which she seemed at the same time proud, has been regarded in

part as proof that she lacked training, as if current events were

a default topic because she had no classical education or

anything else to draw upon. This kind of discounting implies that

an explicit link with contemporaneous events makes her writing

fundamentally different from other imaginative writing, and so it

exposes the indefensible supposition that such a thing as a fully

private imagination exists and that the latter’s supposed

functioning is artistically superior to comment on the collective

adventure.

Two critics form hypotheses about the speed with which she

wrote or dictated and for her saying that this was the case:

Bonnel defends her (83) before diminishing her prefaces by saying

they are conventional, « dans le style réglementaire des préfaces

de l’époque » (in the regimented style of the prefaces at the

time), even though she denies this and even though they are

anything except ordinary. On the other hand, Trouille finds them

more interesting than the plays (267). Blanc imagines two kind of

reasoning that may have been hers, that in case reactions are

negative, a claim to hasty composition serves as anticipatory

defense, and that she believes in instinct and inspiration and so

allows herself intuitive expression (1989: 53). Her belief that

the dramatist and poet Le Franc de Pompignan was her biological

father lends plausibility to her thinking herself a chip off the

old block, both inspired by this knowledge and possessing some of

his talent.

Printing was more than two centuries old; one could hire a

printer and rapidly distribute a hurriedly-written message. De

Gouges was born to this, constantly used the medium and did so at

her own expense. She wrote or dictated, had her texts printed and

then had them pasted on walls around Paris; this is one way she

entered the public’s mind. The method she (and others) chose

suited her budget and her passion, the desire to affect opinion

in the immediate and so to influence events. At the National

Assembly in Versailles and in Paris, she paid to have her words

printed and posted, having written for the crowds gathered in

places serving as their agoras, at the Palais Royal, for example,

and where no female was allowed to speak. She paid also to have

them delivered to editors of newspapers (the Journal de Paris and the

Chronique de Paris for example) and to delegates of the various

successive assemblies. She sometimes went directly to a printer

and dictated her text while standing over the fonts. She was far

from alone in this. Pamphleteering was widespread as were

political clubs: debate was taking place in speech and in

writing, and pamphlets or tracts were often read aloud to

spontaneously-assembled groups. As they evolved, the issues were

often then voted upon in the various legislative bodies. Reading,

writing and speech-giving were going on everywhere and

constantly.

Bonnell says her statements about her art follow an “étrange

logique” (strange logic). Many are only apparently contradictory

since they occur as prolepsis. It is the criticisms of her that

are contradictory: for instance, the reproach that she was

ignorant and derivative. How could she be both? Bonnell writes of

the “implausibilities” of her plots; and Vanpee (Literate Women,

62), of the “amateurishness of their dramatic composition,”

adding that “the oral basis of her knowledge is evident

throughout her writings…” (63) and that her information is

“superficial” (63). She was nonetheless able to recognize and

deploy theatrical convention in every one of her plays,

presumably due to the fact that she went to the theater as did

most of the French population, in the provinces and in the

capital. It is of course probable that it was attending theater,

more than book-learning, that provided her with references and

ideas: to whom did it not? She writes a sequel to Beaumarchais’s

play, puts Molière on stage as a character, echoes plots and

proper names from Diderot’s theater, and populates her Mirabeau

with Montesquieu, Voltaire and Mme de Sévigné among others. She

lives in the thick of things, both theatrical and political. The

two are not far apart.

In reply to such negative comments, one might note also that

no theatrical convention is per se plausible, which is precisely

the meaning of the word convention. Most tastes, rules and

standards of evidence are culturally determined. Certain themes

exhibit little variance through time. One narrative of

redemption, for example, that consists of a child’s discovery of

a lost parent rolls across two centuries of French dramatic

literature and novels as well as across twenty-first century

television. It is not reprehensible that de Gouges makes it a

vector of Cherubin; she even enriches it by having the parents

look for their lost child rather than the reverse, which was

infinitely more common even though against the law. Equal rights

of children born outside of marriage were not proclaimed in

France until 1972.

Finally, the many accusations of immorality disgust any

reader who is aware of misogyny’s permanence. Alas, this hatred

does not appear to be culturally determined: it is timeless and

universal. The ubiquitous double standard is particularly noxious

when applied to women who escape the domestic sphere. One hardly

knows where to begin to untangle the tortured misogynistic paths

to the epithet of courtesan. The unmarried woman threatens males

because she is not “covered,” that is, not reliably dominated. It

is not a matter of knowing whether or not de Gouges had numerous

sexual partners—how would we determine that, even if it were a

legitimate subject of investigation?—it is the male reaction to

the independent woman and, worse yet, to one who wields a pen. A

woman with agency is necessarily castrating, and this one very

specifically denounces the male courtesan, the adulterer, the

predator as the norm.

The critical literature on this point is vast although

without noticeable effect on mentalities.xii Women writers were

especially threatening, it seems, since their activity prompted

virulent sexual sarcasms. In sum, the two main factors countering

de Gouges’s durable success as a writer were manifest misogyny—

nothing subtle about it--and the related lack of a cohort. She

had friends and supporters of both sexes and in various arts but

neither admission to the club of playwrights nor an organized

group of influential female allies was available to sustain her

ability to be heard. Maclean cites de Gouges herself on her lack

of cohort (175-76).

As for the accusations of insanity, it is she who is sane by

any measure. The name-callers incarnate the immaturity of

splitting, the Manichean defense that consists of dividing persons

and events into good or bad, us or them, high or low, admirable

or despicable. She does not split in this way, and this is one of

her transcendent qualities. The traits that she approves and

those she condemns are not divided in the usual ways between

social classes, genders or races. Instead of bad aristocrats

versus good commoners (Almaviva and Figaro in Beaumarchais’s

play), she paints two nobles, one of whom is admirable, Chérubin,

and the other, Almaviva, who is not. The contrast is a moral,

behavioral one and is not assigned to social class. In L’Esclavage,

the West-Indian masters include both the evil homme de confiance

(confidence man) and the benevolent Frémont. Perhaps most

important, both concretely and symbolically, splitting between a

legitimate child and an illegitimate one is unacceptable; all

children are valuable, and to practice exclusion on that basis is

where real insanity lies.

The author sees herself as embedded in a network of

biological and affective ties. Her reforms confront the system of

justice: identity engages a system of relationships and not their

simplification. Biological parenthood ought to be the same as

legal parenthood, and natural right supposes natural affection

between parent and child. Instead of arising from hierarchy or

caste, the bonds of care between humans depend on a common

history, on biological ties and on affection. These are the bases

of relationships and of the self for de Gouges. Whole and free-

standing selves are defined by their affective ties to each

other. It is difficult to see how this can be called insane.

i Here are some examples : --Déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne

suivi de Préface pour les dames ou Le portrait des femmes, éd. Emanuèle Gaulier,

Paris, Mille et une nuits, 2003. --Olympe de Gouges et les droits de la femme,

éd. Sophie Mousset, Paris, le Félin, Les Marginaux, 2003. --Olympe de

Gouges suivi de Les droits de la femme, éd. Rechte der Frau et Karl Heinz

Burmeister, Bern, Stämpfli Verlag; Wien, MANZ, 1999. --Déclaration

des Droits de la Femme, in Eliane Viennot (dir.), La Démocratie "à la

Française" ou les femmes indésirables, Paris, Publications de l’Université de

Paris VII-Denis Diderot, 1996. --Déclaration des Droits de la Femme,

in A. de Baecque, D. Godineau et M. Reberioux, Ils ont pensé les Droits de

l’Homme, Textes et Débats, Paris, Ligue des Droits de l’Homme-EDI, 1989.

ii See the Works Cited for references to those taking her seriously—

Spencer and Verdier among others I mention—and to those who engage in

deprecation— Brown, Conway, Scott, Vanpee, for example.

iii The article consists of plot-summary (L’Entrée de Dumouriez …) and

reference to the difficulties its author encountered in having it

staged. Conway misuses the ubiquitous hopefully (213) and seems unaware

of the existence of pronouns, repeating the proper name de Gouges up

to five times per paragraph. Furthermore, she translates Candeille’s

Catherine ou la belle fermière as “the beautiful farmer’s wife” (227). The

character is no longer a wife. She manages a farm for a fellow

aristocrat and employs her own servants.

iv De Gouges’s plays, however, show some empowerment of women, that

resulting from assertion and solidarity on their part, qualities that

women have undoubtedly shared for eons but that were rarely depicted

in patriarchal theater. Two articles celebrating her feminism are Uwe

Dethloff’s which presents Condorcet’s beliefs, stressing their

startling modernity and adding three paragraphs on de Gouges’s

similarities; and Liliane Lazar’s brief notice written to acknowledge

the appearance of Gisela Thiele-Knobloch’s edition of some of her

plays. Pierre Darmon calls her and Condorcet militant feminists and

notes that two centuries passed before their “ambitions

prométhéennes” even began to be accomplished (194).

vThe play itself illustrates the occasional nature of composition: it

was first called Zamore et Mirza, ou l’heureux naufrage, then L’esclavage des

nègres ou …, then L’esclavage des noirs ou … The changes in titles reflect

the increasing focus on racial injustice as well as on the news of

the massive slave uprising that occurred in the Caribbean in 1792.

The considerable differences between the first and third version

augment the urgency of the pedagogical and political intent by

resisting the possibility of violence and by insisting on natural

right: the lost-and-found three-year-old disappears from the later

version, and two adult female servants are added and given eloquent

speeches in defense of such rights.

Two articles treating the play are Mary Jane Cowels’s on the

subjectivity of the colonial subject and Gregory Brown’s

“Abolitionism and Self-Fashioning” in which he finds de Gouges more

self-promoting than feminist or abolitionist. One version of it is

also translated and commented upon in Kadish et al.

vi In Cartesian Women, Erica Harth uses the term “gradualist solutions”

to describe Montesquieu’s, Condorcet’s and de Gouges’s response to

the difficulties of abolition (227).

vii The errors: Sophie was abandoned not at birth (287) but at age

five (III.13); Zamor was adopted not at birth (288) but at age eight

(I.8). He did not murder his master but the latter’s homme de confiance

who tried to rape Mirza (286) (I.1). It matters that the playwright

imagines these events as occurring when the children are capable of

remembering the parent. It matters also that Zamor not be accused of

killing his adoptive father.

viii Blanc (1989) describes Beaumarchais’s intrigues and de Gouges’s

reactions on pages 51-52.

ix In a serious treatment of the preface to Chérubin, Isabelle DeMarte

traces the persuasive roles the author assigns to herself.

x Charles Roy wrote and circulated an epigram about the novelist and

playwright Mme de Graffigny—not about her play Cénie, but about her

person. English Showalter describes it like this: “It implies that

‘bel esprit’ is equivalent to prostitution for women no longer young

and beautiful enough to earn a living from the latter” p. 109, n. 9.

“Writing off the stage ….” Yale French Studies 75 (1988), 95-111.

xi She shows the author’s steadily expanding vision of the French

nation and of its inclusiveness. She enumerates also the increasing

official remembrances of her established in the twentieth- and

twenty-first centuries in France.

xii To take only two relatively mild examples of comment on the hatred

of politically active women, in the section of her book that treats

de Gouges’s reactions to Rousseau, Mary Trouille speculates that Mme

Roland and Olympe de Gouges were killed for not staying in the

domestic sphere, for transgressing “gender barriers” (278). In their

introduction to Women Writers in Pre-Revolutionary France, the editors Winn and

Kuizenga note the comparison often made between woman’s speech and

sexual indecency (xviii).

The literature on misogyny is of course vast. For a recent

review of it, see Pierre Darmon’s Femme, repaire de tous les vices: misogynies et

féministes en France (XVIe – XIXe siècles). Bruxelles: André Versaille, 2012. Two

of the descriptive terms he uses can be seen to highlight de Gouges’s

originality: “paternalistic feminism” (220 et passim) praises woman

while assigning her to gender-specific duties, and de Gouges’s

radical view of equality of rights does not suffer this manoeuvre.

Neither does the “contextual alibi” find favour with her; it

“understands” certain practices as belonging to a social group

instead of what she knows to be the absolute, un-relativized horror

that they are (221 et passim).

One is tempted to imagine that the male unconscious equates

artistic production by females with their ability to give birth: both

creations produce in men endless (counter-phobic) efforts at

domination. De Gouges often saw her writing as she would her child.

In her article on figures of speech used in the playwright’s preface

to Chérubin. DeMarte find various such metaphors, including her text

as newborn (259, 263), as still-born (264, 265), as aborted (266) and

as orphaned (278).

A further aspect much mentioned in the last decades is woman’s

assignment to the private domain. Habermas and his discussants insist

on the distinction between the public sphere and the private, but it

must be nuanced for women especially. Trouille mentions a few

examples of such works (376-77, n.2) in which the salon is seen as

participating in both spheres. It is there that women taught and

learned most freely—and became even more dangerous.