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Famous and seductive, female stage performers haunted French public life in the century before and after the Revolution. This pathbreaking study delineates the distinctive place of actresses, dancers, and singers within the French erotic and political imaginations. From the moment they became an unofficial caste of mistresses to France's elite during the reign of Louis XIV, their image fluctuated between emasculating men and delighting them. Drawing upon newspaper accounts, society columns, theater criticism, government reports, autobiographies, public rituals, and a huge corpus of fiction, Lenard Berlanstein argues that the public image of actresses was shaped by the political climate and ruling ideology; thus they were deified in one era and damned in the next. Tolerated when civil society functioned and demonized when it faltered, they finally passed from notoriety to celebrity with the stabilization of parliamentary life after 1880. Only then could female fans admire them openly, and could the state officially recognize their contributions to national life. Daughters of Eve is a provocative look at how a culture creates social perceptions and reshuffles collective identities in response to political change.

This pathbreaking study delineates the distinctive place of actresses, dancers, and singers within the French erotic and political imaginations. Berlanstein argues that the public image of actresses was shaped by the political climate and ruling ideology; thus they were deified in one era and damned in the next.

Celebrity status couples recognition of individual achievement, the preeminent cultural ideal of Western societies since the democratic revolutions of the eighteenth century, with the power of the media to disseminate visibility and publicity. This article demonstrates the relevance of celebrity culture well before film and the electronic media by historicizing and gendering it. The nineteenth-century French press offered its bourgeois readers a lively celebrity culture, notably featuring famous women more than men. The historicized and gendered concept of celebrity provides an important tool of cultural analysis since societies inevitably project upon celebrities—and expect them to perform—reigning myths about self-fulfillment and personal uniqueness. In the case of nineteenth-century France, there was a telling evolution in the representation of women celebrities from femmes fatales to proper women whose achievements outside the home were accepted as legitimate.

Prominent French men of letters began to claim that the student body at the acting Conservatory, which bore a morally dubious reputation, was becoming more bourgeois than ever before as the nineteenth century ended. They interpreted the entry of the bourgeoisie as one more manifestation of national decay. In fact, the major shift in recruitment was the growing number of women from respectable, bourgeois backgrounds. The new pattern signalled an expansion in women's autonomy as individuals. Thus, the writers' pessimism obscured the fact that the early Third Republic was keeping some of its democratic promises. The findings indicate that a reassessment of France's capacity for progressive cultural change in the fin de siècle is in order.

This essay uses readers' opinion surveys in Femina, a unique, high-circulation fashion magazine that championed women's rights, to study the reception of feminist ideas. The readers were fashion-conscious and well-off provincial bourgeoises, a group that might have had conservative attitudes on gender roles. Yet, the many thousands of responses reveal a profound desire to expand women's identities beyond domesticity. About a third of the readers were even indignant that women lacked the freedoms of men. Most others looked forward to a future when society would offer women more opportunities to utilize their talents while reaffirming the satisfactions of familial roles. The surveys show that Frenchwomen were redefining femininity in a more individualistic direction though national emergencies as 1914 approached would make them hesitant about pressing their cause.

Famous and seductive, female stage performers haunted French public life in the century before and after the Revolution. This pathbreaking study delineates the distinctive place of actresses, dancers, and singers within the French erotic and political imaginations. From the moment they became an unofficial caste of mistresses to France's elite during the reign of Louis XIV, their image fluctuated between emasculating men and delighting them. Drawing upon newspaper accounts, society columns, theater criticism, government reports, autobiographies, public rituals, and a huge corpus of fiction, Lenard Berlanstein argues that the public image of actresses was shaped by the political climate and ruling ideology; thus they were deified in one era and damned in the next. Tolerated when civil society functioned and demonized when it faltered, they finally passed from notoriety to celebrity with the stabilization of parliamentary life after 1880. Only then could female fans admire them openly, and could the state officially recognize their contributions to national life. Daughters of Eve is a provocative look at how a culture creates social perceptions and reshuffles collective identities in response to political change.Table of Contents: Acknowledgments Introduction 1 Setting the Scene 2 Theater Women and Aristocratic Libertinism, 1715-1789 3 Defining the Modern Gender Order, 1760-1815 4 Magdalenes of Postaristocratic France, 1815-1848 5 The Erotic Culture of the Stage 6 The Struggle against Pornocracy, 1848-1880 7 Imagining Republican Actresses, 1880-1914 8 Performing a Self 9 From Notorious Women to Intimate Strangers Conclusion Notes Index Reviews of this book: Students of French literature and culture will welcome this study of female performers, women who historically achieved great prominence because of their sexuality and public presence. Yet this is much more than simply a descriptive history. Berlanstein...puts theater women into the context of the evolving French debate over the role of women in the public sphere...This fascinating new work is an important addition to the scholarship on French gender history. Recommended for specialists in French history and culture.--Library Journal

Famous and seductive, female stage performers haunted French public life in the century before and after the Revolution. This pathbreaking study delineates the distinctive place of actresses, dancers, and singers within the French erotic and political imaginations. From the moment they became an unofficial caste of mistresses to France's elite during the reign of Louis XIV, their image fluctuated between emasculating men and delighting them. Drawing upon newspaper accounts, society columns, theater criticism, government reports, autobiographies, public rituals, and a huge corpus of fiction, Lenard Berlanstein argues that the public image of actresses was shaped by the political climate and ruling ideology; thus they were deified in one era and damned in the next. Tolerated when civil society functioned and demonized when it faltered, they finally passed from notoriety to celebrity with the stabilization of parliamentary life after 1880. Only then could female fans admire them openly, and could the state officially recognize their contributions to national life. Daughters of Eve is a provocative look at how a culture creates social perceptions and reshuffles collective identities in response to political change. Table of Contents: Acknowledgments Introduction 1 Setting the Scene 2 Theater Women and Aristocratic Libertinism, 1715-1789 3 Defining the Modern Gender Order, 1760-1815 4 Magdalenes of Postaristocratic France, 1815-1848 5 The Erotic Culture of the Stage 6 The Struggle against Pornocracy, 1848-1880 7 Imagining Republican Actresses, 1880-1914 8 Performing a Self 9 From Notorious Women to Intimate Strangers Conclusion Notes Index Reviews of this book: Students of French literature and culture will welcome this study of female performers, women who historically achieved great prominence because of their sexuality and public presence. Yet this is much more than simply a descriptive history. Berlanstein...puts theater women into the context of the evolving French debate over the role of women in the public sphere...This fascinating new work is an important addition to the scholarship on French gender history. Recommended for specialists in French history and culture. --Library Journal

Cross dressing is about deliberately traversing meaningful boundaries. The cultural critic, Marjorie Garber, argues that Western civilization has long been obsessed with transvestite behavior. Garber's wide-ranging analysis (from Shakespeare to Madonna) stresses the disruptive aspect of the phenomenon, which, she claims, precipitates a “category crisis” by exposing the futility of all binary oppositions, including those of gender. Could cross dressing ever have been a commonplace part of the notoriously cautious bourgeois culture of nineteenth-century France? The very idea seems implausible on the surface, but in fact the mainstream stage presented the opportunity to see an enormous amount of transvestite performance (travesti). It consisted not simply of plays within which characters disguise themselves as the other sex. In hundreds of French plays before and after the Revolution, actresses assumed male roles, and, to a more limited extent, actors took female parts. Playwrights and producers, more concerned with fame and success than with social commentary, turned out a stream of such transvestite spectacles.

This essay uses readers' opinion surveys in Femina, a unique, high-circulation fashion magazine that championed women's rights, to study the reception of feminist ideas. The readers were fashion-conscious and well-off provincial bourgeoises, a group that might have had conservative attitudes on gender roles. Yet, the many thousands of responses reveal a profound desire to expand women's identities beyond domesticity. About a third of the readers were even indignant that women lacked the freedoms of men. Most others looked forward to a future when society would offer women more opportunities to utilize their talents while reaffirming the satisfactions of familial roles. The surveys show that Frenchwomen were redefining femininity in a more individualistic direction though national emergencies as 1914 approached would make them hesitant about pressing their cause.[PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]