War Languages: Feminists as warrior women

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War LanguagesFeminists as warrior women

• Vesa Matteo Piludu

University of Helsinki Department of Art Research
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Novellist - Activist

• In 19th Century France, two types of women
  writers stood out the novelist who intertwined
  her political view within the story, and the
  political activist who outrightly fought women's
  oppression in society and the household

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Negative warrior woman the feminist

• In 1848, Edouard de Beaumont created a series of
  images called Les Vesuviennes, which depicted the
  Parisian women as "women warriors" or feminists
• Beaumont used a type of role reversal to shock
  the viewer

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Beaumont'sBanquet Femino-Socialiste

• women's freedom was associated with the
  destruction of family
• Irony a pregnant women is, according to
  Beaumont, protesting against the family

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La Femme Libre ?
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Octave Tasaert's Le Roman, 1852

• A proper 19th century woman ?

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Octave Tasaert's Le Roman, 1852

• it expressed the faults of the modern woman
• Rather than tending to her maternal and spousal
  duties
• the woman "mindlessly sponge absorbing dangerous
  lessons from novels."
• Bergman-Carton, Janis. The Woman of Ideas in
  French Art, 1830-1848. Yale University Press, New
  Haven 1995. Page 111.
• fire and the darkness all around her only
  reinforces the sinful motif
• Fire hell, passion

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Madame de Stael Exiled for a novel

• Madame de Stael wrote the book Delphine.
• A story of one woman fighting the social codes of
  France in an attempt to gain individual freedom.
• Amongst other topics, the book addressed divorce
  and social unacceptance of spinsterhood.
• Napolean reacted to her book and her political
  views by exiling Stael from France

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George Sand , novellist

• I solemnly vow that I shall raise woman from
  her abject position, both through my self and my
  writing,
• God will help me!...let female slavery also have
  its Spartacus.
• That shall I be, or perish in the attempt."
• George Sand in a letter to Frederic Girerd, 1837

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Congres Masculino-Foemino-LiteraireAuthor unknown

• The woman on the right is probably George Sand
• She was notorious for wearing men's clothing
• common assumptions women writers were rude,
  vulgar and masculine women

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1836 Gazette des Femmes

• the Gazette was written by an elite upper class
  of both male and female bourgeois

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Nadar's Pictorial Biography of George
Sand(Barry, Joseph. Infamous Woman the life of
George Sand Doubleday Co, New York 1977)
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Flora Tristan author and date ?

• active in the feminist movement in the mid 1830s,
  arguing for divorce and against gender
  constraints
• she saw herself as "the woman messiah
• Flora Tristan was never actually arrested
• she was indeed under the surveillance of the
  police for the last few years of her life
• Christ-like stance