Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man

Joan Wallach Scott

Published by Harvard University Press 1996

Only Paradoxes to Offer

French Feminists and the Rights of Man

Joan Wallach Scott

https://doi.org/10.4159/9780674043381

Overview
Contents

About this book

When feminists argued for political rights in the context of liberal democracy, they insisted that the differences between men and women were irrelevant for citizenship. Yet by acting on behalf of women, they introduced the very idea of difference they sought to eliminate. Scott reads feminist history in terms of this paradox.

Reviews

In her subtle and provocative new book, Joan Scott convincingly argues that the exclusion of women was central to the logic of French republicanism in the 19th century, and she traces the workings of this logic through the eyes of its most persistent feminist critics.
-- Joshua Cole Village Voice Literary Supplement

Readers of this book will enjoy discovering (or rediscovering) four compelling women, while marveling at how the terms of earlier feminism are at once familiar and strange. Rather than taking the category of women for granted as the subject of feminist discourse and politics, Scott argues that feminist agency is itself profoundly paradoxical...[T]his book contributes a probing intellectual history of the central questions in modern feminist thought which will also add much to contemporary feminist inquiry.
-- Joan B. Landes American Political Science Review

Joan Scott's tour de force is written with clarity, grace, humor, trenchant knowledge, imagination, and a sense of the politically extravagant...After Scott's brilliant book, none of us will be able to read French feminism in the same way again.
-- Judith Butler, University of California, Berkeley

It is the sense of feminism as dynamic, searching, inventive, historically specific, and often divided against itself, rather than abstract, timeless, or doctrinaire, that gives this story its spin.
-- Laura Englestein, Princeton University

A feminist's history of feminist history, one that is likely to shape the debate not simply over the history of gender but over the larger questions of political and cultural history.
-- Mark Poster, University of California, Irvine

Those interested in feminism, postmodernism, historiography, and/or the fundamental assumptions that sustain contemporary political debates will find this book richly rewarding. Philosophers of science concerned with the methodological production of facticity will find this work exemplary of the contributions of postmodernism to the construction of the past.
-- Mary Hawkesworth Canadian Philosophical Reviews

Only Paradoxes to Offer is a valuable and stimulating book which synthesises a number of theoretical issues and applies them in original ways to specific historical contexts. It will be of great value to scholars engaged in feminist critical theory, women's studies and French history.
-- Felicia Gordon Women's Philosophy Review [UK]

The four feminists examined in this book all had differing ideas about [the]problem of women's 'equality' or 'difference', ideas that Scott clearly shows tobe a product of the dominant political discourses of their time...[Only Paradoxes to Offer] is successful and important in its exposure of the internal contradictions, dilemmas and 'obsessive repetitions' of the feminist experience.
-- Jane Freedman Modern and Contemporary France [UK]

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Preface Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
1 Rereading the History of Feminism Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
2 The Uses of Imagination: Olympe de Gouges in the French Revolution Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	19
3 The Duties of the Citizen: Jeanne Deroin in the Revolution of 1848 Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	57
4 The Rights of "the Social": Hubertine Auclert and the Politics of the Third Republic Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	90
5 The Radical Individualism of Madeleine Pelletier Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	125
6 Citizens but Not Individuals: The Vote and After Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	161
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	177
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	225

Language: English
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 245

eBook

Published: July 1, 2009
ISBN: 9780674043381