Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution Paperback – October 11, 1988

This is an outstanding scholarly work by a well-respected scholar of Old Regime France and the role of women in history. To criticize her work because her definition is loosely based on a term which refers to an often nebulous group or phenomenon that is historically impossible to nail down is cheap. As to any criticism of her methodological sloppiness (here in using modern films to exemplify points she makes in her book and draw the reader into the story in an engaging fashion or to show the longevity of historical memory), you ought first to be clear in your examples and then to justify your criticisms for the reader. Your "critical" review is much sloppier and gives little information besides your negative opinion.One of the purpose of this book is to explore the power of rhetoric and the (lack of) influence women were able to exert in pre-Revolutionary and Revolutionary France. Landes has been criticized for a weak sense of coherency in the way she deals with her text and a lack of hard evidence to back up her claim that the dominant ideology of "equality, liberty and fraternity" developed and instituted by the "bourgeois" Republic necessarily limited women. Her evidence is in the weight of rhetoric to influence politics, an important debate in French Revolution historiography, from scholars like Furet and Chartier to historians like Joan Landes. Her methodology is not exactly sloppy and there is little evidence to suggest that she doesn't understand the methodological models she uses. The confusion here must come from that fact that she is combining Habermas' sociological theory with a postmodernist emphasis on the importance of an even more abstract and difficult to document force, the power of language. The result is engaging, but perhaps not always what a casual reader would want. But the problem is not her grasp of these concepts, but her ability to use them together in a convincing manner.Landes book is one of many recent books on women and their role in 18th century French intellectual life and the causes of the radical shift in their involvement. The variety of topics under discussion should make this book interesting for a number of audiences. It should be criticized with more skill and understanding than shown by the previous entry, and history students who read this book should be taught to understand the good points as well as the bad. Certainly the previous criticisms should not "invalidate the book as a whole" or even keep curious or interested readers from checking out this book. Particularly for people interested in the Enlightenment and influential writings of Old Regime France, this book offers an interesting perspective on the how French people were thinking about political involvement and the role of women even before the Revolution and the change in legal status for male and female subjects.

I am only including a review because it is clear that this book deserves more than 2 or 3 stars. It is a scholarly work which has been respected and documented in many other historical works in this field, and if it's good enough for professors of history it is sure as hell good enough for the plebeian readers of Amazon.com.