Dissertation Information for Carolyn Jeanne Eichner NAME: - Carolyn Jeanne Eichner
DEGREE:
- Ph.D.
DISCIPLINE:
- History
SCHOOL:
- University of California, Los Angeles (USA) (1996)
ADVISORS: - Edward Berenson
COMMITTEE MEMBERS: - Kathryn Norberg - Robert P. Brenner - Ruth Milkman
MPACT Status: Fully Complete
Title: Surmounting the barricades: Feminism, socialism, and revolutionary women in the Paris Commune of 1871
Abstract: The Paris Commune bears a weighty historical burden as one of the premier socialist epics. While an enormous body of work exists on this revolution, women's participation is only now receiving attention. My work examines female activism, and contextualizes these revolutionary women within the development of socialism, feminism and gender ideology in nineteenth century France. Communardes developed new forms of feminist socialisms based on their revolutionary experiences, economic exploitation in the workplace, and subordination in the family. Because most male socialist theorists either vilified or ignored women, intellectual and practical demands necessitated the qualification of certain aspects of these male positions. The attitudes and actions of many of their male contemporaries confirmed activist women's need to develop a revolutionary voice of their own.
To male critics of the Commune, women represented the extreme of insurrectionary upheaval by challenging both gender and class hierarchies. In 1871, bourgeois gender ideology provided the dominant stereotypical images of womanhood, assuming absolute associations between class and sexuality. According to these precepts, a true woman, a bourgeoise, embodied pristine passionlessness; a working class woman represented a wild and available sexuality. But, in the unsettled world of the Commune, male critics portrayed women in ways which often transposed these stereotypes. A working class woman, now carrying weapons in the streets and participating in the revolt, became threatening, evil and virtually de-sexed. In contrast, a revolutionary bourgeoise, possibly armed and flamboyantly attired, became eroticized and procurable by leaving her proper, protected sphere.
Communardes espoused a social and economic feminism, eschewing the goals of political and civic rights. They believed that the Commune had ushered in an equitable society, thus mooting questions of suffrage and representation. Female leaders spoke patriotically of defending the nation and Paris, but because they viewed the Commune as the potential germ of international socialism, their nationalism held a strong internationalist component.
During the Commune, working class women's extant sets of standards, developed in the material reality of their lives, briefly burst through the surface and expanded in the revolution, only to be crushed in the Versailles government's intense repression of the revolt.
| |
MPACT Scores for Carolyn Jeanne Eichner A = 0
C = 0
A+C = 0
T = 0
G = 0
W = 0
TD = 0
TA = 0
calculated 2009-02-03 11:13:55
Advisors and Advisees Graph
generating graph, please reload |