Rebel daughters

Sara E. Melzer, Leslie W. Rabine

This interdisciplinary collection of essays examines many facets of the important and paradoxical relation between women and the French Revolution. Recent research has unearthed evidence that women of all classes participated actively in the French Revolution, demanding bread for their families, and fighting for the same rights of equality and liberty that men claimed for themselves. The authors contend that although the male leaders of the Revolution depended on the women's active militant participation, they denied to them the rights women helped to establish. At the same time that women were banned from the political sphere, "woman" was transformed into an allegorical figure which became the very symbol of (masculine) Liberty and Equality. Bringing together the work of historians and literary critics, this book's multidisciplinary approach provides readers with diverse...

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