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The Other Enlightenment: How French Women Became Modern. By CARLA HESSE. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001. 233 pp. $47.50 (cloth), $22.95 (paper).
Carla Hesse's The Other Enlightenment challenges the idea of a monolithic "Enlightenment" as created by the great male philosophes such as Voltaire and Rousseau. Taking as her starting point the contradiction between the notion of an "other Enlightenment" and a traditional definition of "the Enlightenment" as a universal concept, Hesse follows in the footsteps of historians such as Robert Damton who in the 19805 transformed our understanding of the Enlightenment with his study of "Grub Street" writers. Damton, along with Roger Chartier and others, presented the Enlightenment in social and cultural, rather than purely intellectual, terms and made us aware that there were many "enlightenments." The story of women, and particularly of the women writers who are the subject of Hesse's book, is surely one of these many enlightenments, one that has been sorely neglected by historians until very recently.
The title of the book is also a reference to Simone de Beauvoir's 1949 feminist manifesto, The Second Sex, which told us that women were viewed as "other" in a male-defined world. Hesse's "other Enlightenment" is an intellectual history that connects women who pursued "the public exercise of female reason" (p. 55) from the Old Regime to Beauvoir. While Hesse focuses on Prance, her work should inspire historians of other regions to explore the important, though often unacknowledged, contributions women have made to the history of ideas and to the creation of a modern sensibility.
The first part of the hook examines women's relationship to literacy, publishing, and authorship in the Old Regime. Hesse opens with the story of a servant woman, Jeanne-Catherine Clere, who was executed during the French Revolution for seditious speech. Hesse argues that the seriousness with which her drunken royalist rantings were treated is evidence of an oral culture in which women, from fishwives to sakrnnieres, had a privileged relationship to speech. The gradual displacement of the spoken by the written word in public life, finalized during the Revolution, led to a decline in women's...