Karen Offen. The Woman Question in France, 1400–1870

Karen Offen’s The Woman Question in France, 1400–1870 combines a broad survey of French women’s history over almost five centuries with a sparkling interpretive essay that will appeal to specialists of French women’s and gender history, as well as to other scholars. It offers a commanding introduction to the key primary sources and secondary literature in the rich field of French women’s history and deserves to sit within easy reach on many French historians’ desks for its extensive footnotes alone. It is also an engaging and personal work that offers the reader the rare treat of traveling through French women’s history with a seasoned historian who has devoted her long career to researching and writing about French women’s history. Offen draws on more than four decades of research on the history of women and gender in France to build a compelling narrative analysis of the ways in which debates over the “woman question” and the “sexual balance of power” in France have occupied a central position in modern France and the construction of the modern secular state (1).

Appeal · Art · Gender history · Literature · Narrative · Narrative history · Political science · Power (physics) · Sociology · Women's history · Classics · European Political History Analysis · Gender Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies