“LES PROLÉTAIRES ET LES FEMMES SONT DES ESCLAVES” Discourses of subordination in French feminist periodicals from the 1830s
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2025-07-14
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en
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The periodical press is often considered an important site for disseminating ideological views, public debate and politics. Specifically in the nineteenth century, the (French) women’s press allowed women access to the public sphere and these public and political debates. During the 1830s specifically, feminism and the feminist press reemerged in French society. Women’s periodicals tried to mobilise their female readers to fight for the improvement of their condition and occasionally even that of other disadvantaged groups. They for example also discussed topics such as social inequality and reform. According to some scholars, nineteenth-century (French) feminists also expressed themselves on the issue of slavery and the condition of enslaved people and people of colour. However, not all researchers agree on this. Rather, there are those who argue that these feminists merely deployed a language related to slavery in order to discuss and denounce women’s condition.
Focussing on French feminist periodicals from the 1830s, this thesis studies exactly these matters by focussing on the ways in which different types of subordination, specifically those based on social class and race, appear in a larger feminist discourse focussed on the subordination of women. It furthermore analyses the ways in which connections are established between (individuals from) different subordinate groups of society, specifically women, members of the working class, and enslaved people. The research also considers what the motives of these feminists behind linking these different subordinate groups might be.
The thesis does so by studying a corpus of three feminist periodicals: La Femme libre (1832-1834), Le Conseiller des femmes (1833-1834) and the Gazette des femmes (1836-1838). It uses a mixed methodology which combines computational analysis and qualitative analysis. The first chapter discusses the historical context of the nineteenth-century women’s/feminist periodical press as well as some possibilities and limitations of using digital approaches to study periodicals. This chapter also elaborates on the method of this research. The second chapter then looks at each periodical, its contents and social/political positioning. The third chapter consists of a computational analysis of the corpus on the basis of text-mining software AntConc, focussing on keywords related to the different types of subordination and the different subordinate groups under study in this thesis and their collocates. Finally, the fourth chapter further studies the construction of a feminist discourse and discourses related to subordination in each periodical. It qualitatively analyses this and the ways in which different types of subordination intersect and people from different subordinate groups are connected in the periodicals by close reading a selection of articles and conducting a discourse analysis.
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Faculteit der Letteren