Napoleon and the Woman Question: Discourses of the Other Sex in French Education, Medicine, and Medical Law, 1799-1815 (Fashioning the Eighteenth Century) [Hardcover]

June K. Burton (Author), Susan P. Conner (Foreword)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 15, 2007 | Series: Fashioning the Eighteenth Century

Women under the Napoleonic regime have been largely neglected by historians. Through recovered discourses and other primary sources, in Napoleon and the Woman Question June K. Burton uncovers the strategies that Napoleonic women employed to control their lives. She begins with an analysis of Napoleon’s personal attitudes about the nature of women. He did not view them as weak vessels, but rather as industrious and strong, with an important role: as wives and mothers. She discusses France’s first national system of midwifery education, women’s issues in Napoleonic textbooks, the infanticide controversy, and the prevailing view of the relationship between the physical and the moral in feminine bodies and minds. In addition, she explores women’s medicine and surgery of the time with narratives from two patients, Adrienne Noailles Lafayette and Francis Burney d’Arblay. By clarifying the tensions and ambiguities of the Napoleonic period, Burton provides a nuanced approach to late-eighteenth-century and Napoleonic studies. The Emperor did not consider women the weaker sex. In fact, they were strong, perhaps too strong. With their tears or their allure, they could control a man. . . . They were autonomous beings who could move around the system, interject themselves into it at the right moment, and further the cause of women without being unduly noticed. For woman’s nature, what mattered was la différence. —Susan P. Conner, from the foreword

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

June K. Burton is associate professor emerita of history at the University of Akron and an associate editor of Historical Dictionary of Napoleonic France, 1799–1815. Napoleon and Clio (1979) established her reputation as an expert on Napoleonic historiography and bibliography.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Texas Tech University Press; First Edition edition (January 15, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0896725596
• ISBN-13: 978-0896725591
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.5 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,380,136 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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