Best-selling court cases in eighteenth-century France provide ample evidence of a certain emancipation of women. Certain in the sense of tentative, qualified: women won their cases in surprising numbers yet were represented by their lawyers via limiting stereotypes. Certain also in the sense of sure: lawyers and editors contributed to a liberatory moment, particularly in the two decades leading up to the radical phase of the French Revolution, in which late eighteenth-century constructions of female citizen-ship offered virtuous women, regardless of rank or even race, “strategic possibilities” for establishing modern identities—defined as self-creating, auton- omous, and capable of moral judgment and reason. Instead of being excluded from vir tue, women from a variety of social classes, from the provinces, and the Caribbean colonies are represented in Les Causes célèbres, curieuses intéressantes de toutes les cours souveraines du Royaume avec les jugements qui les ont décidées as exemplars, more independent from the particularistic interests, derived from class status and personal ambition that govern the actions of the men who oppress them.

Few scholars have attempted to demonstrate the means by which representations both reflect and transform the lives of historical actors. This study offers a rare opportunity to glimpse that intersection as the Causes célèbres contain representations and lived experience, fact and fiction.

Lawyers and editors called for the liberation of women from tyrannical fathers, abusive husbands, public opinion, and even oppressive laws, like that maintaining the stigma of illegitimacy, in the dozens of seductions, separations, rapes, and infanticides on which this study is based.

Advance praise for A Certain Emancipation of Women

“ A Certain Emancipation of Women takes the study of causes célèbres to a new level of historical analysis. By placing the exciting stories of the women litigants in real time and circumstances, Rizzo can highlight the traditional feudal rhetoric of family honor, the new images of republican citizenship, and how both were manipulated to appeal to public opinion. The old and the new were enlisted to justify women's emancipation from male tutelage and abuse. In addition, Rizzo's use of these cases from the 1770s and '80s shows that gender-based concepts of rights familiar to historians of the women's movement at the end of the nineteenth century had already been formulated in these defense briefs of pre-revolutionary France . A Certain Emancipation of Women gives us the missing piece, the subtle shift by which women's virtue ceased to be the reason for protection and subordination, and became instead the justification for independent, equal participation in everyday affairs. This is a key text for all who are interested in the many ways in which meaning has been given to sexual difference across time.”

—Judith P. Zinsser, Professor of History, Miami University

“A shrewd analysis of representative cases from the most important eighteenth-century French collection of causes célèbres , based largely on judicial memoirs in which lawyers invested conflicts involving husbands and wives, parents and children, masters and servants with public significance, and a welcome addition to the literature on family, gender, and politics in pre-Revolutionary France.”

—Jeffrey Merrick, Professor of History, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

LC 2004007337

ISBN 1-57591-087-X

Printed in the U.S.A.