Day 10 - Sex and Gender in the Belle Epoch

Team Assignments

Between now and next Wednesday your team should visit the Musée d'Orsay as a group and prepare a class presentation using materials from our web site and at least five paintings or other objects from the collection to help you answer one of the questions below. You will share your presentation on Wednesday morning based on these images and the materials available in class. (Note the museum is closed on Mondays.)

Question 1 What roles were prescribed for women in Paris in the second half of 19th century? How much variation in what was officially accepted does there seem to have been across classes or across the decades?

Question 2 What roles were prescribed for men in Paris in the second half of 19th century? How much variation in what was accepted does there seem to have been across classes or across the decades?

Question 3 How was sexuality represented in public culture in Paris in the second half of the 19th century? How much variation was recognized? How much was hidden?

[You may find useful information for answering your question in all the sections below, not just in the one specifically linked to your topic. For example, you might find relevant material on male roles in the sections on women or on sexuality.]

Gender Roles of Women

Jean Beraud, The Box by the Stalls (1883)

Karen Offen, “Women, Citizenship, and Suffrage in France Since 1789” in William B. Cohen,  The Transformation of Modern France (Houghton Mifflin: Boston. 1996), pp. 125-126, 128– 131.

Eugen Weber, France: Fin de Siècle (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), pp. 88-89, 90-97, 99.

• Women's Rights
• Women's Work and Education
• Underwear and Personal Hygiene

Rosalind Williams, Dream Worlds, "Dreams of Love and Wealth" (Consumerism and gender images)

Paul Smith, Impressionism and the Impressionists, Feminist Interpretations of Impressionism

National Gallery of Art, Picturing France, 1830–1900

• Manet's Presentation of Women at the Opera

Images of Women

• Threatening Women

Victorian Paris:

• Paris Downstairs: The upper servants
• Paris Downstairs: La femme de ménage
• Paris Downstairs: Breasts for hire
• Paris Downstairs : La soubrette

Gender Roles of Men

Robert Nye, “The Culture of the Sword: Manliness and Fencing in the Third Republic” from Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor in Modern France (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 148-153, 160-161.

• Masculinity and the Revival of Dueling in France
• The Glorification of Dueling (1)
• The Roots of Honor in 19th Century France (2)
• The Emergence of a Cult of Honor (3)

Robert A. Nye, “Masculinities in War and Peace,” The American Historical Review, Vol. 112, No. 2 (Apr., 2007), pp. 417-438.

Sexual Harassment in the Streets of Paris

Marriage

Blog Posts on Marriage

• Without a Dowry: The business of marriage

• The marriage market

Sexuality

Christopher Thompson, “Un troisième sexe? Les bourgeoises et la bicyclette dans la France fin de siècle, Le Mouvement social, No. 192 (July-September 2000), pp.9-14, 16-18, 26.

• Gender and Bicycles -- Over View (1)
• Gender, Bicycles, and National Security (2)
• Bicycles and Gender Anxiety (3)

Manet's Nana

Raymond Rudorff, Belle Epoque

• French Attitudes Towards Sexuality in the late 19th Century
• Courtesans and Prostitutes

Fae Brauer, “Flaunting Manliness: Republican Masculinity, Virilised Homosexuality and the Desirable Male Body,”

• Male Bodies, Homosexuality, and the German Threat

Fenton Bresler, Napoleon III: A Life, pp.300-301

• Censorship in the Second Empire -- A Double Standard

Victorian Paris

• Cocottes and Cocodettes
• Two women turning to prostitution
• Degrees of Prostitution
• 1861 Report on Prostitution in Paris
• Drink and Prostitution: The Belle Epoque Hooters