Eve’s Proud Descendants: Four Women Writers and Republican Politics in Nineteenth-century France

How could women in postrevolutionary France act politically when they lacked political rights, and how could they support an exclusively masculine republicanism? This is a study of four female authors who wrote women into politics and into republicanism by articulating a model of republican womanhood between the two poles of feminist equality and republican motherhood. These four writers were George Sand, Marie d Agoult, Hortense Allart, and Delphine Gay de Girardin. Each figure constructed herself as a republican woman, as a female with certain public capabilities, and as a model for other women. They also rewrote the republican script regarding family relations, positing egalitarian alternatives to the patriarchal family of male republicanism. Although ostensibly they did not challenge male exclusivity in the possession of political rights, they significantly undermined its foundation in the gendered separation of social spheres.