Eighteenth-Century Women at Work: Writing her Space/ Femmes au travail du XVIIIe siècle: Écrire son espace

Women work, but they have always done so. For decades now, the work of eighteenth-century Francophone women has been the focus of renewed academic interest. This thesis proposes to consider the question of women’s work through the angle of a literature in which writers construct their self-narrative as “women at work”. The corpus, which includes texts written between 1734 and the 1830s, explores the writings of six women writers who equally pursued professional careers. It comprises the correspondence of the scientist Émilie Du Châtelet (1706- 1749) and Princess Isabelle de Bourbon-Parme (1741-1763); the memoirs of the renowned actress Mademoiselle Clairon (1723-1803) and of Lucy de la Tour du Pin (1770-1853), who juggled a number of different careers simultaneously (educator, farmer, seamstress and more); and the “Souvenirs” of portrait painter Louise Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun (1755-1842) and of the entrepreneur Marie-Victoire Monnard (1777-1869). In adopting a multidisciplinary approach which combines literature, art, art history, history, sociology, philosophy and science, among others, this study provides an original perspective on, and helps to broaden and redefine, women’s work. These professional women juggled multiple professions, both as women and women of letters, but also by working in professional fields that were predominantly monopolised by men at this time. Drawing on major figures in literary analysis such as Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault, the thesis aims to define and analyse the narrative of the space(s) – whether private or public – to which these professional women could gain access in order to establish their profession. Despite a rhetoric of domination, these women eschew the domestic space, emphasising that marriage and motherhood are by no means the sum total of careers for women. Clearly, the worldly sphere is equally unattractive to professional women, who have to learn to mingle in polite society from an early age. While their writings suggest resistance to such spaces, the fact remains that these women challenge the traditional motifs of marriage, motherhood and sociability in order to emphasise their desire to appropriate the professional public space. In disregarding the proprieties cherished by homemakers who thrive in the domestic and social spheres, and by men who try to limit women’s access to the professional sphere, professional women are engaged in a war to conquer the professional space. Despite a certain degree of resistance from professional institutions and from society, which forces them to juggle careers as wives and mothers with their professions, these professional women nonetheless manage to leave professional legacies. If their traces appear ephemeral within contemporary society, because they do not manage to dominate the professional arena, this is not the case within their writings, in which they largely dominate all domains, whether marital, maternal or professional, and where their thirst for recognition is so prominent.