From Eylau to Friedland: The Polish Campaign 1807 Book

I am not that thrilled with women's studies as a field. The idea of choosing your object of study based solely on their biological sex disturbs me and seems both arbitrary and demeaning somehow to the women that get studied. People worthy of study should be chosen on the merit of their thought (or its lack of merit) and not because of their gender. That said, i occasionally come across some great work that challenges my usual take on this form of work. Carla Hesse's The Other Enlightenment(Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001) is such a piece of scholarship. I learnt something - something i needed to learn and something i would like to share because it challenges our preconceptions of the development of literature and of women as cultural producers.

"When we shift our perspective from the history of gender ideology to the study of the literary practices of women during the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, three points become clear: (1) The French Revolution marked the advent of unprecedented female participation in public debate, not its suppression; (2) women who wrote were not socially marginalized as outcasts or rebels; rather, they were at the very center of their social and political worlds, as diverse as those worlds were; and (3) there were no typical "feminine" forms of literary self-expression or "feminine" perspectives on the political and social world. Women wrote in every genre and from all sides of the political spectrum" (54).