Browsing by Subject "Sophie de Grouchy"

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Open Access
Reviewing women’s philosophical works during the French revolution: the case of P.-L. Roederer
(Taylor and Francis Group, 2023-07-04) Bergès, Sandrine
This paper looks at selected reviews of women’s philosophical (and literary) works by Revolutionary author and politician Pierre-Louis Roederer. This study occasions the following remarks. Women’s works, when they raised political radical and sometimes feminist agendas were not only read and reviewed, but considered part of the general Revolutionary effort to relieve social and political inequalities. Secondly Roederer appears, from these reviews, as committed to convincing the French intellectual community that works by women ought to be taken as seriously as works by men, and to combat the prejudices which meant that they often were not. I will highlight in particular his reading of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman as both a fictionalized continuation of the philosophical programme of her Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and as a contribution to the philosophy of emotions–for which he compares it to Sophie de Grouchy’s Letters on Sympathy. I will also look at an unpublished draft in which he compares and contrasts Grouchy, Germaine de Staël, Emilie du Chatelet and Suzanne Necker’s writings on love. © 2023 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
Open Access
Wet-Nursing and political participation
(Oxford Scholarship Online, 2016) Berges, Sandrine; Berges, Sandrine; Coffee, A. M. S. J.
Caring duties, which fall particularly to women, are not always compatible with the degree of public life that republican citizenship requires. This is sometimes held as a feminist objection to republicanism. This chapter addresses this objection by focusing on the case of the mothering of infants and wet-nursing in the writings of Wollstonecraft and de Grouchy, two feminist writers of the Enlightenment period. It argues that both writers believe that mothering is central to the development of republican values and that compassion enables the growth of republican sentiments. But for Wollstonecraft this is a double-edged sword. For women to earn the status of citizens they must, if they are mothers, perform all duties attending to motherhood, including breastfeeding their children. Unfortunately, it is those duties that conflict with republican citizenship. A comparison with de Grouchy’s own views on wet-nursing will point to a possible solution.