A01=James Smith Allen
Author_James Smith Allen
Category=JBSF1
Category=NHD
Civic Morality
Civil Morality
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Europe
European History
Feminism
Feminist
France
French History
Gender Relations
Gender Studies
History
Masonic Community
Political Representation
Social Change
Social Justice
Social Network
Women’s Rights
Women’s Studies
Product details
- ISBN 9781496227782
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 01 May 2022
- Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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A Civil Society explores the struggle to initiate women as full participants in the masonic brotherhood that shared in the rise of France’s civil society and its “civic morality” on behalf of women’s rights. As a vital component of the third sector during France’s modernization, freemasonry empowered women in complex social networks, contributing to a more liberal republic, a more open society, and a more engaged public culture.
James Smith Allen shows that although women initially met with stiff resistance, their induction into the brotherhood was a significant step in the development of French civil society, including the promotion of women’s rights in the late nineteenth century. Pulling together the many gendered facets of masonry, Allen draws from periodicals, memoirs, and archival material to account for the rise of women within the masonic brotherhood in the context of rapid historical change. Thanks to women’s social networks and their attendant social capital, masonry came to play a leading role in French civil society and the rethinking of gender relations in the public sphere.
James Smith Allen shows that although women initially met with stiff resistance, their induction into the brotherhood was a significant step in the development of French civil society, including the promotion of women’s rights in the late nineteenth century. Pulling together the many gendered facets of masonry, Allen draws from periodicals, memoirs, and archival material to account for the rise of women within the masonic brotherhood in the context of rapid historical change. Thanks to women’s social networks and their attendant social capital, masonry came to play a leading role in French civil society and the rethinking of gender relations in the public sphere.
James Smith Allen is professor emeritus of history at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. He is the author of several books, including Poignant Relations: Three Modern French Women and In The Public Eye: A History of Reading in Modern France, 1800–1940, and the editor of In the Solitude of My Soul: The Diary of Geneviève Bréton, 1867–1871.
