Women in Enlightenment and Revolution and their Position in the First Modern Civil Codes

1992 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 93-122
Author(s):  
Dorothea Wayand
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Women's Rights ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Civil Code ◽  
Male Dominance ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Civil Codes ◽  
Male Supremacy ◽  
The Revolution

AbstractWomen did not gain from the Revolution or the Enlightenment as men did. Seeking the cause for this, the paper concentrates upon the period of 1770–1810, and the area of Central and Western Europe. It is found that during the French Revolution a number of persons, mostly women, did fight on behalf of women's rights to freedom and equality. However, even before the Revolution was over, they had lost what little they had gained earlier. With Napoleon's Civil Code, a modern code in many ways, the time-honoured supremacy of the male was reasserted. In Prussia, a less violent struggle went on about women's rights. It was fought by men on both sides and it was occasioned by the lengthy creative process which resulted in the first of the modern codes by 1796. It reflected a few of the arguments made in favour of women, but in principle it enshrined male supremacy. The Austrian Civil Code extended the recognition of female equality a bit further. Both German codes were influenced by Enlightened theories; however, they were unable to overcome the long-established principle of “natural” male dominance.

Freedom and the French Revolution

2021 ◽  
pp. 7-65
Author(s):  
John Skorupski
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Radical Democracy ◽  
Political Conflicts ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Catholic Ethic ◽  
Late Modern ◽  
Narrative Account ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

Two great revolutions set the stage for late modern ethics: the French Revolution and the philosophical revolution of Kant. This chapter studies the events and conflicts of ideas in the French Revolution and its aftermath in France. It gives a narrative account of the Revolution from 1789 to 1804. Three broad ethical stances are distinguished: the feudal-Catholic ethic of the monarch and his allies, the impartial individualism of the Enlightenment, and the Rousseauian radical-democracy of the Jacobins. Under the violent political conflicts between these views lies a resilient philosophical conflict: between impartial individualism and a generic stance which this study identifies as ‘eudaimonistic holism’. The feudal-Catholic ethic and radical-democracy are two very different forms of it. Hegelian ethics will turn out to be a third.

“The Factory Of The Revolution”

Women Rising ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 354-362
Author(s):  
Layla Saleh
Keyword(s):  
Women's Rights ◽  
Well Being ◽  
The Political ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
Women's Participation ◽  
Second Year ◽  
Role Of Women ◽  
Syrian Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

Giving a personal voice to the role of women in the Syrian revolution, Layla Saleh places the account of one Syrian woman, Um Ibrahim, exiled in the second year of the uprising, in the larger context of women’s participation in the revolutionary popular mobilization, after the Assad regime’s “women’s rights” proved unsatisfactory and insufficient. The narrative culminates in Um Ibrahim’s own participation in the protests in Damascus before the full-fledged war took hold. Um Ibrahim recounts how women took on a central role in the Syrian revolution, hiding protesters, cooking, delivering food and weapons, and serving in the political and armed opposition. However, they have been victimized by the war, their activist role has been diminished, and their security and physical well-being have become precarious as the country is bloodily entrenched in civil and proxy warfare.

Among the Romantics: E. P. Thompson and the Poetics of Disenchantment

2017 ◽  
Vol 56 (2) ◽  
pp. 322-350 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Epstein
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Women's Rights ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Political Engagement ◽  
The Political ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Abstract Theory ◽  
The French Revolution

AbstractThis article examines key themes in the political and intellectual life of E. P. Thompson. It argues for the centrality of romanticism to his work; it focuses on his unfinished study of the early Romantics. Thompson drew parallels between socialist hopes and disappointments of his own day and the reactions of the early romantic poets to the failed promise of the French Revolution. This article charts the trajectory of the early Romantics as they moved from political engagement to retreat, and relates this trajectory to Thompson's own politics. Thompson discerned a pattern whereby intellectuals and artists moved through stages from political engagement to disenchantment and then to “apostasy” or default. Disenchantment could be a productive condition; at issue was how the poet handled the “authenticity of experience,” how disenchantment was dealt with in verse. Both Thompson and the Romantics privileged the concept of “experience” which they set in opposition to abstract theory. The article's final section turns to themes that Thompson had intended to address but left unfinished, including shifting views of patriotism and the defeated cause of women's rights. For Thompson the romantic impulse was ultimately linked to utopian desire, to the capacity to imagine that which is “not yet.”

scholarly journals When the Personal Is Always Political: Norwegian Muslims’ Arguments for Women’s Rights

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 59-66
Author(s):  
Hannah Helseth
Keyword(s):  
Women's Rights ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Public Debate ◽  
Individual Autonomy ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
Muslim Population ◽  
The Public ◽  
Theoretical Perspectives ◽  
Women's Participation ◽  
Implicit And Explicit

For almost two decades, the public debate about Islam in Western Europe has been dominated by concerns about the lack of gender equality in the racialized Muslim population. There has been a tendency to victimize “the Muslim woman” rather than to encourage Muslim women’s participation in the public debate about their lives. This contribution to the study of discourses on Muslim women is an analysis of arguments written by Muslims about women’s rights. The data consists of 239 texts written by self-defined Muslims in major Norwegian newspapers about women’s rights. I will discuss two findings from the study. The first is an appeal to be personal when discussing issues of domestic violence and racism is combined with an implicit and explicit demand to represent all Muslims in order to get published in newspapers—which creates an ethno-religious threshold for participation in the public debate. The second finding is that, across different positions and different religious affiliations, from conservative to nearly secular, and across the timeline, from 2000 to 2012, there is a dominant understanding of women’s rights as individual autonomy. These findings will be discussed from different theoretical perspectives to explore how arguments for individual autonomy can both challenge and amplify neoliberal agendas.

scholarly journals Death as a Way of Women’s Resistance: Feminist Reading of Snow and Women at Point Zero

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Huda Khudhair Abbas
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Differences ◽  
Women's Rights ◽  
Gender Discrimination ◽  
Male Dominance ◽  
Female Character ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
Patriarchal Culture ◽  
Discrimination And Oppression ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Shed Light

Women’s life without oppression, suppression and discrimination is the claim of women’s rights. Women are subjected to discrimination or violence at various phases of life, by rules and cultures. Unfortunately, female discrimination and oppression are rooted in the cultures of male-dominated societies. Gender discrimination is the practice of denying or granting privilege or rights to someone according to her/his gender, and such practice is acceptable to both; in such societies with such practices and traditions, women’s mission for liberating themselves is seen to be impossible because they have to challenge longstanding customs and traditions of people. This study shed light on the practices of oppression, gender discrimination that women encounter from infancy to adulthood, from childhood to womanhood, as portrayed in Orhan Pamuk’s Snow and Nawal El Saadawi’s Women at Point Zero, as well as the various ways of resistance depending on the cultural differences. Their persistence trial to free themselves from oppression and male dominance. In Women at Point Zero, there is a link between the triple effect of patriarchy, religion, and class on women. This study examines how patriarchal culture, violence, oppression, and gender discrimination happen not only in a family; in contrast, the violence does not happen from men, husbands in families only, but again in wives, women’s resistance and reaction against them. In Snow, women many problems related to their religious norms. The women’s discrimination is because of using headscarves; Kadhife, the female character, is sketched as a woman who attempts to have her right to support and defend women’s rights in her place, Kars, and to retain wearing headscarves.

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