Academic Research Projects
“A Historiography and Annotated Bibliography of Women and Their Agency during the French Revolution”
Graduate History Colloquium (Peter Shapinsky, Fall 2011)
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I wrote an annotated bibliography of over twenty sources and historiography that examined the change of historians’ interpretation from 1960s to present day to determine women’s agency inside Eighteenth-Century French salons, public sphere, private sphere, or if women held any agency within French society. I discovered that after the publication of Jürgen Habermas’ book, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into Category of Bourgeois Society, in 1962, two different schools of thought surfaced: feminism and later interpreting history through gender relations, but was generally anti-feminist. As these two schools of thought emerged, several other historians used post-structuralism to enforce their feminist or anti-feminist point of views of whether women held agency in the eighteenth century. Even though historians in both categories referenced Habermas’s book as the foundation for their argument, each historian’s varying interpretation of Habermas’s thesis, definition of the “public sphere,” and personal attitudes towards feminism determined if they fell into the feminist or anti-feminist category.