Divided Houses: Religion and Gender in Modern France

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Cornell University Press, 2005 - History - 170 pages
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In Divided Houses, Caroline Ford examines how the so-called feminization of religion in France from the French Revolution to the First World War contributed to the formation of a distinctive secular (laïc) republican political culture in France. She also reveals the effect of women's close association with religion on their civil and social status, which gave rise in France to heated debates about the limits of female agency, women's property rights, and women's role in the family and in society. She argues that religious women were often far more than the passive instruments of a male ecclesiastical hierarchy. In showing that these women could dispose of their bodies, souls, and properties in ways that were unimaginable to their secular counterparts, Ford's book obliges one to rethink the categories of tradition and modernity that have structured most thinking about this subject.

Ford's book is centered on a set of microhistories and causes célèbres whose narratives are fascinating in and of themselves. They include conflicts within religious orders, the cults of some latter-day female saints, and riveting legal disputes involving women who converted to Catholicism. Perhaps most intriguingly, Ford brings current debates concerning pluralism and cultural difference in France into sharp historical focus. The fact that women have been portrayed as the quintessential carriers of religion ever since France embraced laïcité sheds light on problems faced by the secular French state today as it attempts to regulate religious expression--including emblems of Islam--in the public sphere.

--Peter McPhee, Professor and Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Academic), University of Melbourne
 

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Contents

Introduction
1
Fanatiques et Dévotes Imbéciles
17
Private Lives and Public Order in Restoration France
37
Storytelling and the Social Imagery of Religious Conflict
72
The Politics of Sainthood and the Cult of Sainte Philomène
95
Religion Property and Laïcité
116
Gender Religion and Laïcité
139
Copyright

Common terms and phrases

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References to this book

About the author (2005)

Caroline Ford is Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of Creating the Nation in Provincial France: Religion and Political Identity in Brittany.

Bibliographic information

QR code for Divided Houses
TitleDivided Houses: Religion and Gender in Modern France
AuthorCaroline C. Ford
Editionillustrated
PublisherCornell University Press, 2005
ISBN0801443679, 9780801443671
Length170 pages
Subjects ›  › 

History / Europe / France
History / Modern / General
Religion / Sexuality & Gender Studies
  
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