This quarrel which is not one: women’s interventions in an Eighteenth-Century French quarrel about boys’ education

Journal article

This article explores the women’s interventions in an overlooked eighteenth-century quarrel about how to reform literary teaching in the boys’ collèges. It begins by introducing this quarrel, which I call the Querelle des collèges, and which involved over 120 actors: just three of whom are known to be women. After presenting the quarrel texts written by Adelaïde d’Espinassy, Joséphine de Montbart, and Anne d’Aubourg de La Bove, comtesse de Miremont, the article explores why and how these women engaged in such a highly-publicised, male-dominated quarrel. They intervened, I show, so as to redirect public interest in reforming boys’ schools towards the reform of girls’ education. And they employed creative strategies to minimise the risk they ran, as women, by quarrelling. By embedding their texts in other, existing disputes concerning women, and by engaging creatively with agonistic discursive practices usually reserved for men, these women destabilized this masculine dispute. In so doing, they reclaimed some room in this quarrel (and others like it) for women.

Authors: Tidman, GR

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Journal: Romanic Review
• Volume: 112
• Issue: 3
• Pages: 486–504
• Publication date: 2021-12-01
• Acceptance date: 2021-05-05
• DOI: 10.1215/00358118-9377374
• EISSN: 2688-5220
• ISSN: 0035-8118
• Language: English
• Keywords: FFR