Corset de papier

The good wife, the good mother, the good housewife, a kind of total woman: this is what women’s magazines and newspapers have been portraying for as long as they have existed. We have to go back to the time when the codes of this specialised press emerged to understand how this paper corset [corset de papier] was formed, compartmentalising femininity in devotion to men, the only ones in power. However, the media space opened up by the rise of the women’s press is also a place where those who cannot express themselves elsewhere do so, and where they develop emancipation tactics. This exciting historical and social investigation takes us behind the scenes of this paradoxical space, where the representation of femininity emerges as a political battlefield.

Lucie Barette has a doctorate in French literature and language and teaches information and communication at the University of Caen Normandy. She is a specialist in nineteenth-century female writer-journalists and their career and writing choices. She also focuses her research on the female press and the figure of the flâneuse. She is also the author of the thesis Les écrivaines-journalistes sous la monarchie de Juillet : la presse au service d’une reconnaissance littéraire.