This chapter examines three different stages in the lives of George Sand, Marie d' Agoult, and Hortense Allart as feminist challenges to the masculine exclusivity of republicanism. It argues that women writers' life stories presented an alternative to the authoritarian family on which male republicanism was based. The three authors' self-narratives authorized a political role for women, much in contrast to the strictly domestic feminine function articulated by revolutionaries in 1793 and codified into law in 1840. This model for women was republican motherhood, the notion that women best...

This chapter examines three different stages in the lives of George Sand, Marie d' Agoult, and Hortense Allart as feminist challenges to the masculine exclusivity of republicanism. It argues that women writers' life stories presented an alternative to the authoritarian family on which male republicanism was based. The three authors' self-narratives authorized a political role for women, much in contrast to the strictly domestic feminine function articulated by revolutionaries in 1793 and codified into law in 1840. This model for women was republican motherhood, the notion that women best served the republic as wives and mothers who imparted republican ideals and virtues to their children in the family setting. By removing women to the private sphere on the grounds that they were naturally suited for housekeeping and childrearing, republican motherhood justified exclusive male participation in the public sphere.