Abstract
Braving an intense heat wave, a large crowd crammed into the auditorium of the former Faculté des Lettres in Toulouse on the evening of September 2, 1911. The audience, estimated by the local press to number anywhere from 1,000 to 1,500, had gathered to hear a resident speaker refute the theories of a young feminist named Arria Ly.1 A successful journalist and lecturer in the Midi region, Ly was well-known to the citizens of Toulouse for her passionate and combative rhetorical style and her uncompromising positions on feminism and sexuality. She elaborated these opinions in a variety of provincial newspapers and public lectures in the prewar decades. Most recently, she had run a memorable campaign as a Toulousain candidate (illegal) for the 1910 legislative elections.2
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Notes
For the most prominent example, see Émile Bruneau de Laborie, Les Lois du duel (Paris: Manzi, Joyant et Cie, 1906), 132–3.
Kenneth S. Greenberg, “The Nose, the Lie, and the Duel in the Antebellum South,” American Historical Review 95: 1 (February 1990), 57–74. On the general symbolism of the physical person in honor cultures, see Pitt-Rivers, “Honour and Social Status,” in J. G. Peristiany (ed.), Honour and Shame: The Values of Mediterranean Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 21–77.
“Loi sur la liberté de la presse,” no. 637, Bulletin des lois de la République française, XII série, deuxième semestre de 1881 (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1881), 133; Georges Bibesco and Féry d’Esclands, Conseils pour les duels (Paris: Lemerre, 1900), 11–12; Laborie, Les Lois du duel, 130.
See, for example, Accampo, “The Gendered Nature of Contraception in France: Neo-Malthusianism, 1900–1920,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 34 (2003), 251–2.
Reddy, “Condottieri of the Pen: Journalists and the Public Sphere in Post-Revolutionary France, 1815–1850,” American Historical Review 99 (1994), 1547–8. On inheritance, see Nye, Masculinity, 1546–70.
For an example of this rhetoric, see Aurélien Scholl, L’Esprit du Boulevard (Paris: Victor-Havard, 1886), 54–5, cited in Nye, Masculinity, 284n80. Reddy analyzes journalists’ conflict in the first half of the century between the demands of the marketplace and their own desire to belong to an ideal republic of letters in “Condottieri of the Pen,” 1556.
Paul Brulat, “La Vertu des femmes,” Progrès de la Somme (Amiens), September 23, 1911, Box 10, FAL, FMLB, BHVP.
Gary Kates, Monsieur d’Eon Is a Woman: A Tale of Political Intrigue and Sexual Masquerade (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 255–74.
Gordon Wright, France in Modern Times, 5th edn (New York: W.W. Norton, 1981), 226–8, 258.
On this view of the female body, see Janet Beizer, Ventriloquized Bodies: Narratives of Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994); Jann Matlock, Scenes of Seduction: Prostitution, Hysteria, and Reading Difference in Nineteenth-Century France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).
Madeleine Pelletier, L’Emancipation sexuelle de la femme (Paris: Girard et Brière, 1911), 9.
Ibid.
For this culture of sport, see Hélène Salomon, “Le corset: entre la beauté et la santé, 1880–1920” and Gilbert Andrieu, “A propos d’un livre: ‘Pour devenir belle … et le rester’ ou La culture physique au féminin avant 1914,” both in Pierre Arnaud and Thierry Terret (eds), Histoire du sport féminin, vol. 2 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1996), 11–26; Mary Lynn Stewart, For Health and Beauty: Physical Culture for Frenchwomen, 1880s–1930s (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 151–72. For the role of la culture physique in contributing to a new feminine aesthetic ideal in the world of the belle époque music hall, see Tilburg, Colette’s Republic, ch. 5.
Li Dzeh-Djen, La Presse féministe en France de 1869 à 1914 (Paris: Rodstein, 1934), 180.
Françoise Parent-Lardeur, “La Vendeuse de grand magasin,” and Pierrette Pezerat and Danielle Poublan, “Femmes sans maris, les employées des postes,” in Farge and Klapisch-Zuber (eds), Madame ou Mademoiselle?, 97–110, 117–62; Jo Burr Margadant, Madame le Professeur: Women Educators in the Third Republic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 46–7.
Dzeh-Djen, La Presse féministe, 179; Evelyne Sullerot, La Presse féminine (Paris: Armand Colin, 1963), 15–44; Klejman and Rochefort, LEgalité en marche, 182–8.
Hause and Kenney, Women’s Suffrage, 34–6; Mary Louise Roberts, “Subversive Copy: Feminist Journalism in Fin-de-Siècle France,” in Dean de la Motte and Jeannene M. Przyblyski (eds), Making the News: Modernity and the Mass Press in Nineteenth-Century France (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), 336 n1.
The beginning of the Third Republic saw the birth of ten new publications in Toulouse alone. See Jacqueline Pau, “La presse toulousaine au début de la IIIe République,” and Pierre Tisseyre, “Un grand quotidien de province au début du XXe siècle: La Dépêche,” both in Congrès d’études de la fédération des sociétés académiques et savantes. Languedoc-Pyrénées-Gascogne. (Toulouse, 21–23 April, 1956), 100–6, 107–13.
M. B. Marié, “La presse toulousaine et les attentats anarchistes” (Diplôme des Études supérieures, Université de Toulouse, June 1958), 6; André Bianconi, “Centralisation et sensibilités regionales: l’exemple de la presse toulousaine au début du XXe siècle,” in État et pouvoir: la réception des idéologies dans le Midi: Actes du 2nd colloque de l’Association française des historiens des idées politiques (Toulouse, October 1982), 33–8.
On crimes of passion, see Harris, Murders and Madness, 208–18; Joëlle Guillais, La chair de l’autre: La crime passionnel au XIXe siècle (Paris: Olivier Orban, 1986); Ann-Louise Shapiro, Breaking the Codes: Female Criminality in Fin-de-Siècle Paris (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), ch. 4; Eliza Earle Ferguson, Gender and Justice: Violence, Intimacy, and Community in Fin-de-Siècle Paris (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010).
Rachel Fuchs, “Seduction, Paternity, and the Law in Fin de Siècle France,” Journal of Modern History 72: 4 (December 2000), 958–9.
Marguerite de Witt-Schlumberger, Situation internationale du suffrage des femmes en Mars 1918 (Paris: UFSF, 1918), 6–7.
Mary S. Hartman, Victorian Murderesses: A True History of Thirteen Respectable French and English Women Accused of Unspeakable Crimes (London: Robson, 1985), 144.
Sara Kimble, “No Right to Judge: Feminism and the Judiciary in Third Republic France,” French Historical Studies 31: 4 (Fall 2008), 609–41.
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© 2011 Andrea Mansker
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Mansker, A. (2011). “Mademoiselle Arria Ly Wants Blood!” The New Woman and the Debate over Female Honor. In: Sex, Honor and Citizenship in Early Third Republic France. Genders and Sexualities in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230348196_2
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