Sex, Honor & Citizenship (Third Republic France)

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“Mansker sets out these arguments with great clarity and impressive documentation. She successfully demonstrates how feminist advocates of civil and political equality for women criticized the demeaning double standard inscribed in the civil code by invoking the prevailing code of honor to which men were obliged to adhere if they aspired to honorable status. In the absence of dramatic legislative victories, Mansker expertly teases out the ways women were able to make use of legal and cultural argument to advance their material equity and symbolic civic equality. She does this with remarkable insight, with notable attentiveness to language and the law, and a subtle grasp of the way the honor codes functioned in public life, for men, of course, but for women too.” 

– Robert A. Nye, H-France Review

“Andrea Mansker’s fine volume on the gender of French citizenship adds to an already impressive corpus of recent North American scholarship on gender identities and relations in France between the Franco-Prussian War and the First World War. One of Mansker’s many virtues is her ability to assimilate that scholarship without reproducing its assumptions in an unquestioning fashion… Chapters 1 and 2 exemplify the ways in which women appropriated masculine honour codes to contest men’s monopoly of public space by bringing to light the fascinating case of the militant journalist Arria Ly, who made national headlines in 1911 when she challenged a prominent male editor-in-chief to a duel at a public lecture in Toulouse for ‘outraging’ her honour by publishing a letter accusing her of lesbianism. As Ly was to write in 1903: ‘L’honneur n’a pas de sexe’ (p. 250 n. 6).” 

– Nicholas White, French Studies

“By showing how many of the themes in Ly’s work also appeared in the work of many more familiar and unfamiliar French feminist activists who wrote before and after her, Mansker expands our understanding of how the French feminists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries lived their lives, crafted their political strategies, and accrued influential new forms of public authority even in the years before they won the right to vote.” 

–Jean Elisabeth Pedersen, French Historical Studies

“L’auteure a donc brillamment atteint son premier objectif : élargir la portée du concept de l’honneur et l’assouplir en le considérant comme un système « constamment révisé en conséquence des changements affectant le monde social dont il découlait », et par extension, du fait des agissements des femmes autant que des hommes (p. 11). Son livre constitue ainsi une contribution importante non seulement à l’histoire des femmes mais à notre conception de la sujétion des femmes.” 

–Charles Sowerwine, Clio: Femmes, Genre, Histoire