Working Up the Political: Women's Everyday Rebellions in
Eighteenth-Century Culture

What were the ways in which eighteenth-century women's everyday lives
challenged cultural expectations about the restrictions on the female
role-expectations held both by their eighteenth-century contemporaries
and scholars today?  What were the ways in which women's everyday
participation in activities like work and politics rebelled against
notions about women's domesticity and privacy?  How did these women's
everyday lives resist the emerging concept of public vs. private?  How
does the current vogue for dismantling the real or imagined barrier
between public and private inflect current studies of eighteenth-century
women's lives?

While recent studies have linked women to the work of politics by
looking at revolutionary moments, such work often implies that those
moments were just that: isolated moments within a framework of
repression and silencing.  But as scholars like Margaret Ezell and
others have reminded us, the idea of women's historical and literary
silencing is a paradigm that emerged from the nineteenth century.  This
collection seeks essays that go beyond that paradigm to look at the ways
in which eighteenth-century women challenged not only the restrictions
their own culture sought to enforce, but also the restrictions our
historical and literary understandings have set up; we are interested in
seeing how women's daily lives and work show that they were not simply
repressed and silenced, but were active, engaged participants in all
spheres of their culture. Eighteenth-century scholars are beginning to
show how women of the period were not circumscribed to precious
revolutionary moments but rather were participants in a web of acts,
ranging in scale, that contributed to the emergence of a rich cultural
dialogue still vibrant today.

We welcome a wide range of topics and approaches.  Some possible topics
include, but are not limited to:

studies of women's political involvement and activity
studies of women's work and employment
literary representations of women's political involvement
literary representations of women's work
cultural significance of fashion, clothing, consumerism as public-sphere
engagement
21st-century approaches to theorizing women's history

Please send submissions by 15 April 2004 to:

Diane E. Boyd
Department of English
Lousiana State University Shreveport
One University Place
Shreveport, LA 71115-2399
[log in to unmask]

or
Marta Kvande
Department of English
Valdosta State University
Valdosta, GA 31698
[log in to unmask]

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