Item No: #308188 A Woman's Philosophy of Woman; or Woman Affranchished. An Answer to Michelet, Proudhon, Girardin, Legouvé, Comte, and Other Modern Innovators. Madame D'Héricourt, Jenny.
A Woman's Philosophy of Woman; or Woman Affranchished. An Answer to Michelet, Proudhon, Girardin, Legouvé, Comte, and Other Modern Innovators

19th Century French Feminism Translated for Americans

A Woman's Philosophy of Woman; or Woman Affranchished. An Answer to Michelet, Proudhon, Girardin, Legouvé, Comte, and Other Modern Innovators

Notes: A notable book that brought French ideas about feminism and women's rights to the American women's movement.

"In this book, Jenny P. d'Héricourt asserted a woman's right to respond to a variety of theories on the social relations of the sexes put forward by major male writers of the 1840s and 1850s. She confronted and refuted the theories of women's intellectual inferiority advanced by the socialist/anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, as well as the 'woman on a pedestal' theories of the so-called father of sociology, Auguste Comte, and the father of social history, Jules Michelet. In the second part of the book, she then developed with great intellectual rigor her own 'philosophy of woman.'"—Karen Offen, A Nineteenth-Century French Feminist Rediscovered, in Signs, vol. 13, no. 1 (1987).

Madame d'Hericourt was a pseudonym for Jeanne-Marie-Fabienne Poinsard, a literary shield that was only punctured in the 1980s. She trained in medicine and worked as a midwife. She lived in the United States from 1863 to 1873 and was closely associated with the women's rights newspaper, The Agitator. This uncredited English-language translation of d'Héricourt's book, La femme affranchie (Brussels, 1860), dates from her time in Chicago and was likely done by the author and women connected to The Agitator.

xiv, [17]–317, [1], plus six pages of ads numbered [1], 4–8. With two flyleaves at the front and back.

Edition + Condition: First edition (first printing). Minor bumping to the extremities, else a near fine copy. With the ownership of the physician Elmira J. Howard on the title page, with the notation, "Cin[cinatti], Mar. 10th, 1882."

Publication: New York: Carleton, 1864.

Item No: #308188

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