'This Is Not Politics': Female Editors and Their Relationship with 'Politics'

Presentation of a research project as part of the "Jeudis de la Maison Suger", a residents' research seminar.

This session will welcome Charris De Smet for a presentation on her research into the Parisian fashion press of the 19th century and the role played by female editors in their relationship with politics.

Presentation of the project

"This research project re-examines the question of women's political agency in the mainstream, non-militant Parisian women's press, questioning how fashion newspapers served as a forum for female editors, writers and a disenfranchised female readership to engage in the political arena between 1815 and 1851. Existing work on the 19th-century women's press has generally focused on a small number of progressive authors and editors. By replicating the self-presentation strategies adopted by the periodical press in order to escape censorship, generalist women's magazines have often been mistakenly perceived as apolitical and conformist in current research. However, my analyses show that so-called 'conformist' covers did not exclude the presence of subtle political discourse. Through an in-depth and comparative discourse analysis of a large corpus of Parisian women's magazines, I examine how these periodicals practised 'political communication' under the innocent guise of French fashion magazines during the Restoration, the July Monarchy and the Second Republic, on topics as varied as citizenship, the nature of political authority, and women's access to the public sphere. By supplementing this textual analysis with a network study, this research goes beyond placing political discourse in its historical context; it also sheds light on the lives and writings of female journalists who have been largely ignored by contemporary research."

Speaker

Charris De Smet is a postdoctoral researcher at the Research Foundation Flanders and affiliated with the Centre for Political History (PoHis) at the University of Antwerp, Belgium. She specialises in parliamentary cultures, consumer politics and women's political writings in 19th-century Europe, with a particular focus on France. She obtained her joint PhD in history from the University of Antwerp and Université Lumière Lyon 2 in 2024. As a Sofina Boël fellow, she conducted research at the Institut d'histoire du temps présent in Paris in 2022.