Women and religion in nineteenth-century France

Abstract

This paper explores the connections made between religion and women by French secularizers in the nineteenth century as a way of understanding the effects of what Max Weber called "disenchantment." It asks how differences of sex figured in anti-clerical writings (particularly those of Jules Michelet). And it argues that the conflation of women and religion, an aspect of their simultaneous privatization and their designation as "irrational," helped secure the place of the difference of sex as the ontological ground for political and social organization in the nations of the West from the seventeenth century onwards.