In this remarkable work of historical synthesis, Offen provides an indispensable overview of several centuries of debates about the place of women in French society. A “companion volume” to her Debating the Woman Question in the French Third Republic, 1870–1920 (New York, 2018), this book draws from Offen’s previously published research and from the work of other scholars of French women’s history; it is a consciously synthetic study relying on “decades of collaborative, collegial feminist scholarship” (xii). Offen seeks to present the particularities and under-analyzed continuities of the “woman question” in France for both scholars and general readers by bridging periodizations that have long dominated the field. Thus, in preparation for the volume that follows it, The Woman Question in France “is grounded in the realization that no aspect of the debates on the woman question actually began with the Third Republic” [emphasis in original] (x).
Offen’s study is...