Workshops: Stories

Workshop 10: Women and Creativity in Early Modern France

Conveners:

• Jacqueline Letzter, French, University of Maryland
• Anne Schroder, Art, Duke University Museum of Art

This workshop investigated the conditions for the emergence of women in the creative arts in early modern France and how women constituted themselves as creative artists, particularly in periods of change.

Among the questions we addressed were: What were the external circumstances (social, cultural, legal, and political) that made an explosion of female creativity possible in a particular historical period? What were the practical strategies women devised to accede to areas of creativity? And how did creative women situate themselves in relation to continuous discourses that excluded them from creativity?

The specific examples the organizers brought to the workshop were the explosion of women's opera at the time of the French Revolution and the discourses surrounding sexuality and mental disease in early modern France. In the workshop we connected these examples to instances of women's creativity in earlier periods and other geographical areas. The questions that we needed to address when considering these special moments of women's creativity included the following: Does social turmoil help or harm women's efforts to imagine, justify, or publicize themselves as creators? Does social change allow a general surge of creativity, or one specifically women-centered? Can we even link these categories causally (or under which circumstances might we do so)?

Issues that we discussed in the workshop revolve around the positioning of women in the market and amongst patrons, the openness of the market to women (separating fact from myth), assessments of the discourse about women pupils and their male teachers, and an evaluation of the socio-political environment as a backdrop for women's creativity.