include: Liberty in their Names: Women Philosophers of the French Revolution (2022), Olympe de Gouges (2022), Sophie de Grouchy's Letters on Sympathy (with Eric Schliesser, 2019). She has also written and edited (with Alan Coffee, and with Eileen Hunt) books on Mary Wollstonecraft.
Bergès applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, No Place Like Home: Women Philosophers' Struggles with Domesticity, and reported the following:
What’s on page 99?Visit Sandrine Bergès's website.
Marie-Jeanne Roland, philosopher of the French Revolution, who died at the guillotine in 1793, was a big fan of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau thought a woman should be a domestic creature: an obedient wife, and a caring mother. Manon Roland, while partly agreeing, distanced herself from his account. Page 99 is about how her idea of domesticity differed from Rousseau’s. Roland agreed that women should spend time running their household, doing the work themselves or with the help of servants. But she thought they should be efficient about it so they had time to do the stuff that truly matters to them: in her case, writing and influencing the course of the revolution by hosting its actors in her salon.
Is page 99 representative?
Page 99 is in the sixth of nine chapters. Chapter 1 starts with Xanthippe, complaining about having to get dinner on a string at short notice for her husband Socrates, and Chapter 9 ends with twenty-first century feminist authors talking about the robotisation of housework. Manon Roland comes bang in the middle: she is the thirteenth out of the twenty-five women philosophers I discuss. Page 99 is representative, because nearly all the women I talk about in the book struggle with the same dilemma: how to live a full human life within the confines of domestic expectations? While some women tried to escape the home, or redefine it, Roland, page 99 says, tries to reinterpret it: to her it’s a sign of power and rationality to be able to get all the housework done in a short time so as to make time and space for other pursuits. So the test works! Except of course a reader would need to read the pages before and after page 99 to get the full argument. I’d say 98 to half-way through 100 would be ideal. Then you’d get a more complete sketch of who Roland was and what her view of domesticity was. And a bit of drama thrown in, as page 98 starts with the signing of her death sentence.
What would still be missing to give a full idea of what the book is about, from page 99 (or 98-100), is a sense that this is a philosophical discussion. Although I treat her as such, Manon Roland isn’t usually regarded as a philosopher – a memoirist, or a hapless victim of the revolution. In the first pages of Chapter 6 I introduce her as a republican political philosopher. She followed Rousseau’s rural republicanism, the view that the a good republic is composed of households and villages which nurture republican values and virtues in all citizens. Roland, comparing herself to a Roman matron, places women right at the heart of this republic: they are responsible for bringing up future citizens. But that’s not enough, she thinks. During a revolution, a woman’s work must take her outside the home, and her sphere of influence must extend to all her acquaintances, not just her family. So the test sort of works – provided it encourages the reader to look at the whole chapter, or maybe the whole book.
--Marshal Zeringue