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Association: Name: American Studies Association URL: http://www.theasa.net
Citation: URL: http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p114384_index.html Direct Link: HTML Code:

Jones, Jennifer. "The Republican Anti-Mother: Therese Levasseur, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Mistress" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Studies Association, <Not Available>. 2009-05-24 <http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p114384_index.html>

Jones, J. "The Republican Anti-Mother: Therese Levasseur, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Mistress" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Studies Association <Not Available>. 2009-05-24 from http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p114384_index.html

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript Abstract: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the great theorist of Republicanism and domesticity, is often viewed as the leading progenitor of the ideology of Republican Motherhood, the ideal that women could best serve the Republic through their quiet work at home educating their sons to be good citizens. Although the concept of Republican Motherhood has become a standard fixture for women’s historians in our teaching and scholarship, it is a concept whose heuristic and analytic use is quite problematic. My research on Therese Levasseur, the barely literate, uneducated domestic servant who lived with Rousseau as his mistress for almost thirty, provides a fascinating case study of the tensions within and limits of Republican motherhood ideology in the France. Therese’s contemporaries alternatively sympathized with her, despised her, and distanced themselves from her: she was in turn the perfect “natural wife,” the abused wife, and the abusive widow in contemporaries’ eyes. Although largely neglected by Rousseau scholars in the past century, for men and women of 18th and early 19th century, Therese was “good to think with” for the ways in which she troubled the boundaries between love and duty, marriage and sexuality, maternal love and the exigencies of poverty and power. Although Therese was given a pension by the Republican government in 1792 to honor her for being the “veuve Jean-Jacques Rousseau,” she was more emblematic for contemporaries like Madame de Stael as being the Republican “anti-mother” than as a symbol of Republican motherhood. My participation in this roundtable will also on a new project on children’s experience of the French Revolution. In addition, I will draw on another current research project on “unnatural fathers,” i.e. male cuckolds who raise and give their name to other men’s children. This fear of not knowing if a child was one’s own was of course Rousseau’s great fear, a fear that may have moved him to abandon his children to the foundling hospital and which certainly inspired his desire to limit women to the private sphere of home and family.

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Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Question of Science in the Second Discourse