Making Connections, Imagining New Worlds: Women, Writing, and Resistance in Paris, 1897-1910

This thesis examines two groups of women who lived and wrote in fin-de-siècle Paris. Marguerite Durand and the contributors to La Fronde used their writing to invade the male sector of journalism and prove they were capable of doing what men could, but doing it for women and without any men involved. Natalie Barney and Renée Vivien used poetry and theatre to remake Sappho’s tradition in a way that prioritized her desire for women and her centrality to Lesbos’s community of women to challenge sexological discourses that posited their own desires as isolating and corrupt. These case studies, taken together for the first time, suggest new lines of historical inquiry into women and how they used different types of writing in resistance to normative discourses that restricted them and their lives in Paris between 1897 and 1910.