The Virtuous Marketplace: Women and Men, Money and Politics in Paris, 1830-1870. .

The Virtuous Marketplace: Women and Men, Money and Politics in Paris, 1830-1870. By Victoria Thompson (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. viii plus 178pp.).

In the Virtuous Marketplace, Victoria E. Thompson argues that between 1830 and 1879 Parisians reconceptualized the gendered nature of the economy. She focuses on the shift in literary and press imagery of specific female cultural types between 1830 and 1879 and posits that there was an economic corollary to the political exclusion of women from civil society articulated during the French Revolution and then re-affirmed by the Napoleonic Code. She traces the interplay between misogynistic images of women who sold their bodies, retailed commodities, or speculated in the stock market and the rise of domestic ideologies that asserted women's inherent weaknesses and natural inabilities to participate independently in the expanding commercial economy. Thompson asserts that new cultural images of women whose virtuosity was defined by separation from the marketplace paved the way for public policies that excluded women from particular types of economic activity. She also shows how this process formed part of a larger articulation of bourgeois values that concerned itself to a very great extent with the drawing of social boundaries. In so doing, Thompson makes a contribution to our understanding of the changes in women's social roles that took place in nineteenth century industrial society.

Thompson begins her analysis with the prostitute and the grisette, as free women whose interaction with the market was deemed in popular imagery of the 1830s as immoral and ultimately unsuccessful, if not tragic. Yet while the fate of the prostitute was to fall under tighter public control, the grisette became a romanticized figure in the 1840s, one more closely associated with the student and with selfless if socially self-destructive love for him. Grisettes supposedly attended to the sexual and domestic needs of students in small attic apartments until they were abandoned for more proper middle-class brides at the completion of their lovers' studies. Though the frequency with which this domestic arrangement actually took place remains unclear, Thompson shows how the grisette became a nostalgic figure for the bourgeoisie by the time of the Second Empire, one whose command of literary admiration rested on her abandonment of earlier materialistic motivations in favor of selfless love for her man. The domestica tion of literary and press images of women workers followed suit with the emergence during the Second Empire of the virtuous ouvriere as a popular figure. Working for wages but staying as close to home as possible, the image of the virtuous ouvriere sanctified the woman who gave up active participation in the labor force at marriage and then devoted the rest of her life to the domestic needs of her family. Thompson's extensive reading of literary sources enables her to very beautifully illustrate how the ideal of separation of home from workplace was prescribed to the popular classes.

Thompson also treats market women in Paris and the efforts of the police and of municipal authorities to regulate the sale of commodities in streets, squares, and open air markets. Her argument is that the Second Empire crackdowns on ambulatory vendors and the reform of the Halles and Temple used clothing market were driven by suspicion of women retailers, by fear that female vendors sold their bodies on the side, and by the desire to re-make market women into more virtuous merchants. Thompson characterizes open air retail as popular, and therefore culturally suspect, commerce. By moving market vendors indoors where they could be subjected to social control, Thompson believes that petty women traders were transformed into bourgeois merchants. Whether that transformation was in fact or in the cultural imagery, or both, is somewhat unclear. Her analysis of the 1868 regulations governing commerce at the Halles market emphasizes sexual control of female vendors over all other municipal objectives. Thus the pressi ng issues of increasing available food supply to the burgeoning population and regulating quality through greater levels of accountability receive short shrift. So too does the symbolic import of market building as a means of enhancing the popular legitimacy of public authority. Because the analysis only includes two markets, the implication is that covered market building should be understood as having been to the detriment of female vendors in Paris even though it is much more likely that this was not the case. The covered market building process in Paris involved the construction of marches de quartier all across the city and may well have provided women with expanded opportunities for entrepreneurship. The case for viewing the whole of the population of female market vendors working in the smaller neighborhood marches, or for that matter, all of the female proprietors of small shops, as participants in proper bourgeois commerce is not fully convincing.

Thompson's last cultural type is the lorrette, or female stock market speculator. Here the case for gender-based physical and economic exclusion is perhaps most vivid. Through the July Monarchy and Second Empire, women were outlawed first from the floor of the stock exchange, then from the balcony, followed by being removed from the sidewalks surrounding the exchange. Eventually they were investigated and persecuted in the streets nearby the exchange in an effort to prevent them from trading in stocks altogether. Still, similar measures were taken by the public authorities to restrict the access of men from the popular classes. In the end, The Virtuous Marketplace is an in-depth examination of how the bourgeoisie used gender and class in the nineteenth century to redefine which types of economic activities were honorable and which types were not. Thompson's argument should be considered by all who work on questions of gender and economic change in the modern period.