Abstract

The essay analyses the relationship between women’s writing and politics through the history of the periodical Femme Libre (1832-1834), organized and financed exclusively by Saint-Simonian women. If writing became an act of individual emancipation within a larger political collective movement already during the French Revolution, throughout the July revolution Femme Libre was a journal that made writing itself a collective political practice The periodical presents itself as a political laboratory, constituting a crucial moment in the elaboration of the modern meaning of freedom and emancipation in relation to women. The image of the free woman to which the newspaper is named allows the editors and authors who publish their articles there to take a polemical stance against Saint-Simonian men, reshaping the idea of liberation now informed by a concrete analysis of their class conditions as women proletarians.