| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Europe: Early Modern and Modern

Caroline Ford. Divided Houses: Religion and Gender in Modern France. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 2005. Pp. xi, 170. $35.00.

This study contributes significantly to our understanding of modern France and to our larger understanding of modernity. Caroline Ford places gender, religion, and laicité at the very center of nineteenth-century cultural, social and political developments. She insists on the significance of the Catholic revival that followed the French Revolution and the prominence of women in that movement. Women were especially visible as members of the rapidly growing religious communities, as ardent followers of new female saints, and as practitioners of public rituals of devotion. While focusing on the nineteenth century, Ford situates what has long been called the "feminization of religion" in a longue durée from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. She argues, however, that this feminine Catholicism ended with the nineteenth century. Ford posits that secular French men reacted vehemently to the "feminization of religion." They elaborated the views of Enlightenment and revolutionary anticlericals into a political culture of laicité that shaped the worldview of bourgeois men: republicans, state bureaucrats and those in the legal professions. This fervent commitment to the creation of a thoroughly secular environment, legitimated by reason and science, emerged in the effort to contain and respond to the powerful religious movement of Catholic women.

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