http://www.h-france.net/vol8reviews/vol8no158desan.pdf

June K. Burton, Napoleon and the Woman Question: Discourses of the Other Sex in French Education, Medicine, and Medical Law, 1799-1815. Lubbock, Texas: Texas Tech University Press, 2007. xxx & 288 pp. Notes. $40.00 (hb). ISBN 0-89672-559-6

Reviewed by Suzanne Desan, University of Wisconsin-Madison.

"Even as she acknowledges Napoleon’s assumptions about innate male superiority, Burton indirectly seeks to rehabilitate Napoleon by focusing attention on his various innovations that aided women and mothers. For example, although Napoleon abandoned the revolutionaries’ attempts to institute basic schooling for all girls, he founded boarding schools for the orphaned daughters of military figures and opened two impressive schools for the daughters of men in the Legion of Honor. Likewise, he supported the establishment of a national school for midwives in the Port-Royal Hospital and revived the Paris Society of Maternal Charity... He endowed the revived Imperial Society of Maternal Charity with 500,000 francs. This institution aimed to fuse public and private charity. Its membership comprised elite women, dedicated to aiding orphans and impoverished families. Drawing on Christine Adams’ research, Burton points out that Napoleon and his administrators hoped ...[to]... improve the morals of its rich female patrons by encouraging them as well as their poor clients to breast-feed their babies.... Napoleon’s elite medical scientists and surgeons, emphasized female difference and physical weakness far more than did the theoreticians.... She writes, 'Contrary to what we would imagine, the more surgeons examined tissue, the more sexually biased they became in comparison to the liberal, humanistically trained physicians – even more sexually biased than Napoleon himself'."