“The salons – exclusive gatherings held in the drawing rooms of the Parisian bourgeoisie – were sites for conversation. Men and women convened at these regular meetings to discuss politics, history, religion, literature, and philosophy.” (Susan Herbst) The invited individuals were scholars, statesmen, writers, businessmen, intellectuals, etc, and the people in charge of the meetings were women.
Jürgen Habermas calls the the era of the salons a refeudalization of society. This means that the public sphere and private sphere, ie the State and society, became involved in each others' spheres. This caused the private sphere to collapse into itself. It changed what would be called public debates into leisurely conversations. A salon can be visualized metaphorically as follows: A woman is bending over and talking into a man’s ear, while he signs a congress bill.
In most political situations, even to this day, women have been barred from operating to their full capacities in the public sphere. Because when a woman tries to operate in the public sphere - they end up taking on man like qualities. A prime example of this is Hillary Clinton and her "pants-suit." Additional evidence of that is Clinton did better with the men vote than the women! Women, however, dominate the private sphere. An example of this is the education system. "According to NEA research, just 24.9 percent of the nation's 3 million teachers are men. And over the last two decades, the ratio of males to females in teaching has steadily declined. The number of male teachers now stands at a 40-year low." (NEA)
Bourgeois Public Sphere
There was a disregard of status in the salons. The emergence of the salons is one of the first political atmospheres that women were able to operate in, without the pressure or consequences of being a woman in the public sphere. Women not had access to this parallel sphere because the boundaries between state and society blurred, but shared the domain of common concern. Although the salons were a public sphere they retained the qualities of a private sphere that allowed women to operate in it. One could call the salon a cross over sphere.
The salons were a place against the notion of exclusivity, instead they held an inclusivity for anyone who was educated. They were able to measure public opinion without pressure. Since anyone could come and state their opinion, without getting their head chopped off, any idea was expressed.
The Salon
- Disregard of status.
- Domain of common concern.
- Inclusivity
Clash was acceptable in these forums, to some extent, and was even delighted in for entertainment. Clearly some critical scholars have at least one distinction that sets them apart from each other, one idea or notion that other scholars don’t agree with. But at the same time this forum allowed open ended discussion without the public disarray of an enemy.
Women were the spotlight but the men thought it was shined on them. Salons were full of political dialogue, freedom of speech - even an open forum. Yet it was a private sphere in a home, a reception area divided into many alcoves for private conversations.
It may not be ironic we hold onto the symbolism of the salon even still today. In fact, there’s a website to fit that melding of the spheres online. www.salon.com. It won’t ever have the same privilege of intimacy. But it proves why salons were important.
Salons - Success or Failure?
Salons were successful in the sense that women got any opportunity to have political sway. They can be deemed a failure in the sense that women were never fully accepted into the public sphere in that time period. Even still, men would not even have the political sway women gained because of salons, in their own public sphere. Men wouldn’t get the leisurely night long regular basis chats that women created with salons. So this deemed success granted a medium for mutual benefit. It also allowed for these scholarly men to feel important in the private sphere, something that they may not have been respected in before.
There are also some successes to note in the women's political sphere. Never before had women organized so socially. Just like the monarchy is handed down through the blood line, so was critical thinking between grandmother to granddaughters, or even a salon's building was handed down generation to generation.
Today women speak in the public sphere and still have a double standard interfering with them. Hillary Clinton tried to convince the public to believe her capable of running a country, yet it was the women she most turned off because of her public image. There might have even been an underlying issue because of the scandal of her husband in his own administration, and that she seemingly ignored it publicly and instead stood by his side. That could have hurt her.
Sources:
Susan Herbst, Politics At the Margin, Historical Studies of Public Expression Outside the Mainstream. Chapter 2.
http://www.nea.org/teachershortage/03malefactsheet.html
Jürgen Habermas, from Herbst's book and various other sources.