Could Nineteenth-Century Working-Class Women Read? Some Female Readers under the July Monarchy (France, 1830–1848)

This article explores the place of working-class women in written culture in early nineteenth-century France. The study relies on a small corpus of autobiographies by women from the popular classes – factory workers, daughters of craftsmen, and rural inhabitants – which shed light on their reading practices. Although these practices were often connected to religion, they also reveal the strong appeal that literature held for these women. These texts invite us to rethink the ways in which working-class women actually accessed the written world.