Our wives and our daughters are ruled by our enemies’: Jules Michelet’s scholarly afterlife

Nineteenth-century assumptions about the piety of women persistently shape histories of religion in the post-Enlightenment world.  We may have abandoned the essentialist conviction that religiosity is a natural part of the female psyche, instead assigning historical and sociological reasons for women’s greater attachment to their faith.  The notion that men marched in the vanguard of secularization while women defended God and tradition nonetheless persists.  Resisting this trope, I argue, is key both to women’s history and to gender studies.  It brings us to a fuller appreciation of the range of roles open to women in the past and restores agency to their non-feminist choices.  It also clarifies the gender politics of both