A Feminist Geography of Women's Industrial Poetry in Nineteenth-Century France

Where is women's poetry about France's Industrial Revolution? Rarely is attention given to the likes of Amable Tastu's 'La France et l'industrie' (1827) or Anaïs Ségalas's 'Le gaz et la lune' (1864) as a distinctive record of heavy industry's impact on female wellbeing, which is a bone of contention worldwide. My experimentation with feminist literary geography, extending from my in-depth knowledge of the environmental humanities, has the goal of providing a platform for the underrepresented 51% of nineteenth-century France's adult sex ratio. Given that the European Commission is addressing gender equality in the cultural sector (2021) and striving to end gender stereotypes (2023), now is the time for my reparative intervention from a position of allyship correlating to #HeForShe (2014) and #FeminizeYourCanon (2018). Inspired by Doreen Massey's 'Space, Place and Gender' (1994) and Caroline Criado Perez's 'Invisible Women' (2019), I aim to gather a diversity of female-authored poems that are representative of bodily, ecological, emotional, infrastructural, and linguistic circumstances. My textual method is in keeping with cultural analysis such as Marina Marengo's 'Geografia e letteratura' (2016) and Adrianna Paliyenko's 'Women Shaping French Poetic History, 1801-1900' (2016). The project's priorities are: 1) locating what women wrote about industrial matters across decades to establish reference points for policymakers and non-specialists