Books by Karen (Stanford University Offen

Debates around the 'woman question' originated in France in the late Middle Ages, and Karen Offen here offers a panoramic account of changing ideas of who women were and should be, and what they should be restrained from doing, from the fifteenth to the late nineteenth century.

Karen Offen offers a magisterial reconstruction and analysis of the heated debates around relations between women and men, how they are constructed, and how they should be organized or reorganized, that raged in France and its French-speaking neighbors during the French Third Republic.