Sophie Germain and her alter ego

The use of a male pseudonym became common from the Revolution onward. It was the strategy adopted by Sophie Germain, whose 250th anniversary we celebrate this year. Her correspondence with Gauss, in which she eventually revealed her identity, shows that this only heightened the admiration she inspired.

Recognition never came easily to women mathematicians, but at least they worked under their own names. When they did not, they used pseudonyms to avoid associating their aristocratic names with activities that might have harmed their social standing. The use of a male pseudonym was therefore extremely rare before the Revolution (see the article "Recognition of women scholars in the Enlightenment").

After the Revolution, however, matters became more difficult for women: what little freedom some of them—from the nobility or upper bourgeoisie—had enjoyed was reduced to virtually nothing. Olympe de Gouges was one of many who denounced this: "O women! Women, when will you cease to be blind? What advantages have you reaped from the Revolution? More marked contempt, more conspicuous disdain. Your power has been destroyed; what, then, remains to you? The conviction that men have treated you unjustly."

The bourgeoisie that came to power after the Revolution established a new principle. Under the Ancien Régime, nobles were not allowed to work—if they worked at anything other than cultivating land, they lost their noble title—and since the bourgeoisie had built its position through work, bourgeois wives would now be the ones who did not work. If a bourgeois man's wife worked, it meant that her husband was incapable of supporting his family financially—or morally; for a bourgeois man, this would be the worst possible fall in status.

Becoming men

In an unprecedented development, many women had to adopt male pseudonyms under which to publish their works. Amantine Aurore Lucile Dupin de Francueil, Baroness Dudevant, became known by her pen name George Sand; her friend Marie d'Agoult published as Daniel Stern; and Delphine de Girardin used the pseudonym Charles de Launay. If these three women, all born between 1804 and 1805 and embarking on their careers at the start of the 1830s, had merely wished to keep their private and public lives separate by not using their real names, they could have chosen female pseudonyms. Male names were intended to lend credibility to their articles, novels and plays.