Beauvoir and Her Sisters

The Politics of Women's Bodies in France

Sandra Reineke

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780252036194
• eBook ISBN: 9780252093227
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: French History
• Index: Social Sciences

Beauvoir and Her Sisters investigates how women's experiences, as represented in print culture, led to a political identity of an "imagined sisterhood" through which political activism developed and thrived in postwar France. Through the lens of women's political and popular writings, Sandra Reineke presents a unique interpretation of feminist and intellectual discourse on citizenship, identity, and reproductive rights.

 

Drawing on feminist writings by Simone de Beauvoir, feminist reviews from the women's liberation movement, and cultural reproductions from French women's fashion and beauty magazines, Reineke illustrates how print media created new spaces for political and social ideas. This sustained study extends from 1944, when women received the right to vote in France, to 1993, when the French government outlawed anti-abortion activities. Touching on the relationship between consumer culture and feminist practice, Reineke's analysis of a selection of women's writings underlines how these texts challenged traditional gender models and ideals.

 

In revealing that women collectively used texts to challenge the state to redress its abortion laws, Reineke renders the act of writing as a form of political action and highlights the act of reading as an essential but often overlooked space in which marginalized women could exercise dissent and create solidarity.

1 The Body, Writing, and Citizenship Rights

BEFORE I TURN TO ANALYZING how three specific types of women’s writing—high feminist literature (chap. 2), popular women’s magazines (chap. 3), and feminist reviews (chap. 4)—helped create an alternative social space for women to gather information and exchange experiences about female sexuality and reproductive rights in postwar France, this chapter will provide important historical and contextual background information. This information will help in understanding how the political exclusion of women based on a disembodied concept of citizenship sparked very specific political strategies by women as they attempted to rectify this exclusion. As I hope to show in the following chapters, one such strategy was the use of reading and writing. It allowed women to straddle the borders of private and public life and enabled them to turn an ordinary social practice into potentially political practices.

Joan W. Scott (2005) has identified three broad yet specific moments in French history when questions of embodiment made women rally for equal citizenship rights: the campaign for women’s right to vote in the nineteenth century; the campaign for reproductive rights in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s; and the campaign for women’s right to access to elected office (parité) in the 1990s. My study focuses on the second of those campaigns. After women acquired the right to vote, activists in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s reacted to persisting political and social inequalities, including the restrictive abortion law that denied women the right to control their own bodies. During this period, I argue, activists rediscovered women’s writing as a forceful tool for fostering a political consciousness among women and potentially creating a real collective agency. To this end, they made the female body a central political locus of the feminist campaign for reproductive rights. However, at the same time that women’s writing aimed to construct a shared female identity and political consciousness that centered on female bodily experiences—exemplified, for instance, in women’s writing about their experiences with sexuality, pregnancy, and motherhood—postwar consumer culture constructed the female body as an object of consumer desire rather than as a subject of individual citizenship rights. This peculiar historical context, I suggest, created distinctive challenges for the postwar women’s liberation movement, which produced at times ambiguous results.

In what follows, I shall provide essential background information on citizenship rights discourses and the body in French history in order to contextualize my subsequent analysis of women’s writing in postwar society. For this purpose, I have divided this chapter into three distinct sections. The first section examines the specific concepts of citizenship rights developed in early modern and modern France and how those concepts impacted women’s social and political status. It also considers the first “feminist” responses to the gendering of citizenship rights following the French Revolution. The second section then offers contextual and background information on the development of French feminism in the nineteenth century, which centered on the campaign for the right to vote. The third section contextualizes the feminist campaign for reproductive freedom of the twentieth century, which began in the 1960s.

Gendered Concepts of Citizenship Rights in Early Modern and Modern France

In France, as historians inform us, the gendering of public affairs and citizenship rights mirrors a deep-seated fear of women’s influence on political life. This fear goes back to the Salic law of the Middle Ages, which excluded female offspring from inheriting rights to the throne. In early modern France, as a result, “political” women were demonized, and political authority was gendered so as to exclude women from public life (Hanley and Denizard 1994).¹ For example, recent scholarship examining public charges made against perhaps the most famous political woman in early modern France, Queen Marie-Antoinette, demonstrates how her critics used sexual stereotypes, such as women’s supposedly insatiable sexual and economic appetite, to portray her as a political threat to the social order. In this case, the royal account books in which the queen’s expenditures on fashion and jewelry were recorded were later used to indict her for causing the bankruptcy of the French state and, ultimately, the downfall of the monarchy. By extension, critics used her case to justify the exclusion of all women from public life and citizenship in the new republic (J. Jones 1996; Marso 2006, chap. 2). I suggest that this construal of the queen’s spending habits as a political threat to French society illustrates the processes involved in gendering early modern and modern French political culture and citizenship rights, which relegated women to secondary citizens.

Concepts of citizenship in early modern and modern France were grounded philosophically in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century social contract theories dating back to the early modern natural law theories of Hugo Grotius, Thomas Hobbes, Benedict de Spinoza, and John Locke, which emphasized individual rights and entitlement. Based on the notion of sovereign power, social contract theories posit that individuals enter into contracts with one another in order to create a political authority (called the state), which protects life and property and secures individual liberties. In return, individuals, now called citizens, are granted political and civil (and later social) rights by this authority that governs their lives.

According to one prominent social contract theorist, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78), women’s civic role was to be mothers and educators of future (male) citizens, not to meddle in public affairs. In his Social Contract (1762), Rousseau called upon women to govern the family and household and to raise the next generation of virtuous citizens (Reynolds 1987; Marso 1999). He wrote: “Happy are we, so long as your chaste influence, solely exercised within the limits of conjugal union, is exerted only for the glory of the State and the happiness of the public.… It is your task to perpetuate, by your insinuating influence and your innocent and amiable rule, a respect for the laws of the State, and harmony among the citizens” ([1762] 1920, 166). Soon, the events of the Revolution of 1789 revealed that this new citizenry demanded individuality and economic well-being as much as civic participation. Earlier, the political theories of Charles de Secondat, Baron de la Brède et de Montesquieu (1698–1755), stressed the importance of private activities, including the market and family affairs, as a source of individual happiness (Montesquieu 1874). In this classic liberal view, citizenship is based on the protection of individual rights (and possessions) by the state rather than on the civic virtues of its citizens (Macpherson 1962). Benjamin Constant ([1818] 1980) aptly described this changed understanding of citizenship in his Essai sur la liberté des anciens comparée à celle des modernes as one of not “political” but “private” individuals endowed with individual freedoms.

The sweeping political changes brought about by the Revolution, which sought to implement these new and indeed radical ideas, did not extend to women. Even propertied women were now barred from political participation (voting). In this way, women were denied active citizenship. Legislators grouped them together with children and minors to be governed by protective laws, which they had no power to change (McBride Stetson 1987). As Geneviève Fraisse and Scott show in their detailed studies on the birth of modern French democracy, the republican concept of citizenship was technically gender neutral as it de facto included women and men, but the universal concept of individual rights on which it rested was gendered from the beginning. As Scott explains, “Ideological/political systems such as French republicanism work by endorsing the notion that coherence is a requirement for social organization and then by presenting themselves as fulfilling the requirements for coherence.… Thus, the production of ‘sexual difference’ was a way of achieving the otherwise inconsistent exclusion of women from the categories of individual and citizen” (1996, 11–12).

Social commentators defended this political exclusion, emphasizing women’s innate weakness and need of male protection. At the same time, they stressed women’s purported moral superiority over men to justify women’s and men’s different status. Women’s political marginalization was nowhere more evident than in a 1793 decree outlawing all women’s groups and a 1795 decree denying women the right to assembly (Rogers 1984, 43). As Fraisse explains in her study, “Women’s rights were not inadvertently overlooked, but were denied out of necessity” (1994, xv), because women were perceived to be a source of division in the new republic. As Harriet B. Applewhite and Darline Gay Levy state, active citizenship was to be reserved for a new elite of white, moneyed men, as “women were legislated out of the political nation, with sex-based arguments thrown in to rationalize the application of a brutal power politics” (1984, 77).

Applewhite and Levy’s studies are part of a growing area of new and important research in French history focusing on the role of women in the French Revolution. These studies offer new insights into women’s political mobilization and actual involvement in political radicalization and street riots leading up to and during the Revolution.² Building on these discoveries, Carla Hesse (2002) has shown that the revolutionary upheaval enabled an increasing number of women to participate in public discourses about citizenship rights through the act of writing. Although the number of women who could read and write remained limited to a small elite, the voice that women gained through the writing of essays and novels turned an otherwise innocent activity into a political practice of contestation, or what Holloway Sparks has called “citizenship dissent” (1997, 75).³ In her pathbreaking study The Other Enlightenment, Hesse claims that “the French Revolution opened up the unprecedented opportunity for women … to debate the appropriate place for women within a democratic society” (2002, 5).

What women writers lacked, however, was a collective basis for promoting women’s concerns. During the eighteenth century, salonnières, upper-class women who held regular meetings in their homes so that local intellectuals and aristocrats could converse about important topics and listen to public readings (including those of women), constituted a very small group of privileged women. Susan P. Conner and others (Goodman 1994; Roche 1998; Kale 2004) have argued that eighteenth-century salonnières

should not be discussed in studies of political women. Their inclusion has actually been a case of mistaking visibility with political power. Scarcely on the periphery of politics, salonnières were prominent not in politics but in social circles as inheritors of the tradition of the précieuses of the previous century. Like their predecessors, they continued to discuss controversial topics and to surround themselves with men of learning. Some continued to revolt against contemporary marriage customs; some studied literature that promoted equality between the sexes, although not particularly as feminists; and some wrote pamphlets and books that frequently contained political overtones.… But the salonnières and writers did not step beyond their salons and discussions. (Conner 1984, 50)

As for the French Revolution, Jane Abray attributes the “almost total failure of revolutionary feminism” after 1789 to the lack of collective action due in part to the suppression of women’s clubs as early as 1793 (1975, 58). If there was no women’s revolution following the Great Revolution, however, “women’s writing flourished once [the old] regime fell” (Hesse 2002, 37), enabling women’s participation in literature and public discourse through the commercialization of cultural life. In short, one way of reading the events of the Revolution is to acknowledge the significance for the emergence of women’s political activity of a developing public culture, or sphere—particularly through public print media—that remains important today.

Among the types of writings that thrived in what Jürgen Habermas has called the “bourgeois public sphere” (1992, 89) are the three genres examined in this study: high literature, popular magazines, and political reviews. Women used all three new literary spaces to exchange experiences and opinions, including opinions on political matters. In this way, they turned ordinary social practices such as reading and writing into acts of political contestation and, potentially, agency.

Perhaps the most notorious example of women’s participation in public political discourse during the Revolution, which was still very much limited to the privileged women of the upper class, was Olympe de Gouges’s Declaration of the Rights of Woman (Déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne), addressed to the National Assembly in 1791. Modeled on the Assembly’s Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen) from 1789, this political tract (Gouges [1791] 1979) urged the Assembly not to forget about women’s equality. It should be noted here that already prior to the Revolution, women had petitioned the king seeking ameliorations in women’s education and work conditions. Like Gouges, these women had hoped that their voices would be heard and that their political claims could be included in postrevolutionary reforms. Likewise, the Marquis de Condorcet and a few other men had argued for women’s political rights as early as 1790 (Landes 1988; Hunt 1996, 60–63). Yet, like Marie-Antoinette, Gouges ended up on the guillotine in 1793 before any of her political demands could be considered. Interestingly, for her actions Gouges was charged with “crimes of the pen” against the government, following an earlier practice in accordance with which challenging writers and their works were considered a civic menace. As Joan DeJean (1991) informs us in her insightful study on the origins of the modern novel in France, women’s writings, which started in France as early as the 1660s as a vehicle for feminist ideas, posed a particular political challenge and thus a threat to civic stability. She reports on another such female writer, Anne Louise Germaine de Staël-Holstein, or Madame de Staël, who was exiled from Paris after the Revolution for her literary work (8).

Despite, or because of, these setbacks, the bourgeois public sphere offered women a medium for challenging the idea of republican citizenship, which had promised universal equality but had limited it to a certain—male—type of individual who stood in for the universal model on which it claimed to rest. As French historians have explained, the gendering of French public culture offered feminists an opportunity to claim political rights for women as they revealed the “paradox” of republican citizenship (Scott 1996, 3). As Scott explains, when early feminists attempted to speak on behalf of women as a group, they forged their political claims around the very same paradox that they wanted to defeat. In this instance, they used the idea of republican motherhood to claim political rights for women based on their reproductive functions, namely, their fundamental difference from men (Hunt 1994; Scott 1996; Foley 2004). Scott writes: “Feminism was a protest against women’s political exclusion; its goal was to eliminate ‘sexual difference’ in politics, but it had to make its claims on behalf of ‘women’ (who were discursively produced through ‘sexual difference’). To the extent that it acted for ‘women,’ feminism produced the ‘sexual difference’ it sought to eliminate. This paradox—the need both to accept and to refuse ‘sexual difference’—was the constitutive condition of feminism as a political movement throughout its long history” (1996, 3–4).

Important for this study, while feminist claims for women’s political rights fought the contradictory model of universal citizenship, they drew attention to women’s sexed body and its political significance: women’s exclusion from politics and public affairs (Scott 2005). Although scholars debate whether women’s exclusion from the public sphere was intrinsic to the masculinist republican model or a constantly renegotiated facet of republican public culture, I want to emphasize how feminist oppositional discourses made the female body a focus in the struggle against women’s political marginalization, which was later expressed in women’s claim to the right to control their own bodies (Landes 1988; Hesse 2002). There are a number of examples of women’s rights activists in France and elsewhere who made a woman’s right to bodily self-determination the focus of their political struggle for equal citizenship rights. These include the feminist campaigns for free and legal abortion, which popularized the slogan “Our bellies belong to us” and made public the confessions of hundreds of women who had had illegal abortions. These protest campaigns allowed feminists to break the silence of women who had experienced unwanted pregnancies and/or clandestine abortions, and to demonstrate to the larger public the absurdity of existing repressive abortion laws that denied women equal rights (Reineke 2008–2009).

Women’s claim to the right to control their own bodies originates in the liberal concepts of individual freedom and autonomy discussed above. Feminists appropriated the liberal view to argue that true individual autonomy is possible only if one achieves control over one’s own body. Since women’s bodies differ from men’s in that they are potentially engaged in the reproduction of the human species, reproductive freedom becomes the litmus test for how the state extends liberal citizenship rights (Batiot 1986; Petchesky 1995). In France, a person’s right to control his body is codified in the Code civil (or Code Napoléon), dating back to 1804, and is today an integral part of article 16 of the Civil Code governing a citizen’s right to physical integrity.⁴

However, women remained excluded from equal citizenship rights on the basis of their bodily difference from men, because, as Scott explains, “sexual difference, in the person of the woman, was not included in the list of traits that could be abstracted for purposes of citizenship. Women’s exclusion was not just about eliminating women’s influence. It also served a major symbolic function as a reminder of the existence of irreducible difference—unresolvable antagonism within the national body, which posed a threat to the abstraction and thus the very existence of national unity” (2005, 16).

Unsurprisingly, women responded strongly to their continued political exclusion based on a concept of abstract universalism that discriminated against women as the embodiment of (sexual) difference (Pateman 1988; Offen 1994, 2003). In fact, a plethora of (male) literature directed toward silencing women, such as conduct books and advice manuals, “may actually represent a highly unsuccessful effort to dam a flow of female energy and activity that could be stopped only by systematic, sustained intervention” (Offen 2003, 739; see also Jordanova 1982; Veauvy and Pisano 1997).

Despite these roadblocks, women’s political activism started to take off in the nineteenth century with the rise of Saint-Simonian socialism and the Revolution of 1848 leading to the establishment of the Second Republic (1848–51). In fact, the first autonomous women’s movement evolved out of the Saint-Simonian movement in the early 1830s. Flora Tristan, Jeanne Deroin, and Pauline Roland remain most strongly associated with this era, at the same time that the first feminist newspapers and journals tried to link the plight of the working class with the struggle for women’s rights (McMillan 1981, 79; Moses 1984, chaps. 3 and 4). Tristan, for instance, an active leader of the French working-class movement, emphasized women’s right to work for a remunerative wage as well as divorce laws. Her work was an uphill struggle, however, because it was not until 1848 that the Provisional Government of the Second Republic recognized men’s right to work after the institution of “universal” male suff...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. The Body, Writing, and Citizenship Rights
• 2. Secondary Citizens
• 3. Citizen Consumers
• 4. Dissident Citizens
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index