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Beauvoir and Her Sisters
The Politics of Women's Bodies in France
By SANDRA REINEKE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Copyright © 2011 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-252-03619-4
Introduction
THIS BOOK EXAMINES a perennial political question: Are women citizens, and if so, how can they speak and act together politically? Recent research in the area of gender and politics has started to shed light on the questions of when and how women participate in political terms. However, studies in the area of democratic theory and citizenship rights have only begun to address the central question of how citizens make themselves into political agents. Arguably, we can better understand how women participate in the political realm by understanding how female citizens—who are traditionally marginalized from the public and political life—attempt to construct a collective political consciousness or identity that can serve as a springboard for political activism (Childs and Krook 2006; Henderson and Jeydel 2007; see also the section "Recent Scholarship" below). My study contributes to this important area of research by examining how, in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, French women used reading and writing about women's sexuality and reproductive rights as a vehicle to promote the idea of communities of women, characterized by a collective feminine identity and likely common political interests. As I shall argue, for second-wave women's rights activists in France and elsewhere, the idea of women's communality held great potential for women's political agency in various areas of public policy, including state laws governing reproductive rights.
In this way, this book presents a case study to show how women can come together to create an "imagined sisterhood" (Werbner 1999, 223) so that they can speak and act together in the political realm. I am borrowing from Pnina Werbner's pioneering study on the feminist collective imagination, and applying it to a specific place and time: postwar France. For the purposes of this study, this period spans the years from 1944, when French women first acquired the right to vote, to 1993, when the French state made hindering a woman from obtaining access to abortion a crime, and which includes 1970, the year the French women's liberation movement, the Mouvement de la libération de la femme (MLF), was born. (The name was later changed by the activists to Mouvement de libération des femmes as they signed pamphlets and publications.)
I see France as an important case study in this area of inquiry because French women were enfranchised considerably late in comparison to women elsewhere in the Western Hemisphere, and yet France has a long and powerful history of feminist activism (Offen 1994). When French women finally acquired full active citizenship in 1944 following World War II, they continued to face persisting political and social inequalities. In this book, I am concerned with one of the most striking examples of potentially repressive state legislation: abortion laws. These laws denied women the right to control their own bodies, a right included in the liberal republican ideal of citizenship. In response to these inequalities, French women started a concerted effort to demand reproductive rights for women as part of general citizenship rights. For the purpose of this study, I analyze how women's writing helped constitute "women" politically by articulating, expressing, and disseminating feminist claims for gender equality in postwar France. I identify three different levels of women's writing: high feminist literature, mass popular women's magazines, and feminist reviews.
In short, I have two goals in this book. First, my analysis aims to demonstrate how women's writing helped form an "imagined sisterhood," a community of women with the potential for real political change. Second, I aim to show how the concept of an "imagined sisterhood" enabled women to address issues of female embodiment in postwar French society, especially in terms of how postwar culture constructed the female body as an object of consumer desire rather than a subject of individual citizenship rights.
The Case Context
Like women elsewhere, French women had historically been excluded from citizenship rights, because they were deemed unsuited for politics and civic life owing to their corporeal, or "natural," difference from men. In France, women's exclusion from political participation stemmed mostly from a strong cultural association between women and excess (sexually or otherwise), which classified women and their interests as "particular" and at odds with the common good. In other words, women's activities were considered a threat to the social and political order of the state and bourgeois society (Hertz 1983; Hunt 1992; J. Jones 1996; Tiersten 2001). Viewed in conjunction with the development of modern practices of consumption, which developed alongside the state, women in France were excluded from civic life and participation. In this way, they became objects, not subjects, of political discourse, including laws governing sexuality and reproduction (Accampo, Fuchs, and Stewart 1995; Cova 1997).
Throughout French history, women activists had tried to redress sociopolitical inequalities, but women's push for citizenship rights was complicated by the following theoretical conundrum: Was female equality to be based on women's (bodily) sameness to or difference from men? That question preoccupied French feminist thought throughout history and will be discussed in more detail in chapter 1. Thus, when President Charles de Gaulle finally decreed in 1944 that women were full active citizens with the right to vote, it was not to suggest that women had the same "inalienable" rights as men, but rather to reward them for their participation in the Resistance during World War II (Duchen 1994, 33). Even after 1944, women continued to experience grave social and political inequalities.
By the late 1960s, in the wake of the students' and workers' revolt that had swept through France, women renewed their efforts to articulate demands for women's rights, including access to abortion. Leading in this endeavor was the women's liberation movement, or MLF, which explicitly connected female bodily experience (such as sexuality, motherhood, and abortion) with the struggle against political marginalization. This major feminist concern manifested itself in the movement's preoccupation with reproductive rights. This book, however, is not a study of the MLF. Nor is it a study of the political processes that finally won French women the right to abortion.
Rather, this study investigates a selection of women's writings to show their potential for collective political agency. Thus, all of the texts I examine are examples of women's writing for sociopolitical change, which enabled women to carve out a social space apart from traditional feminine expectations to construct a political community. I have called this social space an "imagined sisterhood" (Werbner 1999, 223), not unlike the imagined communities described by Benedict Anderson (1983) in his study of the cultural construction of national identity. If, as Anderson suggests, modern print media shape our collective imagination as a political community, then women's writing on matters of sexuality and reproduction can be understood as contributing to a politically potent "imagined sisterhood." Arguably, women's sisterhood may represent and promote a collective feminine identity and, potentially, political agency.
Throughout French history, women writers attempted to participate not just in the sharing of personal experiences contained in diaries, autobiographies, and novels, but also in the dissemination of political ideas published in newspapers, journals, and political tracts (DeJean 1991; DeJean and Miller 1991; Preston 1995). Crucially, the burgeoning commercialization of public life in the eighteenth century, particularly the development of commercial print media, enabled a growing number of women to participate in public discourse through the act of reading and writing (Moscovici 2000; Walton 2000; Hesse 2002).
Opportunities for women to take advantage of this new freedom varied from one historical period to another. In postwar France, as part of the larger students' and workers' revolt of the late 1960s, women demanded greater participation in public discourses about what we today call "women's issues," such as sexuality, reproduction, work, and consumption. The women's liberation movement, for instance, published weekly and monthly journals to raise awareness about women's sexuality and reproductive rights.
But it was the publication in 1949 of a controversial study about women's social existence by the French philosopher and novelist Simone de Beauvoir (1908–86), titled Le Deuxième sexe (The Second Sex), that made it possible, not just for women but for French society as a whole, to engage in discourses about sexuality and reproduction. While Beauvoir's writing in Le Deuxième sexe set the tone for women's political activism, the women's liberation movement and its independently published feminist reviews carried out the task of informing women and organizing them into an empowered "sisterhood." Ironically, the reviews' commercial counterpart, the market of women's magazines, which also mushroomed during this period, appropriated the liberal feminist agenda to create its own feminine space, a for-profit, glossy women's world with self-proclaimed aspirations for women's emancipation (Sullerot 1963; Bullier 1965; Ferguson 1983; Bonvoisin and Maignien 1986; Winship 1987; Ballaster 1991; Wadia 1991; McCracken 1993; Farrell 1994; Hermes 1995; Scanlon 1995).
Through her publication, Beauvoir helped make a post-1945 "imagined sisterhood" by articulating its central tenet: the potential of the female body for political agency. Because of Beauvoir's insights, her "sisters" turned this occupation into a political agenda, which was disseminated in the feminist reviews and manifested in the collective political struggle for reproductive rights in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. In addition, the popular success of women's magazines during this period, despite their central concern with commodity consumption and their focus on individual self-development, helped disseminate information on reproductive rights and sexuality. Paradoxically, then, popular women's magazines contributed to the creation of this real and imagined "sisterhood," as even the act of consuming can entail potentially counterhegemonic practices (Jenkins 1992; Storey 1996).
My study analyzes all of these types of women's writing—high feminist literature, mass cultural texts, and feminist reviews—to show how texts written by women for women who are bound together by common concerns can help propel women to become engaged politically despite their political and cultural marginalization. Women's political engagement is exemplified here by the postwar collective struggle for reproductive freedom, through which women challenged the French state to abandon its laws criminalizing abortion.
Analytical Lens and Main Theoretical Concepts
Before I proceed, a few methodological notes are in order. Given the broad scope of the issues covered here—the body, citizenship, dissent, reproductive politics—my choice of material is highly selective, and my analytical lens, a qualitative political discourse analysis of women's writings in the form of narratives, images, and symbols, may seem closer to a linguistic study than a work of political science. In this regard, I am consciously following the "Cambridge School" of political theory, exemplified by Quentin Skinner. Skinner and his followers have demonstrated that putting political thought in its social and cultural context amplifies our understanding of politics (Skinner 1978; Ball, Farr, and Hanson 1989). This study takes the next step in this direction by connecting bodily and sexual practices with everyday politics and liberatory claims for citizenship in Fifth Republic France. Furthermore, groundbreaking recent feminist political discourse analyses attest to the relevance of linking discursive patterns with (national) social policymaking following the interpretive turn in the field of political theory. Political discourse analysis demonstrates that politics is not just a struggle over what political actors want but also a struggle over interpreting what political actors want (Kulawik 2009).
Moreover, this study follows other recent theoretical developments in challenging traditional notions of the body, sex, and gender. My analysis of the symbolic representation of women and their bodies in a variety of different texts shows the female body to be a site of political contestation rather than a kind of "natural" biological entity. Likewise, these theories understand women's (and men's) bodies as artifacts, socially situated and acted upon by different societal forces to construct specific historical subjects—including women activists (Bourdieu 1984; Foucault 1990; Featherstone 1991; Bordo 1993; Grosz 1994; Gatens 1996; Canning 1999; Chisholm 2001). In this way, my analysis of women's liberatory discourses contributes to our understanding of women's political activism in democratic political systems, an issue that the field of democratic theory has only begun to systematically analyze. In short, I show how personal experiences of the body are central to women's democratic politics in modern France, which are expressed during the period of second-wave feminism in postwar France in very specific ways through rhetoric about women's equal citizenship rights to control their own bodies.
Here I should clarify some of the main concepts and terms used in this study, which should also say something about my theoretical orientation and methodology. In using the term "discourse," I do not refer to a specific text or utterance, but rather to a historically, socially, and institutionally specific structure of statements, terms, categories, and beliefs. The meaning of these structures is always contested, and the power to control their meaning usually resides in claims to (scientific) knowledge through writing, institutions (such as schools), and social relationships (such as the family). To talk about "citizenship discourse," for instance, is to acknowledge that the meaning of citizenship is in constant flux, and furthermore that the elaboration of its meaning involves conflict and power.
"Citizenship," in modern political theory, expresses the entitlement to civil and political rights held by an individual residing in a given state, and is most often associated with the democratic notion of equality under the law. But the development of citizenship rights has a long history, going back to the Greek city-states, where citizenship was bound up with the quest for social peace, or the common good, rather than individual well-being. Recent writings by feminists have focused on social contract theory to argue that the justification for keeping women out of the body politic was, and is, often made in terms of protecting the health and well-being of society from corruption and infection, a measure still observable in twentieth-century welfare politics. As a result, feminism can be understood as a protest against this unequal treatment and political exclusion (Okin 1979; Eisenstein 1981; Phillips 1987; Coole 1988, 1994; Pateman 1988; Orloff 1993; Offen 1994). Consequently, feminist theorists have argued that the concept of citizenship ought to include not just rights and obligations, which are usually associated with it, but also bodily practices, since those differ greatly between women and men. By showing that citizenship is a gendered construction and bound up with bodily practices, feminist-embodied citizenship theory significantly broadens the sense of what can be considered political in the modern state. In this study, I draw attention to how bodies themselves become sites of political struggle, that is, how the body can be used to contest or legitimate the power of the state and the meaning of citizenship (Young 1990; Schiebinger 1993; Sparks 1997; Parkins 2000, 2002). My position is that there are no bodies in a general sense, but rather (historically) specific bodies, marked by gender (and race, class, sexuality, etc.), which shows the body politic to be a gender-specific myth.
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Excerpted from Beauvoir and Her Sisters by SANDRA REINEKE Copyright © 2011 by Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois . Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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