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The Purloined Gender :
American Feminism in a French Mirror
Éric Fassin, Département de Sciences Sociales, École normale supérieure
“Uncle Sam and Love” : thus begins, with a droll though ominous title, an editorial by
Jacques Julliard, in the left-wing weekly Le Nouvel Observateur (2-8 January, 1997). In
his essay on feminism and sexuality, the French historian focuses on America’s public
enemy “since the days of the stagecoach : today no less than yesterday, it’s love.” He then
goes on : “Everything has been attempted in order to eradicate it : first repression, i.e.
Puritanism.
Then trivialization, i.e. the sexual liberation, with its flood of scientific
surveys and sexual prattle.
And ultimately, the final solution, i.e. American-style
feminism.” Of course, this could be irony — were it not for the allusion to the Holocaust,
which is usually no joking matter. The shrill tone and radical rhetoric do strike the reader
as unnecessarily extreme : when Julliard reports on “the hysterical climate that astonishes
all travelers” in the United States, why should he use a hysterical tone in the supposedly
gentler climate of France ?
Indeed, after a short visit to a New England college, this eminent intellectual can
confirm the worst fears of his readers, and the darkest reports of his fellow travelers. “I
can assure you that the unfortunate boys who ventured into enemy territory had a cowered
look — while the girls could only talk about one thing. Moreover, in order to escape the
alleged lust of these males, the women had managed to hide their secondary sexual
characters so well that it felt like Mao’s China, and not the heart of Massachusetts.” After
the journalist’s facts, comes the man’s opinion : “In my view, under the circumstances, the
sexual assaults whose threat these women feared weren’t so much criminal as heroic.”
Here is, according to Jacques Julliard, the logical consequence of the war of the sexes,
understood as the war against love. If feminism is incompatible with eroticism, harassing
sexually undifferentiated women would require a real sacrifice on the part of men. Such is
Uncle Sam’s burden.
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Gender and National Culture
What seems most remarkable in this frightening fantasy, composed by a historian and
journalist, is neither its sweeping historical generalizations (cramming Puritans and
feminists, not to forget Kinsey and Marcuse, into the same “stagecoach”), nor its somewhat
hasty reporting (my personal experience, after teaching in the United States for a few years,
is that I can distinguish between male and female students as successfully as in France).
Even the rhetoric, after all, is not so new : a few years ago, in a diatribe against (so-called)
“political correctness” within American universities, Jean-François Revel, in the
right-of-center weekly Le Point
(March 20, 1993), coined the phrase “concentration
campus” — a French version of the infamous “feminazis”. But what remains perhaps most
remarkable is that in France such a venomous critique of feminism is not to be found only
(as would be the case in the United States) among conservatives, such as Revel, but also
among progressives, such as Julliard. Nor is it a male prerogative : at the time of the
Clarence Thomas hearings, liberal philosopher Elisabeth Badinter used similar arguments
in Le Nouvel Observateur against American feminists, denouncing this twentieth-century
“witchhunt” (October 17-23, 1991). The considerable rhetorical power of her argument
relied on the masculinization of the witch, and the feminization of the witch-hunters, but
also on the conventional Americanness of the reference, from Salem’s Puritans to
McCarthy’s anti-Communism. In the same way today, Julliard mixes gender rhetoric and
national
rhetoric,
feminism
and
Americanness.
Though
anti-feminism
and
anti-Americanism do make strange bedfellows, to borrow a phrase from Judith Ezekiel,
theirs is a “politically successful marriage.”i
The article is thus particularly interesting insofar as it is not idiosyncratic — on the
contrary. This is no personal fantasy ; it plays on widespread stereotypes, and reflects, if
not common sense, at least conventional wisdom.
As a consequence, it cannot be
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explained away in purely psychological terms : it would not do to dismiss Julliard as Anita
Hill’s critics once tried to do, by suggesting that “hell hath no fury like a Frenchman
scorned.” It may then become tempting to interpret such a rhetoric, found across the
ideological spectrum (right and left), and beyond gender divisions (including in feminist
discourse), as an expression of “Frenchness”.
This is how French reactions to “sexual
harassment” (for example) are often analyzed in the United States : from newspapers to
academic journals, the culturalist logic prevails. The very existence of the phrase “droit de
cuissage” becomes an argument in its own right. And the specificity of the French legal
definition of sexual harassment makes it possible “to measure the influence of national
identity.” More generally, the reluctance (all too common in France) to resort to the
category of “gender” (perceived as an American construct) is generally assumed to be
rooted in French culture. The political risk, of course, is to confirm “the French” in their
suspicion that, indeed, “gender” does not translate well (despite the “barely gallicized
rendition, genre”), because the concept is foreign to their culture : “untranslatability” could
ultimately justify “resistance” and “refusal,” “repression” and “denial”ii. Paradoxically, the
culturalist critique thus reinforces, rather than undermines, the cultural prejudice it purports
to oppose.
Beyond this political difficulty, such an argument raises at least three interrelated
theoretical problems, all linked to the use of the notion of “culture”. The first can be
defined as an expressive fallacy.
Cultural facts are not the “expression” of some
underlying culture : culture is not acting through us. “Culture” is an analytical construct,
not a cause. In fact, culture is no explanation ; it is that which must be explained. The
second I would call the synecdochal fallacy — mistaking the part for the whole,
intellectuals for French society.
Intellectuals are not the voice of France, and their
reactions ought to be studied for their own sake. It will come as no surprise that this
fallacy should be so alluring to intellectuals, who are naturally inclined to believe they
“represent” (with both meanings of the word) society. The third one may be named the
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specular fallacy : we are trapped in a mirror game, when a discourse on Americanness is
accounted for in terms of its Frenchness. The national “explanation” (the Gallic nature of
the French) merges with the national “argument” (the Puritan nature of the Americans).
We are thus confusing an explanation with what is in fact a rhetorical weapon.
But the question can be turned around : instead of addressing national character,
French or American, it may prove more rewarding to start by analyzing the rhetoric of
national character in its transatlantic applications. The question is no longer : “What does
the French reaction to American ‘gender trouble’ reveal about the Frenchness of the
French?” It becomes : “Why has gender today become a matter of national interest” — at
least (though not only) between France and the United States ?
This question is raised by
Joan W. Scott in the context of the controversy surrounding French historian Mona Ozouf’s
latest opus, Les Mots des femmes : essai sur la singularité française — a book combining
ten literary portraits of women, from Madame du Deffand and Madame de Charrière to
Simone Weil and Simone de Beauvoir, with a long philosophical essay opposing French
feminism, and femininity, to an American countermodel.
I want to address this question,
taking the book, and the controversy, as the starting point of my argument — not in order to
discuss the “French exception” itself, but so as to apprehend the recent reactivation of the
“nationalization” of gender in transatlantic intellectual discourseiii. What are we to make
of the rhetoric of national character (both Frenchness and Americanness), in its application
to gender ? Mona Ozouf’s essay is a crucial piece in the current debate, both for what it
creates, and for what it reflects : it is important because of its impact, and interesting
because it weaves together (to use a metaphor she might appreciate) all the threads of the
current arguments.
My purpose is first to disentangle them. How does this rhetoric work
? This leads to a second question : what is the function of this rhetoric ? My hope is thus
to help decipher a double puzzle. If what we’re discussing is gender, why should national
character play such a prominent role in the debate ? And if we’re discussing transatlantic
matters, what’s love gotta do with it ?
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The French exception : the empire of women
A recent American novel, with a French title, focuses on transatlantic love, and its
corollaries : cultural stereotyping, and misunderstandings. Diane Johson’s Le Divorce
handles with delightful irony, through the eyes of her Jamesian heroine (Isabel Walker) the
sunny version of the Gallic singularity : this is a contemporary version of the “international
theme” inherited from classic American novels. A husband deserts both his child and his
pregnant wife, leaving her for another woman. He is (to her) quintessentially French :
Charles-Henri de Persand is an aristocrat (with a family mansion in Chartres), whereas
Roxy (to him) is not just an American : she is from California (indeed, from Santa Barbara).
Despite her sad fate, sweet Roxy still believes in French exceptionalism :
She thought him the perfect husband, polite, helpful, and ardent.
“The
Anglo-Saxon male style is entirely different, all those obligatory football games and
beer, their lack of interest in household matters, their notion that it would be
somehow unmanly to take an interest in the dishes or tablecloths,” she said.
“Charles-Henri is capable of appreciating a soup tureen.”
The word ‘Anglo-Saxon’ makes it clear : she has adopted a ‘French’ perspective. Her
sister Isabel is sincerely willing to do just that :
She is right that French men seem to have a pleasant air of collaboration with
women, an air of being in the business of life together — marriage, society. It is
quite unlike the atmosphere of strained toleration or active dislike between the sexes
we seem to have at home.
Paris is not Santa Barbara. But Isabel’s naïveté does not stop her curiosity : she also wants
to hear a French woman’s point of view.
But when I said this once to Roxy’s friend Anne-Chantal Lartigue, who lives near us
across the Place Maubert, she sniffed. “Don’t be deceived,” she said. “They are
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cads, like other men, spoiled by their mothers, unfaithful and evasive.” Of course,
being French she ought to know, but possibly she doesn’t understand what other
men are like — the non-French ones, like Americans, or the Muslims, say, who are
said to seem nice until they get you back to Turkey or Algeria.
The involuntary irony of the narrator’s tone is underlined by the deliberate irony of the
situation, i.e. by the author’s tone : this is, after all, a book about a bitter divorce, not about
the harmony of the sexesiv.
Taken at face value, the theme of a natural harmony of French gender relations, in
contrast to American acrimony, is the positive side of the singularity attributed to France in
recent debates. According to Mona Ozouf, what foreign visitors such as David Hume
(“France is the land of women” : 323) and Montesquieu’s Persans (“the familiarity of
commerce between the sexes” : 331) witnessed and analyzed in the eighteenth century,
which is also what women such as Madame de Staël and Madame de Rémusat praised after
the Revolution (“a talkative, lively France” : 331), remains equally true today : even
feminism has “in France a peaceful quality, either reasonable enough or too timid,
depending on the perspective” (11).
This irenic view was first developed in the recent
years by Michèle Sarde, and more influentially later by Elisabeth Badinterv. It has recently
become conventional wisdom in some intellectual circles. Not of course that everyone
agrees with this soothing portrait of a kinder, gentler France : Michelle Perrot criticizes
what she calls “a history without conflicts.” But at the same time, she has to recognize that
such an optimistic vision is popular, and therefore credible, in France today :
This may in part account for the success of the book. Beyond its intrinsic qualities,
the beauty of endearing portraits, drawn with superb style, it does reinforce the
perception of a sexually pacific France, in which men and women, despite their
disagreements, know how to talk about love.vi
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Whether this is an accurate picture, or not, the fact is that many in France, women as well as
men, are willing to believe it is true : se non è vero, è bello. Such a belief may be founded
on an illusion ; it is nonetheless a social reality.
What Mona Ozouf adds to this pretty picture is an explanation. For this, she relies
in part on a short essay published in Le Débat by political philosopher Philippe Raynaud, in
1989, as a contribution to a dossier devoted to the commemoration of the Bicentennial of
the French Revolution. Raynaud did start with the same interrogation, namely, “why are
the relations between men and women so different in France from what they are in other
democracies ?”vii In fact, as is generally the case in this debate, “other democracies” tends
to mean “Anglo-Saxon” countries, soon to be restricted to “America,” i.e. the United States
— the rhetorical homeland of (the other) democracy since Tocqueville.
Somewhat
paradoxically, Raynaud’s answer turns the classical liberal analysis upside down. For
Louis Hartz, “the liberal tradition in America” (as opposed to Europe, and in particular
France), was defined by the double absence of Revolution and Counter-Revolution, in other
words of socialism and reaction :
One of the central characteristics of a nonfeudal society is that it lacks a genuine
revolutionary tradition. [...] It lacks also a tradition of reaction : lacking Robespierre
it lacks Maistre.viii
In Raynaud’s argument, by contrast, the Old Regime redeems democratic society : for him,
the heritage of an absolutist past does not make France more violent, but rather less
vindictive. Modern French civility is inherited from the court and the salons of the past :
hence (according to him) the importance, even today, of Gallic gallantry. This idea is
further developed in the work of literary historian Marc Fumaroli on “conversation” in the
Old Regimeix : in the same way, civility asserts the cultural power of women, as rulers of
manners. Women are the instrument par excellence of the civilizing process. This is the
foundation of Raynaud’s neo-tocquevillian contrast between America and France :
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In the birthland of equality, feminism is the somewhat embittered spearhead of the
democratic claim ; on the contrary, in the land of absolutist monarchy, women
provide revolutionary passions with their most humane expression. (185)
The problem is of course that French “galanterie”, though it may be considered to
bring forth “a particular form of equality” (as “it compensates for the inequality between the
sexes”), can also be analyzed as “an attempt to refine male domination” — as Raynaud
knows all too well (182). Ozouf is faced with the same difficulty, though she seems less
aware of it : for her too, “the art of women civilizes men” (326). And she may envision, if
not (as the Persans do) “under the guise of equality, the reality of women’s supremacy”, at
least, “a form of equality between the sexes” (327).
But could it not be that the harmony
of the sexes is purchased at the expense of equality ? And is the lack of a real answer in
this book simply due to the fact that Mona Ozouf, as suggested by Geneviève Fraisse, “is
more interested in the liberty of women than in equality between the sexes”x ? In fact,
Ozouf’s discussion of equality only becomes fully explicit as she moves from the Old
Regime to the Revolution, from Montesquieu to Rousseau, from manners to politics. She
cannot ignore the revolutionary paradox :
What we have here is a mystery that can only be compared to the one Quinet
analyzed : the illuminating promise of liberty, on the threshold of the Revolution,
opened the way to the Terror ; and after the promise of emancipation for women
came a new servitude. (342)
Why this aborted emancipation ? And is not the political exclusion of women, as studied
by Fraisse, an integral part of the revolutionary project ?
The French exception : the power of men
This is in fact the other, darker side of the French exception : as the empire of civility gives
way to civic power, women are excluded from democracy. As “secret agents of the past”
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(346), women are confined to tradition, if not treason. The brotherhood of citizenship is
not open to sisterhood. And as we know, from contemporary discussions of “parité,” this
“démocratie exclusive” (Fraisse) is not only a thing of the past. But Mona Ozouf, who is
first and foremost a historian of the Revolution, does not accept the radical critique
developed at the time of the Bicentennial, “the idea that the Revolution, in which the
freedom of women as well as men was supposed to prevail, should have ended in the
historic defeat of women” (14) This indictment is ascribed to “American historians”, or
rather “historiennes” (and here we may have a clue to the nationalization of the gender
issue):
According to Joan W. Scott and Carole Pateman, the scandalous paradox of the
French Revolution is that universality should be embodied in the white male’s
particularity. (352)
In reaction against this negative vision, Ozouf insists on the importance of time : it may be
true that “a Republic that will not acknowledge its past does, at least temporarily, entail the
defeat of women.” (347).
delegitimizes inequality.
But more importantly (to her), the Revolution definitively
Even if it temporarily reinforces it, “it does announce that, at
least in the long term, it will be stopped” (352). “Au moins provisoirement,” “au moins à
terme” : with these qualifications, we are in a logic of postponement, difference accounted
for by deferment (“différance”).
The Revolution has just introduced into the lives of women, alongside the idea of
Progress, the musical phrase : “some day will come”.[...] This is not only a delay,
but also a promise (352).
Equality is simply a matter of time— for women, of patience, and for society, of delay.
This is where the classical question of the French “retard” for women’s suffrage
becomes crucial. And this is where Ozouf’s restoration of the Old Regime, derived from
Raynaud, is counterbalanced by her rehabilitation of the Revolution, based on Rosanvallon.
In his history of French citizenship studied through the prism of suffrage, Pierre
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Rosanvallon discusses women’s fate in comparative terms in order to understand French
“specificity” :
How can we explain that a century should separate male universal suffrage (1848)
from women’s suffrage (1944), while this delay is much shorter everywhere else ?
How can we explain that the political rights of women should have been recognized
in France much later than in countries with an uneven democratic tradition and an
unlikely feminist culture, such as India (1921), the Philippines (1937), or Turkey
(1934), not to mention the major liberal democracies ?
Rosanvallon’s answer (based essentially, once again, on the transatlantic contrast) is
striking (though puzzling) in its beautiful simplicity. According to him, we need not look
at specific historical circumstances, such as the weight of Catholicism and the opposition of
the Republican Senate. We need not resort to the problematic notion of mentalités , or
culture. The key is the universalist model of citizenship that prevails in France, in contrast
to the utilitarian model of representation adopted in America.
In France, Rosanvallon argues, group interests (and interest groups) have no
legitimacy — the Republic will only recognize abstract individuals : “women are deprived
of the right to vote because of their specificity, because they are not pure abstract
individuals” — whereas by contrast, in America, “they are called upon to vote not as
individuals, but as women”. It is because of their social difference that in the United States
women were granted the vote, while in France it was denied to them for the same reason :
The French delay can thus be explained mostly in terms of the resistance of Gallic
political culture to the utilitarian philosophy of the representation of interests. The
idea of legitimating a “women’s sphere” has long been identified with a kind of
archaic resurgence of the old organic conception of society. For this reason, the
political emancipation of women could only follow the beginning of their civil
emancipation, by contrast to what happened in ‘Anglo-Saxon’ countries.
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In America, women could feminize democracy, whereas in France, femininity had first to
be democratized. The paradox is thus that the delay in women’s suffrage is not due to
some French cultural archaism, but to the form political modernity takes in the wake of the
Revolution :
Paradoxically, it is the universalist definition of an abstract political link that
delayed women’s suffrage in France.xi
The other French exception, or rather the downside of the French singularity, is thus
accounted for in positive terms : in matters of gender equality, France turns out always to
have been modern — not only in the realm of manners, since the Old Regime, but even in
the republic of citizenship, since the Revolution.
Paradoxical differences
A major difficulty remains. How can Ozouf combine the two arguments, Rosanvallon’s
and Raynaud’s, and reconcile the two models, the Old Regime and the Revolution ? How
can the two French exceptions (or the two sides of the same singularity), one positive (the
harmony of the sexes), and one negative (the democratic delay of women’s rights), be
integrated ? Here we need to take a closer look at the paradoxical use of difference in
Mona Ozouf’s argument, linked to the contradictory use of difference in the arguments of
Raynaud and Rosanvallon. The history of citizenship in France is founded on the rejection
of gender difference, whereas the history of civility embraces it : “difference” is French, in
manners (according to Raynaud); in politics, it is American (according to Rosanvallon).
Ozouf is aware of the problem, and offers a theoretical solution : just as, according to Louis
Dumont, in contrast to the German national, “the Frenchman sees himself in the mirror as
human [homme], by nature, and French, by accident” (381), in the same way, by contrast
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to Americans, gender difference is secondary in the definition of French women :
universality comes first — although it does not eliminate difference.
It is indeed somewhat simplistic to oppose equality feminism (supposed to be the
genuine version of French feminism) to difference feminism (essentially
Anglo-Saxon). While it is true that French women experience their specificity
without the anguish and recrimination expressed by American women, is it not
rather that differences are in France subjected, and not opposed to equality ? (381)
In order to understand fully this complex theoretical construct, we need to retrace a
double logical movement.
On the one hand, following Tocqueville, Ozouf argues that the
democratic movement towards equality is a threat against social, and specifically sexual
differentiation, thus creating “the widespread fear (shared by women as well) of a world
without qualities, of a gray, inhuman abstraction” (351). This is why she can interpret the
revolutionary exclusion of women, against the grain of democratic modernization, as an
attempt at conjuring this new fear : “The men of the Revolution obscurely felt that the
movement they had initiated led to the loss of differentiation.”(ibid.)
But on the other hand, and in opposition to Tocqueville, Ozouf does not find in the
American solution of the “separate spheres” a modern ideal : ironically, segregation leads
to “the early emergence of a radical feminism in America” (360), whereas for her, the
French “métissage” (passim), far from leading to the disappearance of sexual difference, is
the only way to preserve gender as a civilizing agent. In fact, according to her, both the
sacralization of difference, and its demonization, the sexes segregated, or undifferentiated,
are the two sides of the same (American) coin, and against this double peril she defines
what we could call a French “juste milieu”, in which you can enjoy differences while
remaining “deeply convinced that the abstract equality between individuals will prevail
over differences no matter what” (381). According to this picture, in France, difference is
harmoniously integrated, i.e. subordinated.
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Hence the absence of homosexuality from the French picture, and its presence on
the American side : “American women [...] elevate the homosexual intercourse between
women as the model of pleasure without domination” (p. 387). By contrast, once French
femininity, and feminism, are defined by the “mixité” of “métissage”, homosexuality
becomes unthinkable, as it is defined, according to Ozouf, by the double stigma of radical
democratization — a lack of differentiation, and an excess of segregation.
Homosexuality, or rather lesbianism : only women, through the politics of feminism, carry
the power to undermine the harmony of the sexes, since they are invested with the
responsibility of preserving it. This appears clearly in Ozouf’s presentation of Colette :
Sodom is no Gomorrha. Men may well disregard the other sex — lesbians cannot :
without men, they are “orphaned”.
The ‘ladies in jackets’ remain spurious, hostile critics of men, which only proves
they never forget them. Ultimately, there is but one homosexuality — that of men.
Between women, the love impulse rises after they have been hurt by men, and in the
hope they will heal. (246)
This may be free indirect speech, but the next two sentences clearly demonstrate the
convergence of Colette’s with Ozouf’s perspective :
This also shows that, however foreign they may be, between the worlds of men and
women, there is sometimes an encounter. However brief, perilous, and unluckyit
may be, nevertheless, it bears the resounding, though perhaps overrated, name of
love. (ibid.)
In France, according to this analysis, heterosexual love conquers all — even the modern
democratization of gender. The traditional theme, criticized for example by Geneviève
Fraisse, of “the alleged incompatibility of love and feminism,”xii thus becomes with Mona
Ozouf the incompatibility of American feminism with heterosexual love.
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From contrast to parallel
Mona Ozouf’s argument has been criticized in historical terms by both American and
French readers, for its portrayal of both France and the United States.
Not surprisingly,
since Ozouf is no specialist of American history, this is the weaker link in her argument.
But even on the French side, factual errors have been pointed out, in particular by Joan W.
Scott in her rebuttalxiii. Inaccuracies are less noteworthy in themselves (for example, the
date of women’s suffrage in America, announced as 1914 instead of 1920, page 12) than in
what they reveal :
whether misreading Susan Faludi, presented as a “differentialist,”
alongside Adrienne Rich and Carol Gilligan (387), or misplacing Marilyn French as an
“ordinary feminist” (“this is the way ordinary feminism goes, on the other side of the
Atlantic” : 11), both shortcomings betray her intention to simplify the American picture, in
order to reinforce the transatlantic contrast. And the polemical purpose is clear : it is not
surprising that this caricature of American feminism should be borrowed from Henry
James’s satire, The Bostonians
(p. 360), for the past, and Christina Hoff Sommers’
diatribe, Who Stole Feminism ? (p. 388), for the present.
Two examples can illustrate the biased nature of Ozouf’s reading, due to biased
sources. First, she suggests twice, in her introduction and in her conclusion, that for
American feminists “mere verbal insistance on the part of men defines rape” (11-12 and
389). This rumor about “rape by innuendo,” which runs from the journalist John Leo (in
his column) to the Dictionary and Handbook on Sexual Correctness and Dating (in its very
first article), has been exposed by historian Jon Wiener in The Nation for what it is : a
polemical fabrication xiv. A second example reveals the same genealogy : the idea that,
sexually, even verbal consent does not prove consent (“even explicit agreement cannot
guarantee” consent : 389), far from being the standard feminist position, as Norman
Podhoretz, Neil Gilbert, and Katie Roiphe would have it (through a misreading of rape legal
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expert Susan Estrich), is opposed by liberal feminists, for whom “yes” always mean “yes”
(just as “no” means “no”)xv. The problem is to mistake a partisan view for an objective
perspective — a frequent cause of transatlantic misunderstandings in the recent past, for
example in the naïve approach to “political correctness.” Isn’t the critique of sources the
foundation of the historian’s craft ?
Mona Ozouf does warn the reader, in a footnote :
I know that there are several types of American feminism, and that they have not all
departed from the humanist, universalist tradition. Here, I am only dealing with the
most visible and vocal type, which Christina Hoff Sommers calls ‘gender
feminism.’ (388)
The problem is that, were she to qualify her description, the whole construction would
collapse.
Both inaccuracies and simplifications are required by the argument.
Otherwise, the opposition between the two cultures of feminism and femininity vanishes.
Ozouf seems to suspect as much in a few instances : indeed, she undermines her own
model.
That man is the enemy, as Gloria Steinem would have it (according to Ozouf),
this is something French women will not accept. Nor is it easy to have American
women admit it either. (389)
American women may not be so different from their French counterparts, after all. Is it
simply then that Ozouf is not really talking about women, but about feminists — despite the
fact that her portraits reveal a greater interest in femininity (see for example : “No one’s art
is more feminine than Colette’s. None is less feminist.”: 262) ?
Regarding feminism, Ozouf considers two paradoxes. First, and this she considers
“a considerable objection,” “the birthplace of radical feminism seems to be France.” The
“fundamentalists of femininity” of whom she is thinking are women like Hélène Cixous
and Luce Irigaray, who have proved influential in the United States — indeed, more so
recently than in France (384). I would argue that the historical coincidence between
French and American “difference feminisms” is the source of a misunderstanding, due to a
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misnomer : we are in fact talking about different differences. A philosophy of femininity
that owes a great deal to Derrida and Lacan can hardly be called “essentialist,” and French
“écriture féminine” was hardly the stuff that identity politics is made of. But this is not
Ozouf’s reading : what she finds significant is that 1970s French feminism “was limited to
the intelligentsia, and remained on the margins of society” (387), which is supposed to
prove that it was hardly French, and potentially American. Two objections can be raised
here : first, the impact of French feminism in the United States has been just that — limited
to the intelligentsia, and on the margins of society ; and second, as Joan W. Scott points it
out, this undermines Ozouf’s own project. In fact, she justifies in her introduction her
focus on exceptional women : “We are now past the time when obscure, anonymous words
seemed to carry more meaning than the most shining documents” (13) But surely then,
Hélène Cixous is no more of an “oddity” than, say, philosopher Simone Weil.
Her
paragraph on the failed encounter between Betty Friedan and Simone de Beauvoir also
reveals a second paradox — a dialogue (as Ozouf puts it, “à front renversés” : 392) in
which the former sounds more “French,” and the latter more “American”.
Could it be that
the very founding mothers of both French and American feminisms were at odds with the
transatlantic cultural contrast Mona Ozouf has painstakingly elaboratedxvi?
The main historical critique that can been addressed to the book is then that what
Ozouf chooses to analyze as an opposition between, is in fact a tension within national
cultures of feminism.
As Geneviève Fraisse puts it,
a cursory reading of the history of nineteenth-century feminism reveals that French
militants, whether radical or moderate, resorted both to their universality and to their
specificity as women.xvii
In fact, Rosanvallon himself recognized as much in the longer version of his analysis :
women’s specificity was also a French feminist argument. “Undeniably, the utilitarian
approach did leave its mark on French feminism” xviii — for example, in the case of
Hubertine Auclert.
The difference between French and American feminisms is then,
17
according to him, that while the former was torn by contradictions between universalism
and differentialism, the latter was coherently focusing on a utilitarian approach, the
representation of groups rather than the rights of the individual. This would mean that
differentialism was never unthinkable in France — simply, that it was not a good strategy at
the time, given the universalist political culture. Indeed, what Rosanvallon describes is not
a difference so much in the culture of feminism, or even less femininity, but in cultural
models of citizenship.
Even the American side is more complex than Rosanvallon suggests. On the one
hand, the difference argument was also used by women against female suffrage — not to
keep women in the home, but in order to pursue politics through other means. These
anti-suffrage women activists, the “Antis” studied by Manuela Thurner, supported a
different form of political involvement, reflecting women’s specificity not in the private but
rather in the public sphere xix . On the other hand, despite the temporary unity of the
National American Woman Suffrage Association after 1890, the women’s movement in the
United States was always divided, from the issue of Black suffrage, with the ratification of
the Fifteenth Amendment in 1869, to the battle of the Equal Rights Amendment. For 1920
was not only the year of the Nineteenth Amendment : it also revealed a major split, echoing
former divisions of the feminist movement, that were aired in 1923, with the struggle
between Alice Paul’s National Woman’s Party and Florence Kelley’s League of Women
Voters — liberals and social feminists, universalists and differentialists, arguing for equal
rights or special protectionxx. Indeed, it may be more fruitful to point out the parallels,
rather than the contrasts, between the two cultures of feminism : in the 1920s, the American
divisions have their equivalent in France, with debates among feminists on labor legislation
and the regulation of women’s work. “Equality” or “protection” ? The debate then rages in
France, as well as in the United Statesxxi. After all, the two “cultures” probably structure
both feminisms, rather than oppose them.
18
The return of difference
In addition, I would like to raise another kind of critique, based on the logic of the
argument, rather than on its historical accuracy.
Readers have often been puzzled by the
dual nature of Ozouf’s book, juxtaposing a “garland” of portraits and a lengthy essay, “les
mots des femmes,” with the author’s own reflections.
They may focus on the former, like
Lynn Hunt, or on the latter, like Bronislaw Baczko ; but they often wonder at the coherence
of the two, like Elisabeth Badinter or Michelle Perrot. I wish to argue that the two sections
of the book are indeed profoundly interrelated, and at the same time that this relation
reveals a profound contradiction.
The book opens with a sentence that introduces the author as a woman : “The
portrait of a lady is a masculine genre, in which a woman’s signature is a rare ornament.”
(7) This meditation on genre and gender offers a critique of men’s writing, and a
vindication of women’s writing : contrary to a man, “less interested in the individual’s
singularity than in her conforming to a model,” when drawing a woman’s portrait, Mona
Ozouf attempts to “restore her words and reasons” (9). The woman writing in this genre is
thus defined by a “listening intention”(“projet d’écoute” :11) : and indeed, Ozouf is a
wonderful listener — and a delightful writer. The delicate elegance of her style has even
made some readers uncomfortable : Michelle Perrot (also a great stylist) wonders about
her use of grace, both pleasing and disturbing, as if, beyond the pleasure principle, it
were the livery required for femininity, or at least, what is called that way. The
book is permeated by something like a woman’s fragrance, mixing the painter’s
scents and the models’.xxii.
The identification is even greater as the women studied in this book are also writers.
Indeed, femininity defines not only the approach, but also the subjects of this book. For
the question soon arises : why this gallery of portraits ? what is the unity underlying this
diversity ? “A thread runs through the diversity of pearls in this necklace, preventing them
19
from scattering around.” (17).
The answer is of course, beyond the heterogeneity of
women, the homogeneity of femininity.
Ozouf’s definition of femininity is offered at the end of the introduction : women are
defined by their particular relation to time. “The feminine art of time, such is the secret
they all whisper to us.” (24) How is time different for women ? For Ozouf, time may
well be “objectively discontinuous” (22) — but subjectively, continuity remains the
province of womanhood. And this gender opposition is also one between men’s actions,
and women’s traditions :
the halting time, with a succession of independent actions, the ruptured time of the
passé simple, the discontinuous tense, life starting anew every morning, such is the
time of men. The time in which women dwell, on the other hand, is a time à
l’imparfait, a continuous tense, carrying the burden of childhood, customs, and
tradition ; no woman can escape the persistant weight of the past in the present. (23)
Surprisingly, Ozouf does not try to account for this subjective difference, as she could have
quite simply, in historical terms : as a historian of education, she might have something to
say about the socialization of women, and its impact on the economy of their emotions, as
well as on the texture of their representations. But she does not explore this obvious
possibility, nor does she wish to expand her argument into a metaphysical meditation on
death, as suggested by Lynn Hunt : “But, independent of our sex, we are all subjected to
time, aging, and death.”xxiii Death is not gendered.
But Ozouf does not want to make this her main point : she clearly wishes to argue
for the specificity of women’s time, and as Baczko points it out, she chooses to naturalize
this difference :
Each portrait reveals how an individual’s fate is situated within a time punctuated by
events whose rhythm defines the personal history of women, and binds it to nature :
puberty, menstruation, motherhood, menopause.xxiv
20
This Ozouf makes even more explicit when joining the debate occasioned by her book, in
an essay aptly entitled “le compte des jours” — “counting days” :
Because of the biological clock imposing its tempo, women count days differently
than men — precisely, they count them, whereas men do not have to. Because of
the long process of making a child, women know better about patience and
duration.xxv
The common nature of men and women seems completely forgotten. This goes far beyond
the difference in feminine writing she first evoked.
It is the most radical form of
difference, that of biology, which brings Mona Ozouf close to the very “cultural feminists”
that she denounces in her book — for example, when she explains that French women find
it hard to accept the “obscurantiste” idea that “there may be some kind of a philosophy in
nursing or in a woman’s periods.” (391)
Paradox or contradiction ?
How can we account for this major contradiction, or at least paradox ? Why should
difference, despite the central argument of the book about French universalism, play such a
central role in a French reading of French femininity ? I can only think of two ways of
accounting for this puzzling problem. The first would explain it in terms of the tensions
inherent in all feminist discourse : in this case, Ozouf’s dilemma is a paradox. The second
would explain it in terms of the opposition between this book’s rhetoric, and its ideology :
in that case, what we have is indeed a contradiction. The first resolution can draw on Joan
W. Scott’s book, published shortly after and implicitly in response to, Ozouf’s : according
to her, feminists have “only paradoxes to offer.” Scott’s purpose is to deconstruct the
“equality versus difference” opposition, as she first did in a piece on Olympe de Gouges.
This case study becomes the starting point of a general reflection on the paradoxical logic
of feminism (and more generally of minority politics):
21
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.
The opposition between equality and difference, universalism and particularism, is
then understood not as a struggle between two rival ideologies, nor even between two
competing strategies, but more profoundly as a defining tension within the feminist
movement.
This is the inevitable paradox of feminists, as they operate within the
constraints of a dominant liberal discourse they claim and disown at the same time :
The history of feminism is the history of women who have had only paradoxes to
offer because [...] historically modern Western feminism is constituted by the
discursive practices of democratic politics that have equated individuality with
masculinity.xxvi
Can we apply this argument in the case of Les Mots des femmes ? It is tempting, but I
would hesitate to extend it in this direction, given the fact that Mona Ozouf does not claim
to speak as a feminist — nor is she recognized as such by feminists. Her position is
perhaps more accurately described symmetrically, as she is trying to vindicate, not
feminism, but universalism, not women’s rights, but liberalism.
The alternative argument I would like to offer insists on the specificity of this book,
not on the generality of feminist discourse.
Why should a difference of nature between
men and women matter in Ozouf’s logic ? This question is raised by the portraits, but the
answer can be found, I believe, in the essay : the two parts make one book, contradictions
notwithstanding. Throughout the essay, Ozouf argues that the French singularity is in the
preservation of a balance between “art” and “nature” : this she finds (with different
proportions, though) both in Montesquieu (332), and in Rousseau (338). Of course, the
Revolution undermines this happy harmony :
22
After the world of Montesquieu and Rousseau — accommodating art and nature —
comes a world of pure intention, in which otherness is bound to disappear.
(350-351)
But as we saw earlier, contrary to the American experience, the heritage of the Old Regime
tempered the radical climate of the French Revolution. For Ozouf, the French singularity
is thus founded on moderation — it presupposes an accommodation of nature, by contrast
to its American rejection, in the spirit of “extreme equality.” According to this model,
“l’horreur de la contrainte,” i.e. a hatred of external determinations which defines radical
individualism, is in France counterbalanced by the acceptance of nature’s law. This was
also François Furet’s argument, in a discussion of “political correctness,” and feminismxxvii
: in the light of the French Revolution, American radicalism can only be understood as a
negation of nature — and by contrast, the French model of moderation is the evidence of a
reconciliation with nature.
This is indeed an ideology of “juste milieu,” in opposition to “radicalism,” whose
political consequence is that, in matters of gender, even more than elsewhere, change
should be moderate : nature will have its way.
It explains her sympathy for the final
works of Simone de Beauvoir, well perceived by Lynn Hunt :
Even Simone de Beauvoir had to admit it : “There is in life something that eludes
culture and the act of will.”xxviii
The rejection of “extreme democracy” in the name of nature may be called either
“moderate” (as Ozouf might) or “conservative” (as her critics would). But beyond the
label, what is important is that this ideology is presented as natural, not just to the French,
but to women : the French compromise is, according to Ozouf, derived from femininity
itself — women are better armed against “the tabula rasa utopia, the arrogance of the free
will” : “In and of itself, a woman’s life is a protest against absolute artificialism.” Are
women not invested with the weight, but also the responsibility of tradition ? Hence their
historical role in education, since “the goal of education is to pass on that which has been
23
around since the beginnings of time.” Hence also their opposition to the Revolution,
which in her analysis is due, not to culture, but rather to their nature :
women’s resistance to the Revolution is not so much a religious resistance as a
resistance to a revolutionary temporality that denies descent (filiation).
This is why Ozouf herself defines “the feminine conscience of time” as spontaneously
Burkean” : women are naturally conservative xxix. Here is the crux of the contradiction
between the book’s implicit ideology, and its explicit rhetoric. The ideology relies on the
naturalization of gender, whereas the rhetoric is based on the nationalization of gender : the
former requires the embodiment of difference, the latter abstract universalism. According
to Mona Ozouf, in a word, the nature of femininity is difference, while Frenchness is
essentially universalist.
The rhetoric of national character
The last question remaining is then : why should Mona Ozouf resort to the rhetoric of
national character, when it collides with the logic of her ideology ? Why use a language
that does not fit the underlying message ? If this is a contradiction, as I have argued, and
not a paradox, it cannot be explained internally, as a dialectical process. The argument,
and its contradictions, must be interpreted by replacing the text in its context.
It will not
suffice to speak in her own words : the clash between rhetoric and ideology cannot be fully
understood without taking into account the historical moment that defines French
intellectual reflection on gender in the American mirror.
The first point that needs to be made is that this rhetoric of national character was
already available before the book made use of it : the transatlantic contrast has been part of
the intellectual “toolbox” (“boîte à outils”, in the historians’ lingo) for many years, but
more specifically, it has become common parlance, both in the media and in intellectual
life, at least since 1989 — the year of the Bicentennialxxx. “L’affaire du foulard” was very
24
much about Frenchness, and the “lettre ouverte” published by Le Nouvel Observateur,
with the signatures of Régis Debray and Alain Finkielkraut, but also, significantly,
Elisabeth Badinter (among others), did place the controversy under the auspices of the
Revolution. But interestingly, this national matter was immediately defined in contrast to
the United States : this was the explicit meaning of the opposition Régis Debray developed
shortly thereafter, also in Le Nouvel Observateur,
between the two political cultures
of“République” and “Démocratie” : pure abstract individualism and the radical difference
of ethnic ghettoes, “jacobinisme” and “communautarisme,” “France” and “America.”
The Americanization of the national “Other” in the media coincided with an
evolution in the rhetorical use of the United States among the French neo-tocquevillian
liberal intellectuals xxxi .
“America” had been used in the early 1980s as the positive
counterpoint to the French political experience, through the contrast of the two
Revolutions.
America was a liberal model, in so far as it provided the model of a
Revolution without the Terror, 1789 without 1793. In the late 1980s, and for example in
Raynaud’s text on “women and civility,” published in 1989 in the wake of the
commemoration of the Bicentennial, America became a negative countermodel to the
French social experience. This was a shift in the direction of the second volume of
Tocqueville’s Democracy in America : the emphasis was now on the perils of “democratic
passions,” the radical egalitarianism of “extreme democracy” — “the American utopia”
(Furet) and “the tyranny of minorities” (Raynaud).
This provided the intellectual
framework with which to analyze “political correctness,” multiculturalism, and also
feminismxxxii.
For the beauty of this contrast between national political cultures is that it could be
applied to very different objects : indeed, the national model had been devised (quite
logically) to interpret the nation, on issues such as immigration and ethnicity, but it could be
extended rhetorically to other issues. One example is that of homosexuality : Frédéric
Martel, in his book on the history of homosexuality in France since the 1960s, draws an
25
opposition between a French model of individual integration, and an American model of
communities and separatism. “Radical” activism is thus discredited in the name of a
reformist approach (for example on the issue of the Contrat d’Union Sociale, i.e. domestic
partnerships), with the help of a rhetoric of Frenchness, opposing identity politics to
abstract individualism.
How can we not see a slow process of “americanization” of French society at work
in the Gay Pride ?xxxiii
Aside from homosexuality, gender is the other major extension of the national
rhetoric — which we saw initiated both by Philippe Raynaud and Elisabeth Badinter. Not
surprisingly, the diffusion of this rhetoric is linked to the intellectual circles where it was
first developed — hence the recurrent references, throughout these pages, to Le Débat and
Le Nouvel Observateur (for example, François Furet launched “political correctness” in
France through both). In the same way, Martel, who claims the double lineage of François
Furet and Alain Finkielkraut, and resorts simultaneously to the liberal and the national
arguments, first published his polemical analysis separately from the book, as a Note de la
Fondation Saint-Simon.
The return of gender
Why should the gender rhetoric have become so inflammatory, though — as evidenced by
Jacques Julliard’s editorial this text opened with ? That the national rhetoric was already
available does not account for its now being used, especially with such passion. In order to
explain this, I suggest that we must examine two contexts : one transatlantic, and the other
specifically French.
The transatlantic context requires taking into account the circulation
of intellectuals. In the last generation, the French intellectual market has extended to the
United States : especially in certain disciplines, such as history, academic legitimacy is
confirmed, beyond Parisian circles, on American campuses. A book translation and an
26
invitation to lecture in the United States both carry weight on the French scene. But this
recognition does not always go without ambiguity, both among the French visitors and
among their American hosts : the classic French ambivalence, involving at the same time
fascination and repulsion, simultaneous admiration and condescension, is reinforced by the
current American ambivalence, as academia is torn between those who reject French
influence, and those who claim a different kind of French influencexxxiv : hence for example
Mona Ozouf’s argument about the American importance of (French) difference feminism of
the 1970s. It is common knowledge that French intellectuals coming to the United States
today find it difficult to recognize themselves in the mirror of “French theory” presented to
them on American campusesxxxv. This tension is exacerbated in the case of gender issues :
the traditional incomprehension and mutual distrust on this matter is reinforced among
intellectuals today. The reason may be that while an important body of research on gender
and sexuality, both empirical and theoretical, has developed in the United States in the last
generation, there is comparatively little on the French side. The consequence is that
French academics can sometimes be at a disadvantage, intellectually, when debating these
burning issues with American colleagues and students, as they are often called to do,
especially if they are women.
The exacerbation of passions on the issue of gender also has to do with a specifically
French context.
The insistance on the harmony of the sexes in France might not be so
great, had not the question of power relations between the sexes been raised twice at least in
recent years — both with sexual harassment in the workplace, and with “parité” in politics.
Sexual harassment became a legal and political issue in the spring of 1992, in the wake of
the Clarence Thomas hearings : the chronology is coincidental, but the reference to the
American countermodel played an important role. That same year, a book was published
calling women to power : “liberté, égalité, parité,” was the motto of Françoise Gaspard,
Claude Servan-Schreiber, and Anne Le Gallxxxvi. Although the parity issue did not reach
its broadest impact until 1996 (after Ozouf’s book), with the Manifeste de la parité
27
published
by women
politicians in
L’Express
(June 6, 1996), the political
underrepresentation of women was already an object of embarrassment in the 1993
elections : Libération’s headline read, on the occasion of the “journée de la femme” : “The
second sex has already lost.” (March 8, 1993)
Two points are particularly noteworthy.
First, in both cases, reactions among
intellectuals do not reflect public opinion. This was true in the wake of Anita Hill’s
accusations : in December 1991, the Secrétariat d’État aux Droits des femmes sponsored a
survey on sexual harassment. The resulting Louis Harris poll shows that even then public
opinion took the matter very seriously (93%), and this, not only in quid pro quo situations,
but also (70%) in a context of hostile environment (a broader definition that the French law,
contrary to European recommendations, and American jurisprudence, was not to accept) :
“the French” considered that this was a serious problem, as it had to do with justice (88%).
This means that the French condescension resented in the American mediaxxxvii had less to
do with “the French” than with French journalists and intellectuals. In the same way, the
most striking aspect of the reactions to the parity debate is the gap between elites (women
in particular) and opinion polls : 77% of the people surveyed by Ifop for L’Express in May
1996 (with no difference between men and women) favored a revision of the Constitution
allowing for parity. It is not easy to account for this gap — unless, perhaps, we apply the
logic formulated by Geneviève Fraisse when discussing the democratic exclusion of women
: exceptional women could be tolerated in the Old Regime, but as the exception was to
become the rule under revolutionary logic, it became intolerable. Could this be true today,
especially for some of the very women whose success makes them exceptions to the rule,
and who stand to lose even more than men, should their privileged situation become the
democratic norm — every woman’s prerogative ? Is this not the logic suggested by Mona
Ozouf herself, linking French universalism to social status : according to her, French
women “can feel the ghetto in any form of particularism. They would not want to owe their
28
careers and their success to a system of quotas.” (392)
Could it be a matter of career and
success, after all ?
The other remarkable point is that in both cases, the American countermodel plays a
crucial role. In 1992, even the initiators of the sexual harassment bill, such as Véronique
Néiertz (then in charge of “condition féminine” in the Socialist government) insisted on the
difference between the French and American contexts — an argument that was to be used
by Katie Roiphe against American feminismxxxviii. France was not to know the “war of the
sexes” recently revealed to the French public by Anita Hill. In 1996, when, in reaction
against the parity manifesto, Elisabeth Badinter says “no to quotas of women,” on the front
page of Le Monde (June 12, 1996), she does it by opposing yet again “our secular,
universalist republic” to the “identity politics of a democracy of quotas imported from the
United States.” Even more interesting is that the women defending parity are extremely
careful to insist on their universalism : responding to Badinter, also in Le Monde (June 18,
1996), Sylviane Agacinski-Jospin argues “that mankind is universally gendered, and
universally mixed.”xxxix The argument had already been explicitly formulated by Françoise
Gaspard and her colleagues : what they wanted, as Hubertine Auclert did,
was not that women should be represented by women, and men by men, but that
both assemblies should equally share seats between the two sexes.
This is why they did not favor quotas, more or less proportional to the importance of
women, but exact parity :
Women are neither a corporation nor a lobby. They are half of the people, half of
mankin. Half, not mre — even when, for demographic reasons, they are more
numerous than men.xl
Even in the case of parity, feminists reject the accusation of differentialism in the name of
universalism. However, is not parity becoming a third French exception in matters of
gender, along with the harmony of the sexes, and the democratic “retard” — as parity or at
least women’s quotas in politics are beginning to take shape in France, whereas (Elisabeth
29
Badinter notwithstanding) it remains not only constitutionally, but also socially and
politically unthinkable in the United States ?
The Unthinkable
The final justification for the use of the rhetoric of French character, despite the
contradictions it may occasion in Mona Ozouf’s Les Mots des femmes, derives from what
we just saw : it works. Even those who try to change the status quo, on sexual harassment
or the participation of women in politics, have to take into account the transatlantic
comparison, and must carefully avoid identification with the alleged Americanness of
feminist politicization. Rhetoric works, not only within the text (for example, in the attack
against the “pensée 68”, beyond Cixous and Irigaray, as a way of suggesting that Foucault
(389), or Bourdieu, in the final footnote of the book (397), are ultimately more American
than French in their worldview), but even more significantly beyond it. Two examples will
illustrate this. Both Michelle Perrot and Geneviève Fraisse have expressed in writing their
criticism of the book.
It is all the more interesting to see how they relate, in different
ways, to the rhetoric of national character it is based on. In order to account for the French
singularity, Michelle Perrot can thus borrow from Pierre Rosanvallon a hypothesis we are
now familiar with :
French women’s “gender-consciousness” cannot, in their individualist democracy,
reach the level or take the same forms as in American’s ghettoized society (société
communautariste).xli
In the same way, the category of “gender,” “a word that can hardly be translated into
French,” argues Ozoufxlii, has become a national issue — so much so that, when writing a
book on “la différence des sexes,” Geneviève Fraisse feels obligated to reject two notions
: both “la différence sexuelle,” which she characterizes as “a philosophical statement
specific to French thought”, and “gender or genre, a philosophical position of American
30
origin.”xliii Avoiding “gender” altogether seems to be the only way to avoid being caught
in the rhetoric of national character. The nationalization of gender is thus a powerful
rhetoric, in that, while the constant transatlantic contrast implies that America has become,
once more in France, “bonne à penser” (to borrow a phrase from Claude Lévi-Strauss), at
the same time, it makes certain notions, such as “gender,” literally unthinkable.
I would argue that one reason this rhetoric has now become so powerful is that the
definition of gender within national cultures, that is within specific social, historical, and
political contexts, is not the object of as much serious study as it should be. My argument
is not, ultimately, that one should not discuss “gender” and “national cultures” in the same
breath, but on the contrary, that these links have to be studied in greater detail — and in a
different light.
In order to avoid the traps of culturalism, two critical principles should
always be maintained when discussing culture : culture is to be understood both historically
and politically. First, gender is not only a category that we must apply to history ; it is also
a category that we should (and here Foucault, whether French or American, may help)
historicizexliv. Second, this historical approach to the national context of gender should
always be understood in political terms — culture is what is at stake in a society ; hence the
advantage of starting from polemics, rather than consensus about genderxlv. In the light of
these two principles, it becomes clear that culture is not that which explains, but that which
must be explained. This is why this text should be read merely as preliminary intellectual
hygiene : it is only meant to emancipate academic work (such as mine) from the rhetoric in
which it can all too easily, though involuntarily, flounder — as the rhetoric of national
character confirms our illusion that “Frenchness” explains France, and Americanness the
United States.
This hygiene is indispensable today in France : for the ultimate paradox is
that gender is now both omnipresent, and unthinkable.
Gender in France may be similar
to Poe’s purloined letter : invisible, although or rather because it is obvious, all the better
hidden from our view for being in full sight.
31
NOTES
:
i . Judith Ezekiel, “Anti-féminisme et anti-américanisme : un mariage politiquement réussi”, Nouvelles
Questions Féministes, vol. 17 (1995, 1): 59-76. I discovered her article after finishing mine ; it includes
useful background on the previous generation’s anti-Americanism, in particular with the group “Psychanalyse
et Politique”.
ii.
See for example Joan DeJean, “Exporting America : Can ‘Sexual Harassment’ Exist in France ?”, French
Politics and Society, vol. 11 (Summer 1993, 3). Quotations : passim, pp. 47-57. And my earlier critique :
Éric Fassin, “Dans des genres différents : le féminisme au miroir transatlantique”, Esprit (November 1993,
11) : see in particular page 103 : “Defining culture as a prisonhouse from which one cannot escape raises
problems. First, because Joan DeJean’s perspective mirrors Elisabeth Badinter’s : for better of for worse,
France is still defined as an exception. Paradoxically, the exogenous critique converges all too well with
native clichés : the French do not mind picturing themselves as ‘Gallic,’ and the denunciation of feminist
‘Puritanism’ is no less popular in the United States.” Le droit de cuissage has recently been studied in two
books — as myth, by Alain Boureau, Le Droit de cuissage : la fabrication d’un mythe, XIIIe-XXe s., (Paris,
1995, and as fact, by Marie-Victoire Louis, Le Droit de cuissage : France, 1860-1930, éd. de l’Atelier, Paris,
1994.
Geneviève Fraisse offers reflections on the polemical articulation between the two levels
(representation and reality) in a short, but illuminating article : “Droit de cuissage et devoir de l’historien”,
Clio, 1996, 3, pp. 251-261.
iii.
Mona Ozouf, Les Mots des femmes, essai sur la singularité française, Fayard, Paris, 1995. Some of the
reactions are to be found in a dossier published by Le Débat : “Femmes : une singularité française ?” (n°87,
November - December 1995). It includes contributions from Bronislaw Baczko, Elisabeth Badinter, Lynn
Hunt, Michelle Perrot, Joan W. Scott, and Mona Ozouf. (Scott’s question I have translated from her essay in
this dossier, p. 139). The “nationalization” of feminism is not exactly a novelty : the French fascination with
American feminism in the 1970s and the American fascination with French feminism in the 1980s prepare the
ground for the misunderstandings of the 1990s.
iv.
Diane Johson, Le Divorce, Dutton, New York, 1997, p. 39.
32
v.
Michèle Sarde, Regard sur les Françaises, Xe-XXe siècles, Stock, Paris, 1983. Elisabeth Badinter, XY,
De l’identité masculine, Odile Jacob, Paris, 1992, p. 18 : “Les féministes américaines reprochent souvent aux
Françaises leur connivence avec les hommes. Il est vrai qu’au-delà des polémiques et des critiques qui ont
opposé hommes et femmes, la Française n’a jamais tout à fait rompu le dialogue avec son complice.”
Badinter prefers the term exception, rather than singularity, as she points out in Le Débat, loc. cit., p. 123 : “il
y a une différence. Je crois même avoir été la première à la souligner, dans XY, en parlant d’exception
française, et pas seulement de singularité française — j’y reviens dans la préface à l’édition américaine de
XY.” Clearly, “singularity” generally functions as a mere euphemism : French exceptionalism is the real
issue. In this text, and given this context, I shall use the two words interchangeably.
vi.
vii .
Michelle Perrot, “Une histoire sans affrontements, Le Débat, loc. cit., p. 134.
Philippe Raynaud, “Les femmes et la civilité : aristocratie et passions révolutionnaires”, Le Débat,
November-December 1989, n°57, p. 180.
viii.
Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America : An Interpretation of American Political Thought Since
the Revolution, Harcourt, Brace and Company, New York, 1955, p. 5.
ix.
Marc Fumaroli, “La conversation”, Les Lieux de mémoire, Pierre Nora ed., reprinted in Trois Institutions
littéraires, Gallimard, Paris, 1994.
x.
See the “afterword” Geneviève Fraisse wrote for the new edition of Muse de la Raison : Démocratie et
exclusion des femmes en France, Gallimard, Paris, 1995, pp. 340-341.
xi.
Pierre Rosanvallon’s argument is to be found, in a short version, in Femmes et histoire, Georges Duby and
Michelle Perrot eds., Plon, Paris, 1993, “L’histoire du vote des femmes, réflexion sur la spécificité française”
(quotations pp. 81-86, passim), and in greater detail in his book, Le Sacre du citoyen : histoire du suffrage
universel, Gallimard, Paris, 1992, part I, chapter 2 (“l’individu autonome”), and part III, chapter 3 (“le travail
de l’universalisation”).
xii.
Geneviève Fraisse, “Sur l’incompatibilité supposée de l’amour et du féminisme”, Esprit, May 1993.
xiii.
Joan W. Scott, in Le Débat, loc. cit., (136-137) mentions several.
xiv.
Jon Wiener, Professors, Politics, and Pop, Verso, New York, 1991.
33
xv.
For a detailed discussion of the logic of these misreadings, see my article : “Le date rape aux États-Unis :
Figures d’une polémique”, Enquête, 5 (1997) : 193-222, in particular 208-216.
xvi.
True, Ozouf implies that when “Friedan talks about daycare, maternal salary, health benefits,” (392), she
is in fact pleading for special rights — thus behaving in a “typically” American fashion. But surely these are
not women’s rights, but social rights (men too have children): they are in fact, on the contrary, what makes it
possible for women, in Rosanvallon’s model, fully to become individuals.
Ozouf confuses “concrete”
problems with “specific” ones, “pragmatism” and “differentialism”, i.e. two different national stereotypes.
xvii.
Geneviève Fraisse, Muse de la Raison, op. cit., 340.
xviii.
Pierre Rosanvallon, Le Sacre du citoyen, op. cit., 403.
xix .
Manuela Thurner, “‘Better Citizens Without the Ballot’ : American Anti-Suffrage Women and Their
Rationale During the Progressive Era”, Journal of Women’s History, 5, n°1, Spring 1993, 33-60, reprinted in
One Woman, One Vote, Marjorie Spruill Wheeler, ed., NewSage Press, Troutdale, 1995.
xx .
On the suffrage movement, see Eleanor Flexner (and Ellen Fitzpatrick), Century of Struggle, The
Woman’s Rights Movement in the United States, Belknap, Cambridge, 1996 (1959).
On the feminist
divisions of the 1920s, see Nancy Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism, Yale U.P., New Haven, 1987.
xxi.
On French feminism in the Third Republic, see Laurence Klejman and Florence Rochefort, L’Égalité en
marche, le féminisme sous la Troisième République, PFNSP / des femmes, Paris, 1989, and Christine Bard,
Les Filles de Marianne, histoire des féminismes, 1914-1940, Fayard, Paris, 1995, in particular p. 170 et sq.
(note the plural in the subtitle).
xxii.
Michelle Perrot, Le Débat, loc. cit., p. 130.
xxiii.
Lynn Hunt, Le Débat, loc. cit., p. 129.
xxiv.
Bronislaw Baczko, Le Débat, loc. cit., p. 123.
xxv.
Mona Ozouf, Le Débat, loc. cit., p. 145. She adds, though : “This does not imply a return to the
naturalness of women, in a tradition of essent”. But isn’t the biological clock meant to evoke just that ?
xxvi.
Joan W. Scott, Only Paradoxes To Offer : French Feminists and the Rights of Man, Harvard U.P.,
Cambridge, 1996, pp. 3-5.
34
xxvii.
François Furet, “L’utopie démocratique à l’américaine”, an interview published in Le Débat, n°69,
March-April 1992.
xxviii.
Lynn Hunt, in Le Débat, loc. cit., p. 129.
xxix.
Mona Ozouf, in Le Débat, loc. cit., p. 144-146.
xxx.
I have tried to retrace and analyze the emergence of this rhetoric in a talk presented in April 1996 at a
conference organized by the European University Institute in Florence, to be published in a volume on
multiculturalism edited by Stephen Lukes and Christian Joppke (Oxford University Press) : “Good to Think :
The American Reference in French Discourses of Immigration and Ethnicity”.
xxxi.
Jean-Philippe Mathy’s excellent study of French intellectuals and America stops short of studying this
recent political update of the “rhetoric of America” : see his Extrême Occident, The University of Chicago
Press, Chicago and London, 1993.
xxxii.
On the French reception of “political correctness,” see Marie-Christine Granjon, “Le regard en biais :
attitudes françaises et multiculturalisme américain”, and on the transatlantic mirror-game, see Éric Fassin,
“‘Political correctness’ en version originale et en version française : un malentendu révélateur,” both in a
dossier (that also includes an article by Denis Lacorne) published in Vingtième Siècle, n°43, July-September
1994.
xxxiii.
Frédéric Martel, Le Rose et le Noir, les homosexuels en France depuis 1968, Seuil, Paris, 1996, p. 406.
xxxiv.
A rare exception to this alternative is found in the series New French Thought, published by Princeton
University Press under the direction of Mark Lilla and Thomas Pavel, using “new French thought” as a
weapon against“la pensée 68.”
xxxv.
Among historians, the misunderstanding is certainly not as great, but I would still argue that the recent
volume edited by Lynn Hunt and Jacques Revel, French Histories, The New Press, New York, 1996, is an
attempt at bridging the gap.
xxxvi.
Françoise Gaspard, Claude Servan-Schreiber, Anne Le Gall, Au pouvoir, citoyennes ! Liberté, égalité,
parité, Seuil, Paris, 1992.
35
xxxvii.
For example, The Boston Globe, November 7 1991 : “France Pooh-Poohs l’affaire Thomas,” and later,
when the bill was under discussion, The New York Times, “France Rethinks its Wink at Sexual Harassment”,
May 1, 1992.
xxxviii.
Katie Roiphe, The Morning After : Sex, Fear, and Feminism on Campus, Little, Brown & Co., New
York, 1993, p. 99.
xxxix.
I cannot help but notice that the parity manifesto is dated June 6, and Agacinski’s support is published
on June 18.
xl.
Françoise Gaspard, et al., op. cit., p. 126, and pp. 166-167.
xli.
Michelle Perrot, “Où en est l’histoire des femmes ?”, French Politics & Society, vol. 12, n°1, Winter
1994, p. 56.
xlii.
xliii.
xliv.
Mona Ozouf, in Le Débat, loc. cit., p. 143.
Geneviève Fraisse, La Différence des sexes, PUF, Paris, 1996, p. 45.
I have elaborated on this idea in my essay “Politique de la critique historique : histoires de genre et de
sexualité”, delivered at the conference “Pratiques politiques et usages de Michel Foucault,” CERI, Paris,
November 1997.
xlv .
To illustrate this approach, see for example my history of the “date rape” polemic mentioned in a
previous note (15). This “politicization” of culture is not limited to polemics, though : it can be applied to
cultural phenomena more often studied in the logic of “national character” — see in particular my
complementary attempt at elaborating a political history of “dating” : “Un échange inégal : sexualité et rites
amoureux aux États-Unis,” Critique, n°596-597, January-February 1997 (48-65).