French Feminist Thought: A Reader by Toril Moi

French Feminist Thought: A Reader Reviews

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  El

  I finished this yesterday but just couldn't decide how to review it. I mean a book of essays (a "reader") is sort of like a book of poetry or collection of short stories. They're either good or bad individually, but as a whole it's sorta hard to judge. And here we're talking about something like feminism which is such a polarizing topic, even today, and most of these were written in the 70s/80s when the issue was even more misunderstood.
  
  The collection is as follows:
  
  PART I: From Simone de Beauvoir to the Women's Movement
  1. Simone de Beauvoir: Women and Creativity
  2. Anne Tristan and Annie de Pisan: Tales from the Women's Movement
  
  PART II: The Politics of Difference
  3. Annie Leclerc: Parole de femme
  4. Christine Delphy: Protofeminism and Antifeminism
  5. Julia Kristeva: Talking about Polylogue
  6. Luce Irigaray: Sexual Difference
  
  PART III: History
  7. Arlette Farge: Women's History: An Overview
  8. Elisabeth Badinter: Maternal Indifference
  
  PART IV: Philosophy and Psychoanalysis
  9. Michele Le Doeuff: Women and Philosophy
  10. Sarah Kofman: The Narcissistic Woman: Freud and Girard
  11. Michele Montrelay: Inquiry into Femininity
  
  
  All pretty interesting stuff, though of course some are better than others. I dig Simone de Beauvoir and would have liked to see more of her writing, but it's not like she's hard to find or anything. The Annie Leclerc essay was interesting, but more so only because the Christine Delphy following her was an argument against Leclerc's defense which helped put things in perspective.
  
  Most interestingly to me was PART III: History because a lot of my interests lie in that direction anyhow. Arlette Farge was particularly interesting in her discussion of women's history - what does that even mean, is it even a legitimate study, etc.

  
  Women's studies themselves scarcely paused for a moment to think about the ambiguities masked by such an attitude of tolerance: a feeling of guilt for not having thought of introducing the idea of sexual difference into history before, or clever, but token, exploitation of the theme. Some universities took pride in their women's studies in much the same way as the church used to take pride in its poor; others welcomed such activities in the name of modernity and the desire to encourage progressive ideas. At all events, such tolerance is always acceptance and not encouragement, and in this case it rapidly led to the creation of special areas, of an enclosure, established in isolation, and passed over in almost complete silence by male colleagues... No cross-fertilization or exchange: it was as if there are two absolutely separate forms of history, totally alien to each other, and with nothing to say or learn from each other. Women's studies was, in effect, indulgently cocooned, and this initial attitude had serious and sometimes negative consequences. (p137)

  
  
  Following that was Elisabeth Badinter's Maternal Difference which detailed the history of maternity and motherhood, and how in the 17th and 18th centuries most children were raised by wet nurses before coming home for a short while, and then they were sent to governesses or tutors, and then eventually boarding schools or convents. The amount of time spent with the original family was pretty short. All of this falls under the heading of child neglect since most of those children never made it past their first year anyway. Yet it continued to be a common practice.
  
  Again, all pretty interesting stuff, but then again it's stuff I've pretty much encountered before. I was hoping that I'd get a different perspective since these were written by French women holding their own women's movement throughout France, but it all felt pretty typical.
  
  But then I'm sort of feeling surly so the complaint that something "isn't French enough" is probably really weak.