2
In what follows, I shall analyze the abortion debate in postwar France through a
critical reading of the feminist print media. Throughout, my main point is that the
postwar feminist reviews (revues) negotiated a social space for women from which they
could challenge the political system, performing what Holloway Sparks has called
“citizenship dissent” (Sparks 1997: 75).
3
Following Benedict Anderson’s suggestion that
modern print media shape our collective imagination as a political community, I argue
that the feminist reviews published by these women’s groups (called “feminist groups”
from here on) during the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s contributed to what Pnina
Wernber has called an “imaginary sisterhood” or collective feminist identity in postwar
France (Werbner 1999: 223; Anderson 1983).
4
In his study of the cultural construction of
national identity, Anderson explains how people come to identify with each other through
the shared consumption of print media, despite the fact that they don’t know each other.
The postwar French feminist print media, written by women for women bound together
by common concerns, such as sexuality and reproduction, I argue, provide “the technical
means for re-presenting the kind of imagined community” (Anderson 1983: 25, emphasis
in original) that feminists have called “sisterhood.”
5
To this end, I have organized my
study into three distinct parts. In the introduction, I shall offer some contextual
information on French women’s historical exclusion from citizenship. In the first part of
my study, I describe the development of women’s print tradition in France, leading to the
3
For a discussion of “dissident citizenship” and feminine embodied agency see also Wendy Parkins. 2000.
“Protesting Like a Girl,” Feminist Theory, Vol. 1, No. 1; and Wendy Parkins, ed. 2002. Fashioning the
Body Politic. Dress, Gender, Citizenship. Oxford and New York: Berg.
4
For the purpose of this study, I have defined “feminism” as a commitment to improving women’s lives
and to ending gender domination.
5
My use of the collective “sisterhood” is not the same as Iris Marion Young’s social group (Iris Marion
Young. 1990. “Polity and Group Difference: A Critique of the Ideal of Universal Citizenship,” in Cass R.
Sunstein, ed. Feminism and Political Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Young argues for
“group representation” based on difference in order to redress social injustice and inequality (118). The
postwar French feminist movement, by constrast, argued for “sameness” (with men) in order to fight sexual
oppression. The movement’s desire for political sameness was so strong that the identity it constructed for
women was based on a shared female culture, effacing differences of class and race (and other social
categories) among French women. Joan W. Scott’s essay “Deconstructing Equality-Versus-Difference: Or,
the Uses of Poststructuralist Theory for Feminism” (Feminist Studies 14, No. 1, Spring 1988) is a helpful
tool in understanding the persisting debate (in France and elsewhere) about whether women’s emancipation
is to be found through the achievement of equality with men or the celebration of female difference.
Convention