Beauvoir and Her Sisters: The Politics of Women's Bodies in France

3. Citizen Consumers

wu 3 Citizen Consumers In November 1970, the women’s magazine Elle staged a unique publicity event outside Paris. The magazine’s staff organized a series of conferences or meetings, called a “Women’s General Assembly” (États généraux de la femme), with the objective to zero in on French women’s expectations for social change, and to bring their claims to the attention of the political elite. The assembly’s meetings were preceded by the distribution of some 8,000 surveys to Elle readers throughout France. Now the time had come to take stock and to discuss what, according to these surveys, French women had identified as their foremost concerns in “all areas of the female condition” (Pringle 1995, 145). Elle planned to collect and make available the conclusions reached by the attending women and invited “experts” (including politicians , academics, and social activists) in the form of a “white book” to further women’s sociopolitical rights. With this self-proclaimed aspiration for women’s emancipation, Elle wanted to give its readers (who presumably represented all French women) a voice to challenge the sexual and political inequalities between women and men that persisted in postwar France (Wadia 1991; Pringle 1995; Colombani and Fitoussi 2005). In this chapter, I explore how popular magazines for women (and men) functioned in post-1945 France as ideological sites for producing and reproducing social gender ideals and identities. Specifically, I argue that popular magazines such as the French Elle can help mediate changing societal attitudes about women’s gender roles as well as women’s experiences as political agents who vindicate and enact these changes, as exemplified by Elle’s organization of the “Women’s General Assembly” in 1970. In the case of Elle, 36 chapter 3 the magazine promoted the law on contraception as early as 1961, the laws on abortion in 1975 (the Veil law) and 1979 (the Pelletier law), the legalization of the morning-after pill in the 1980s, and political activism to redress the rise of the antiabortion movement in France in the late 1980s to 1990s (Wadia 1991, 273; Elle 1995; Colombani and Fitoussi 2005). In France, popular women’s magazines, which started to mushroom after World War II, soon became an avenue for women to engage in political activism and agency by offering them a social space in which to exchange opinions and personal experiences on a wide range of topics, including matters of sexuality and reproduction. In the pages of these magazines, women could find and read information about reproductive rights, and they could discuss their personal circumstances and experiences with reproduction through written contributions to the magazines’ letter page or readers’ forum, for instance. Following Pnina Werbner (1999, 223), I call such a discursive space an “imagined sisterhood,” a space that expresses a shared female identity and a sense of community among women.1 In this way, women’s magazines, like other types of women’s writings, helped develop the French postwar women’s liberation movement in the 1970s and 1980s. In the case of Elle, the magazine expressed its solidarity with the MLF and thereby contributed to the postwar women’s rights debate. In turn, the MLF affected French postwar gender politics in a unique way because it made reproductive freedom the central focus in its struggle for women’s equal citizenship rights. One important way in which women’s magazines contributed to women’s political activism is by creating political meaning through the act of reading. Instead of being the cultural dupes of media institutions, readers of popular magazines could seek and find not just entertainment but also guidance, including guidance on coping with patriarchal culture. Theorists such as Stuart Hall and Michel de Certeau have demonstrated the subversive nature of popular magazines and of popular culture in general (Hall and Jefferson 1976; Certeau 1984; Jenkins 1992). Ruth Rosen (2000, 313), however, has pointed to some of the limitations of popular women’s empowerment, calling the type of feminine agency cultivated in women’s magazines “consumer feminism” because it looks for individual rather than collective responses to women’s problems and because it usually ignores larger economic and social obstacles that women can face. I agree with Rosen and Berlant, who have shown how publications such as Elle conflate politics and consumerism by advancing a type of women’s empowerment that rests squarely on consumption. In this way, women’s magazines can be seen as constructing ambivalent notions of femininity, which are then imparted...