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

Conclusion

wu Conclusion My main point in writing this study was to show how women’s writing has contributed to feminist political contestations that have challenged the abstract concept of citizenship to include women’s rights in postwar France. The feminist political contestations I examined are exemplified in the political struggle for reproductive freedom, in which women collectively challenged the French state to abandon its laws criminalizing abortion and to recognize women’s rights. As my analysis of three different types of women’s writing—elite feminist theory, women’s magazines, and feminist reviews— shows, feminist political contestations still produce ambivalent images of women’s identity. Throughout this study, one of my main efforts has been to show how the female body is used as a key political site in the production and reproduction of such ambivalent and contradictory images of women’s identity in both dominant and feminist discourses. On the level of elite feminist theory, for instance, Simone de Beauvoir’s attitudes toward the female body revealed deep ambivalences, such as her assessment of the female body as a “sick” and “hysterical” abject body that constitutes a handicap for women. I argue, however, that Beauvoir’s texts show how contemporaries denigrated and pathologized female sexuality and motherhood by devaluing cultural representations of the female body, and that a key aspect of Beauvoir’s literary and philosophical work remained her concern about how women experience their gendered corporeality in patriarchal culture. In her novel Les Belles images, for instance, Beauvoir underscored how patriarchal society constructs women as men’s “Other,” passive, disorderly, and unable to attain political agency, yet continuously perform- 72 Conclusion ing their prescribed feminine identity. According to Beauvoir, in order for women to attain equality with men and to escape their sexual oppression, they must first become aware of the female body as a primary locus of patriarchal power. On the basis of this consciousness, women must gain material independence from men through remunerated work at the same time that they struggle for political rights. Beauvoir’s focus on the female body as a site of sociopolitical intervention resonated within the larger women’s liberation movement in Fifth Republic France. Yet her critique of patriarchal body politics collided with the increased idealization and commodification of the female body found in the booming postwar business of mass culture, specifically women’s periodicals. Arguably, women’s magazines such as the French Elle, with which virtually every woman came into contact, promote bodily self-fashioning as part of the modern feminist project. They view the beautiful body as a liberated body. Like Beauvoir, thus, women’s magazines demonstrate a strong tension between political claims and traditional stereotypes, as the beauty and fashion advice they contain not only reproduces idealized standards of female beauty, but in fact equates femininity with consumerism. The final part of this study examines images of women’s bodies and reproductive roles in concrete terms of political activism—in this case, abortion rights—contained in some of the militant feminist reviews that developed during the height of the French women’s liberation movement. Available at meetings and kiosks as well as by subscription, these publications enjoyed a unique success with women, despite their limited circulation and short shelf life. As press organs of a larger social movement, they negotiated a social space for women between traditional feminine expectations and the promise of consumer culture. A reading of these reviews reveals women’s need for information and expression of the controversial issue of reproductive rights, drawing attention to the female body as the quintessential site of political negotiation. However, like their commercial counterparts, the reviews had to wrestle with the claims of liberal feminism, the desire to represent and speak for all women, as most of them were managed by white, middle-class women from Paris, who equated women’s bodily experiences with their own. I also hope to have shown that women’s writing created a sense of communality or “sisterhood” among French women. Despite its intrinsic limitations , this “sisterhood,” in turn, contributed to an empowered political activism in Fifth Republic France. Through the act of writing and reading such diverse materials as theoretical feminist texts, women’s magazines, and feminist reviews, women could exchange information, experiences, political Conclusion 73 opinions, and contestations with each other, which enabled them to become conscious of their shared situation in patriarchal society. It directed them to take collective...