Can you tell us about your next book, just published March 8, International Women’s Day?

De l’Alcôve à l’Arène, Nouveau Regard sur les Françaises (From Alcove to Arena, a New Look at French Women) comes out of my wish to provide a follow-up to the first A Look at French Women, published in 1984 and which was widely-read. The first Look aimed at determining French Women’s specificity by questioning tradition in a comparative manner. Written under the influence of the 70’s movements and the sexual revolution, the book ended up with one question: Are there still French women in the 21st century?

This new Look, conceived at the very beginnings of this new century, was meant to respond briefly to this question by evoking the last thirty years. What I noticed during my explorations was history in the process of making itself and another revolution, which led women to invest themselves in the public sphere. De l’Alcôve à l’Arène, Nouveau Regard sur les Françaises describes the path women have followed from the private sphere to the public sphere, from the repetitive intimacy of the household to the constantly renewed challenges of the professional arena, particularly that of politics. From the alcove to the arena. This path is a global one and common to women in all democracies. But national specificities remain, in style as well as in strategies. And this book, like its predecessor, attempts to distinguish French singularity.

The work I conducted reveals an under-the-gun decoding of French society. A type of direct survey that takes an inventory of all the important recent battles fought by women or for women in France: from the PACS (Civil Pact of Solidarity1) to homosexual parenting, from prostitution to sexual violence, from professional equality to the wearing of the veil to school, from linguistic to political parity.

During this journey of the last thirty years, French women have succeeded in integrating, in a favorable way for themselves, the values of the republic from which, because they only were granted to right to vote in 1945, they had been excluded up until now: liberty via sexual liberation, equality via political parity, fraternity via mixité. But this crossing of the frontier between the alcove and the arena was particularly difficult in a society where the protection of the privacy is institutionalized by law and respected even by journalists. A society where women are more attached than elsewhere to their good relations with men, to the “gentle commerce between the sexes” inherited by the Ancient Regime and to the “rapport of seduction.”

This book describes this journey: resistance from women as well as men in favor of the status quo, French machismo, notably in political parties and as far-reaching as the Académie Française, the recent entry and still fragile status of women in politics, to the favorable debate on parity and the resulting constitutional modification. It accords special consideration to “new French women,” for the most part immigrant Muslims and gives comparable status of French lesbians to their counterparts in other democracies. The current situation in which women are in the position to win a Presidential election resembles a deus ex machina that history fabricated in order to perfect this survey and give a sense and a symbol to this journey.

Like the preceding one, this book puts a face on the women who have contributed to this march towards equality and gives a voice to a few among them, from Edith Cresson to Simone Veil, from Mazarine Pingeot to Fadela Amara. In keeping with its comparative perspective, it enumerates the strengths and the weaknesses of French-style emancipation à la française.

How do you view the quantity of work around the theme of the “feminine condition” currently being published? Which arguments, in your opinion, are the most interesting?

I haven’t read many of the books to which you refer, not because they didn’t interest me, but because they were coming out at the same time that I was finishing my manuscript and I had to stop my research at some point. But I do know most of the authors, notably from their previous work. In my book you will find a rather lengthy, albeit not exhaustive, bibliography for the period ending first semester 2006. From this list of recommended reading, I would like to bring special attention to Caroline Fourest and Fiammetta Venner, especially for their major publication (Calmann Lévy, 2004), Tirs croisés: La Laïcité à l’épreuve des intégrismes juif, chrétien et musulman (Cross-fire: Secular Society challenged by Jewish, Christian and Muslim integrisms).

Regarding those you propose: Christine Bard directed an excellent Siècle d’anti-féminisme (Century of Anti-feminism). The reputation of Alain Touraine, of course, precedes him; those of Dominique Meda or of Margaret Maruani as well. Le Livre noir de la condition des femmes (The Black Book on the Situation of Women) directed by Christine Ockrent with a preface by Françoise Gaspard is a general survey which turns its attention to the global context. Sylvaine Agazinsky has been a familiar voice in the parity debate. She is one of those who succeeded in reconciling universalism and parity against the anti-paritaires, who, like Elisabeth Badinter, insist on the binary opposition between the sexes. At the other end of the spectrum, Marcela Iacub, pamphleteteer and libertarian, has often attacked the differentialist feminists over the freedom to prostitute oneself against the natalist discourse that aims to send women back to the household and against the abusive penalization of sexual crimes. She is a talented writer and knows how to have the reader laughing with her, not at her. All feminists are divided but their very divisions have contributed to the richness of debate. The aim of my work was to listen to them and to put their positions into context, not to critique them.

You live or have lived in Chile, in the US and in France: can you compare the situation of women in these three countries?

It’s clear that French women have successfully completed the first phase of their emancipation which consisted in the 70’s of taking possession of their bodies, regulating child-bearing without systematically doing so in the context of a marriage, aligning their sexuality with that of men. They accomplished this sexual liberation while maintaining an ideal of men and women living together, even within the feminist movement itself, and in maintaining a good rapport with their men, some who accompanied these women and even preceded them in many battles. In professional terms, thanks to generous aid from the State, they have succeeded in reconciling their maternities and their activity. Their rates of fertility as well as those of their professional activity are among of the highest in Europe and they are better educated than the boys.

On the other hand, they are far away from any sort of domestic parity and their companions are much less cooperative in the home than American husbands. In professional life, as in the political arena, they hit their heads against a glass ceiling. On top of this, they have had to combat a French machismo founded on discourse including gauloiserie, sexual jokes, denigration and scorn; a degree to which neither American women (protected by the politically correct) nor Chilean women experience.

For the latter, the remnants of the military dictatorship slowed down certain measures in the private sphere (divorce has only been legal since last year and the morning-after Pill is hotly debated). On the other hand, in the political arena and contrary to stereotypes, machismo in Chili was much less apparent than in France at the level of party politics. In the last Presidential elections, two women were nominees for the Concertation (coalition of leftist and centrist parties) and one of them, Michèle Bachelet, got, as we know, the top job.

French women, who lag behind the rest of Europe in terms of number of elected officials, suffer in a political system that is unfavorable to them, due in large part to uninominal suffrage and the accumulation of terms. And it goes without saying that there is strong resistance in political parties whose members fear being supplanted by women. The success in the US of Madeleine Albright, Condoleeza Rice or Nancy Pelosi demonstrate that American women are also investing themselves in the political arena. Will they succeed better than French women? In this regard, the comparison between Hillary Clinton and Ségolène Royal will be instructive when both will have gone through their electoral tests.

Is there still an active feminism in France?

There is not one feminism but feminisms, represented by certain personalities, intellectual and academic, who take strong positions in the debates or by diverse associations that take militant action on targeted issues. The ones who have gotten the most press these last few years have been Chiennes de garde (Guard Dogs) and Ni putes ni soumises (Neither whore nor subjugated). This last group not only awakened the feminism of “new French women”, immigrant women from troubled neighborhoods, but also the historic feminisms of the Gauloises, that is to say, ‘old stock’ French women.

French feminisms are in general attached to schools of thought originating in the republican tradition and are divided among themselves. The universalists propose an equality in which difference does not exist and the differentialists propose an equality in which difference does exist, the libertarians want to align women’s freedom with that of men’s and protest against the victimization of women and the penalization of sexual crimes. The old trend which privileged class struggle over the battle of the sexes is once again gaining ground with the problematic post-colonial community issue which voices protest over the stigmatization of “Arab male youth.” And finally, queer feminism has ended up crossing the Atlantic and penetrating certain circles, notably among lesbians, who, while having not attained the same levels of visibility and recognition as American lesbians nor as their French male gay counterparts, have advanced in their fight for visibility and recognition. Generally speaking, French women, very attached to their men, have had a problem getting beyond the ancestral auto-deprecating of themselves and of others in order to invest themselves in the feminist cause and unite among themselves. We can ask ourselves, in the light of recent transformations, if this attitude is currently undergoing change.

How can the image of Colette enlighten us as to the situation of women today?

Colette is very representative of French women of a certain generation, hers, and to a lesser extent, those that followed. At ease in her body and with her sexuality, unconditional lover of men, in love with love, independent in her life and in her creativity; at the same time, not inclined to think of herself as a feminist and hostile to all types of militancy in favor of women’s causes. It’s clear she would have not joined women in their struggle to dominate the political arena on an equal basis with men. But she remains a model for women for her lack of self-devaluation of herself as well as of other women, which she described as the heroines of intimacy. And she was not a stranger to feminine solidarity. This being said, she never really left the alcove but through the recognition of her work. A universal body of work that speaks equally to men and women and helps them to better understand this “dark continent”, which feminine deportment has symbolized to men for a longtime and which is considered today by many feminists a purely cultural construction.

New york, March 2007

Translated by A. Kaiser