Dear All:
H-Net has an excellent system of book reviews, and this is one of the
examples. I forward it here because I think the book and the review
have relevance to ECOFEM.
Best wishes,
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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Date: Fri, 16 May 1997 09:27:46 -0400
Sender: H-Net Review Project Distribution List <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
From: H-Net Review Project <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Schalk on Scott, _Only Paradoxes To Offer_
H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by [EMAIL PROTECTED] (January, 1997)
Joan Wallach Scott, _Only Paradoxes To Offer: French Feminists and
the Rights of Man_. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1996. xiii + 229 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $27.95
(cloth), ISBN 0-674-63930-8.
Reviewed for H-France by David L. Schalk, Vassar College
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Those of us who have read and re-read, often assigned, and long
admired Joan Scott's prize-winning first book, _The Glassworkers of
Carmaux_ (Harvard University Press, 1974), may have been surprised
to see her carve out a reputation as a leading feminist historian.
One might have expected her to have become an eminent social
historian, probably focusing on the development of the modern
industrial labor force. I went back and checked the index of
_Glassworkers_, and there is only one woman listed, the early
socialist organizer, Paule Minck. Minck is cited strictly for her
political role in introducing socialism to Carmaux in 1882. Indeed,
the word "feminism" does not appear in the index of _Glassworkers_.
Social history's loss is feminist history's gain, and Joan Scott has
given us a book of extraordinary brilliance and lucidity. It is
carefully structured, with a theoretical introduction, four
substantive case studies that move effortlessly back and forth
between theory and praxis, and an illuminating conclusion discussing
the condition of Frenchwomen and of French feminism since women
began to vote and to hold office in 1945 (though, and this is part
of the paradox, their parliamentary representation has always been
very small, even minuscule).
This work is a model of theoretically informed scholarship, setting
up its arguments with clarity and concision. Scott has acquired an
amazing command of the most abstruse theory, a command that a
professional philosopher might well envy--and ought to imitate--in
that she makes complex theoretical points with such precision and
elegant simplicity that the layperson can follow her arguments
without difficulty. On several occasions after reading a
particularly succinct and luminously clear theoretical formulation,
I went to her footnotes to see what philosopher she was relying on
at that point in her argument, and found a reference to the
notoriously indecipherable Jacques Derrida!
Joan Scott lays out the central paradox she is determined to examine
(but not resolve, since technically a paradox is unresolvable) so
concisely that I quote it here:
Feminism was a protest against women's
political exclusion; its goal was to eliminate
'sexual difference' in politics, but it had to make
its claims on behalf of 'woman' (who were
discursively produced through 'sexual difference').
To the extent that it acted for 'women,' feminism
produced the 'sexual difference' it sought to
eliminate. This paradox-the need both to accept
and to refuse 'sexual difference'--was the
constitutive condition of feminism as a political
movement throughout its long history (pp. 3-4).
On one level Scott's book is a history of nineteenth- and
twentieth-century French feminism, an always interesting, often
moving account of the efforts of a series of brilliant, energetic,
determined French women to acquire political rights. None of her
principal characters lived to see their primordial goal of suffrage
realized. Scott's most recent subject, Madeleine Pelletier, died in
1939, five years before the Committee of National Liberation, then
based in Algiers, issued an ordinance enfranchising women. Hence one
of the key questions Scott addresses in her work (subsumed under the
generic or all-encompassing paradox discussed above), is to explain
the "repetitious quality of their Ythe feminists" actions" (p. 3).
Joan Scott began her project with a study of Olympe de Gouges, who
in a statement of 1788--describing herself as a "woman who has only
paradoxes to offer and not problems easy to resolve"--provided Scott
with her marvelous title. As is well known, the elusive and
imaginative but obviously in the end deadly serious de Gouges paid
with her life in 1793 for her early feminist writing and political
action. Scott's discussion of de Gouges is subtly combined with a
concise articulation of the beginnings of feminism in France. After
completing her study of de Gouges, Scott decided to continue the
"deconstruction of the 'equality versus difference' opposition," and
"began to think about which other feminists... Yto" include in such
a book" (p. xii).
I would have been fascinated to know a little more about Joan
Scott's thought processes, and why she made the choices she did.
After de Gouges, who is deservedly a central figure whom one could
not imagine ignoring, Scott decided to write about Jeanne Deroin,
Hubertine Auclert, and Madeleine Pelletier. Did she select these
three remarkable feminists because of the threads that join them?
Jeanne Deroin explicitly and consciously linked her political
activities in 1848 with Olympe de Gouges's campaign for women's
rights during the first Revolution and Republic. Hubertine Auclert
admired Deroin and wrote to her in London in 1886, where Deroin had
been living in exile since 1851. Pelletier in turn was involved with
Auclert, joining with the older woman in militant suffragist action,
invading polling places in 1908. I rather suspect that different
threads leading back to Olympe de Gouges and forward to the
twentieth century would be found with a different sequence of
feminists.
Why, for example, did Joan Scott decide _not_ to write about Flora
Tristan, Louise Michel, and Maria Verone, to take another remarkable
and roughly synchronous trio? And if Joan Scott had picked my
alternative trio, could their private experience and public action
be "read" according to Scott's theoretical model, which works so
well for the case histories she selected? I rather think they
could, but would be most interested in Scott's view..
Joan Scott's concluding chapter, "Citizens but Not Individuals: The
Vote and After," helps us understand why Claude Servan-Schreiber
could claim in 1992 that essentially nothing had happened for women
since the granting of suffrage. Scott begins by listing a series of
reasons, each of them convincing, as to why the Free French
government in exile of General de Gaulle decided to enfranchise
women in 1944. I would simply add one reason to round out the
explanation. How could full civil rights be denied to those who had
shared in the trauma and pain of the Occupation and so willingly
joined the Resistance? Though the particular case I mention below
could not have been known when the decision to grant suffrage was
made, many others were.
In Dijon on a comfortable stone school building on
the rue Condorcet (coincidentally the only Enlightenment figure who
was a feminist, a friend of Olympe de Gouges, and like her a victim
of the Terror), one may read the following plaque:
_Lycee Marcelle Parde
Honneur et Patrie
A la memoire de Marcelle Parde
Directrice du Lycee (1935-1945)
Et de Simone Plessis sa Secretaire
Officiers des Forces Francaises Combattantes
Deportees en Allemagne et Mortes a Ravensbruck
(janvier 1945-mars 1945)
Un pays vit tant que ses enfants
sont prets a mourir pour lui._
I would hope that Joan Scott's marvelous book will soon be
translated into French, so that the current generation of students
at the Lycee Marcelle Parde, and many others, both men and women,
will have a better understanding of the "reasons for the
intractability of the dilemmas YFrench" feminists have confronted
and for the necessarily paradoxical responses to them they continue
to have" (p. 174).
Copyright (c) 1997 by H-Net, all rights reserved. This work
may be copied for non-profit educational use if proper credit
is given to the author and the list. For other permission,
please contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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Stefanie S. Rixecker
Department of Resource Management
Lincoln University, Canterbury
Aotearoa New Zealand
E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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