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Beauvoir and Her Sisters investigates how women's experiences, as represented in print culture, led to a political identity of an \"imagined sisterhood\" through which political activism developed and thrived in postwar France. Through the lens of women's political and popular writings, Sandra Reineke presents a unique interpretation of feminist and intellectual discourse on citizenship, identity, and reproductive rights._x000B__x000B_Drawing on feminist writings by Simone de Beauvoir, feminist reviews from the women's liberation movement, and cultural reproductions from French women's fashion and beauty magazines, Reineke illustrates how print media created new spaces for political and social ideas. This sustained study extends from 1944, when women received the right to vote in France, to 1993, when the French government outlawed anti-abortion activities. Touching on the relationship between consumer culture and feminist practice, Reineke's analysis of a selection of women's writings underlines how these texts challenged traditional gender models and ideals._x000B__x000B_In revealing that women collectively used texts to challenge the state to redress its abortion laws, Reineke renders the act of writing as a form of political action and highlights the act of reading as an essential but often overlooked space in which marginalized women could exercise dissent and create solidarity.

This study examines recent French bioethics laws governing the uses of new reproductive and genetic technologies (NRGTs)—including in-vitro fertilization, surrogate motherhood, prenatal diagnostics, sex selection, and cloning—in light of feminist claims to women's rights, especially a woman's right to reproductive freedom. To this end, the study explores two interrelated questions: First, to what extent have French feminists supported NRGT development and treatment? Second, to what extent do French national bioethics debates, laws, and policies reflect feminist reactions to NRGTs? The investigation of these questions is informed by recent theories of state feminism that show how national policy debates are gendered by particular sets of feminist ideas, and how policy choices resulting from these debates turn some of these ideas into law (McBride Stetson and Mazur 1995). Some of the most pressing feminist concerns in this area include women's loss of control over their bodies and fertility, women's exploitation and commercialization of their bodies, and women's health risks from NRGTs. The analysis of pronouncements by French feminist writers, researchers, and policy-makers reveals a multiplicity of feminist stances on NRGTs, showing keenly how feminists contest what constitutes effective feminist public policies to illuminate the fact that these policies are subject to shifting political contestations, rather than the reflection of a fixed set of feminist ideas. While contemporary French feminists grapple with the potential merits and dangers of NRGTS, the study shows that feminists generally seem to support NRGTs, as long as French law protects women's reproductive autonomy. Seen in this light, France's strong sense of the right to procreate through facilitation of access to NRGTs is not a contradiction of France's strong social and legal support for women's reproductive freedom, but rather enables French lawmakers to regulate NRGTs more effectively.

BEFORE I TURN TO ANALYZING how three specific types of women’s writing—high feminist literature (chap. 2), popular women’s magazines (chap. 3), and feminist reviews (chap. 4)—helped create an alternative social space for women to gather information and exchange experiences about female sexuality and reproductive rights in postwar France, this chapter will provide important historical and contextual background information. This information will help in understanding how the political exclusion of women based on a disembodied concept of citizenship sparked very specific political strategies by women as they attempted to rectify this exclusion. As I hope to show in the

THIS CHAPTER EXAMINES how the French philosopher and novelist Simone de Beauvoir complicated and worked through projections of female corporeality in two of her major works,Le Deuxième sexe(1949) andLes Belles images(1966). My reading of these works presents Beauvoir as a feminist critic of French postwar consumer culture who forcefully wove together analysis of women’s experiences with economic and social alienation and their objectification as wives and mothers. It is important to note that Beauvoir did not consider herself a “feminist” until after the publication of her major works in the 1970s, even though she had already

ON AUGUST 26, 1970, nine women trespassed at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier underneath the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, where they laid a wreath in memory of the soldier’s unknown wife. (They had chosen this date because it marked the fiftieth anniversary of women’s right to vote in the United States.) Although the women were immediately arrested by the police, the media grasped the symbolism of their act. The next day, the newspapers called attention to how the women had violated a major symbol of French nationalism, referring to them as the women’s liberation movement (MLF). Arguably, this

IN NOVEMBER 1970, the women’s magazineEllestaged 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 toEllereaders 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

This dissertation examines a selection of postwar women's writing to investigate how women reacted to persisting political and social inequalities after they acquired full active citizenship in 1944. In particular, this study is concerned with one of the most striking examples of continued repressive state laws, that is, abortion laws which denied women the right to control their own bodies, a right included in the liberal-republican ideal of citizenship. To this end, the study analyses three types of political writing—high feminist literature, mass cultural texts, and feminist reviews—to show how women's writing creates a politically potent community for women, which I have called “imagined sisterhood.” My main point throughout the study is that this alternative social space represents and promotes women's collective political agency, despite women's continued political marginalization in postwar French public culture. Through analysis of the symbolic representations of women and their bodies in these texts, I show how personal experiences of the body related to sexuality and reproduction are central to postwar women's activism. In fact, women's corporeality represents something very unique and historically specific to postwar gender politics. I argue, thus, that women's political activism, or the politics of sisterhood, constitute an historically unique expression of French feminism, as women demanded, for the first time, equal rights based on their corporeal difference from men. Exemplified is this effort in the struggle for reproductive freedom, in which women collectively challenged the French state to abandon its laws criminalizing abortion and to recognize women's rights. It is in this way that an analysis of the politics of sisterhood contributes to our understanding of women's political activism, an issue so far undertheorized in the field of democratic theory.