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1965, French women required their spouse’s
permission to hold down a job, open a bank
account and dispose of property. Additionally,
and perhaps more importantly, because contra-
ception did not become legally available until
1967 and the right to abortion was only ac-
corded in 1975, French women of the postwar
era had little control over their sexuality and
their reproductive processes.
The 1950s and 1960s saw the publication
of a good many female-authored works of
French literature. A number of these texts, writ-
ten by authors such as Françoise Mallet-Joris
and Benoîte and Flora Groult and intended for
an exclusively feminine readership, offer a some-
what tame account of the realities of French
women’s lives. Others, however—
unsurprisingly, given the sociosexual climate
within which they came into being—envision
the feminine condition in a more honest, and
less positive, fashion. This latter category of texts
includes works by women authors such as
Simone de Beauvoir, Marguerite Duras, Claire
Etcherelli, Violette Leduc, Christiane Rochefort,
Albertine Sarrazin and Françoise Sagan. In their
writings—which range from the exclusively fic-
tional to the directly autobiographical, and pre-
dominantly belong to the realist genre—these
écrivaines represent the condition féminine ei-
ther as resting on a desperate chasse à l’amour
that brings dependency in its wake and/or is
rarely permanently satisfied (see the prose fic-
tions of Beauvoir and Sagan, and the autobio-
graphical writings of Leduc), or as a deeply ac-
culturated mode of being that offers little chance
of escape from pre-ordained roles (see Sagan,
Beauvoir, Rochefort and Duras’s Moderato
Cantabile), or as a form of second-class citizen-
ship equivalent, or even inferior, to that enjoyed
by the socially marginal (cf. Etcherelli’s Elise,
or the Real Life (Élise, ou la vraie vie), or as a
state that is so generally unsatisfactory that it
impels the female subject into various forms of
revolt (see the autobiographical works of
Sarrazin and Leduc). It is certainly the case that
the more insightful female-authored literary
creations of the 1950s and the early to mid-
1960s offer depictions of the feminine condi-
tion that can be categorized as more or less
‘feminist’. However, their ‘political’ impact is
limited, by virtue of the fact that they tend sim-
ply to signal the negative aspects of women’s
lives (in order implicitly to highlight and cri-
tique their sources/causes), and generally hesi-
tate to offer radical solutions or imagine alter-
native ways of female being.
In the wake of May 1968, the French femi-
nist movement—largely quiescent during the
1940s and 1950s, in spite of the publication
in 1949 of de Beauvoir’s Second Sex—received
a new lease of life. One of the consequences of
its renascence, and of the sociosexual upheav-
als that hit France in the 1970s, was a kind of
feminine re-entry into, or remoulding of, the
sociosymbolic champ culturel (cultural arena).
This phenomenon, argues Marcelle Marini,
was made possible by the supportive, creative,
female-centred ‘space’ the Mouvement de la
Libération des Femmes allowed women writ-
ers and artists to access in the post-1968 pe-
riod (Marini 1992).
During the 1970s, a new generation of
écrivaines, inspired by the revolutionary times
in which they were writing and also, in certain
cases, by a burgeoning body of French femi-
nist theoretical work, brought into being a
corpus of literary texts which tended to the
experimental, the poetic and/or the highly per-
sonal, and within which their own preoccupa-
tions as women subjects were manifestly—and
courageously—on display. Produced by the
likes of Hélène Cixous, Chantal Chawaf,
Jeanne Hyvrard, Christiane Rochefort, Emma
Santos, Monique Wittig and Marie Cardinal,
these texts addressed themes such as desire,
eroticism, sexuality, sexual difference, bodily
being, feminine relationships, madness, and the
alliance of language and patriarchy. Often, in
terms of their stylistic and linguistic composi-
tion, they departed from traditional or con-
ventional literary forms—a phenomenon
which has encouraged contemporary (feminist)
literary critics to categorize the works of
Cixous, Chawaf, Hyvrard and even Cardinal
as exercises in, and affirmations of, a kind of
écriture féminine (an avant-garde writing mode
deemed to be feminine-gendered, and to relate
in some way to the female body). In addition,
women’s/lesbian writing