Fighting ‘On the Side of Little Girls’: Feminist Children's Book Publishing in France after 1968

Abstract

The publishing activities of the French second-wave feminist movement are well-documented. Less attention has been focused on its attempts to imagine childhood freed from sexism. In the mid-1970s, the Franco-Italian editorial partnership ‘Du côté des petites filles/Dalla Parte delle Bambine’ fought ‘on the side of the little girls’ by publishing a new kind of children's book: politically and aesthetically subversive, and engaged in the period's major feminist debates. Tracing relationships between the publishers involved, this article illustrates how feminist campaigns helped shape new ideas on children and their culture after 1968: child-rearing was both a major point névralgique of the movement as a whole, and an issue requiring action, to provide tools for the struggle. Examining publishing practices, creative artists and books, this study reveals both the intellectual impact of the MLF activists on ideas of childhood and children's literature, and the artistic visions and new poetics they helped nurture.