Femmes Fortes

Today French women are more likely to be in salaried employment than their male counterparts, albeit being overrepresented in low-paid, part-time jobs. This chapter argues that one of the most striking cultural manifestations of these shifts in the relationship between sex and employment has been the emergence of the highly ambiguous figure of the femme forte, the strong working woman. Recent novels and films by Éric Reinhardt, Laurent Quintreau, Philippe Vasset, Alain Corneau, Natalie Kuperman, and Marie-Castille Mention-Schaar offer examples of one iteration of the femme forte – the calculating, manipulative, ruthless senior female executive whose pursuit of her career goals requires she abjure all her maternal instincts to become a particular kind of femme fatale, an updated version of Lady Macbeth or the Marquise de Meurteuil. The films, novels, and reportage of Medhi Charef, Florence Aubenas, François Bon, and Robert Guédiguian, meanwhile, offer a different, apparently more flattering iteration of the femme forte – the middle-aged working class woman who, in the face of the loss of stable male industrial employment, bravely struggles to keep family and community together, personifying an embattled tradition of working class struggle. The chapter analyses the ideological implications of these contrasting representations of the femme forte.