What War and Resistance Can Do: The Rebirth of Feminism in France, 1945–1970

Abstract:Two generations of postwar feminists constructed feminist political theory through their participation in and encounter with women’s double exploitation in World War II and the Algerian War. These two generations, together with a third born out of the events of 1968, created a feminism that was both theoretically sophisticated and intensely pragmatic. They showed the ways in which women’s sex and women’s gender were exploited by men on any side of a conflict. Men were willing to forgo their insistence that women remain in the private sphere if it meant more bombs could be planted clandestinely by using the trope of women’s “natural” roles as mothers and wives. Men were willing to defend their women as sacred to the national fabric and simultaneously torture them or strip them of rights based on their gender and national identity. By the 1970s this analysis received significant feminist support in France and a far more radical feminism was born.