Paris, Alain Moreau, 400 pages.
This book is a very dense essay on the history of feminism, from Antiquity to the beginnings of the American and French Women’s Liberation Movements. Françoise d’Eaubonne analyzes these “primordial historical facts” which are “phallocratism, sexism, then feminism”. Based on a very wide variety of references (psychoanalytical, anthropological, historical, literary, etc.), she analyzes both how sexist discrimination has been developed and maintained through the centuries and countries, and how much women have always tried to rebel against it – although their revolts were suppressed by various means. Incidentally, Françoise d’Eaubonne exposes the extent of the work carried out by her predecessors, retracing the cultural history of Western feminism – especially, but not only, centered on the French case – offering extracts from speeches or works and commenting on them. It is a book that tells the story of feminist revolutions, of their successive failures and repressions to to the advent of the MLF (the Feminist Liberation Movement). (Aurore)