Les Mots des femmes: Essai sur la singularite francaise

Mona Ozouf starts in this book with an interesting paradox: from the ancien regime to the present, France has been regarded by its neighbors and has viewed itself as a country distinguished by its cult of women, to which a long tradition of writers, starting with Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Hume, have attributed a profound civilizing influence. Yet, except in the realm of education, in which the French state was pathbreaking in according women a significant place in the Third Republic, this prominence did not translate into equality of rights until 1945. France lagged behind such nations as Turkey, India, and Italy in conferring voting and legal rights upon women. Though France was in the 1970s the cradle of feminist theory and of a vocal feminist movement, most of today's French women, according to Ozouf, who tends to generalize freely, experience gender difference without tension, resentment, or aggressivity. How can one explain, she asks, this tranquil, even "timid" brand of feminism that seems to be specifically French?

One might expect the historian Mona Ozouf to advance an historically based explanation, outlining the vicissitudes of women's history under diverse regimes, monarchist, imperial, and republican. But she chooses a different tack, a biographical approach in the style of the literary portrait. The genre of the woman's portrait, and better yet, of the women's portrait gallery, traditionally, has been a male literary genre, illustrated in France by such eminent writers as Stendhal, Sainte-Beuve, and the Goncourts. Mona Ozouf positions her book both within this literary tradition and against it. Within it: she calls on all the resources of a remarkable literary style, replete with original syntactic constructions, unexpected metaphors, and obsolescent idioms. The result is an astonishing literary performance that holds its own with those of her literary forebears by presenting riveting portraits of her subjects. From the formidable, witty, quintessentially aristocratic Marquise du Deffand, the unconventional and independent Dutch-born Madame de Charriere, the passionately revolutionary Manon Roland, the peaceful Madame de Remusat, on to the women who defied society's anathema against women writers and righters in the 19th century, Germaine de Stael, George Sand, and the suffragette Hubertine Auclert, and, in a stark contrast, Colette, the apologist of sensual pleasures, opposed to the self-sacrificial social and political activist Simone Weil, and, finally, the acclaimed feminist theorist Simone de Beauvoir, Ozouf produces a rich array of characters, personalities and lives in which to track ways in which French women experienced, conceptualized, and problematized femininity over the centuries.

Ozouf also claims to position herself against the tradition of male women's portraiture, opposing Diderot's advice to writers on the female sex to "dip their pen in the rainbow and cast on the line they trace the dust of butterfly wings." She claims to eschew essentializing male constructions of femininity and instead to restore to these women's lives the tone of their own voices. She interrogates their personal writings (memoirs, correspondences, diaries) in regard to the perennial "women questions:" attitudes towards the self, education, marriage, motherhood, sex, society, nation, work, and equality of rights, as well as the dilemma of writing in a world hostile to female authorship. It would, however, be an error to believe that, writing as a woman, Ozouf is more sympathetic to the cause of these women than her male predecessors. One of the main objections her book may encounter is that her portraits are just as slanted as theirs. For example, she dwells with almost perverse pleasure on the proud and old Marquise du Deffand's girlish, self-demeaning subjugation to the whims and self-interest of Horace Walpole. She conducts a scathing critique of Beauvoir on many fronts, highlighting in this "future apologist of engagement"(p. 313) a shocking indifference to the war, comparing Beauvoir's writing to Henry James's, "minus the genius," unmasking numerous instances of Beauvoir's "bad faith" and "hypocrisy." Instead of focusing on Beauvoir's pioneering contribution to feminine identity and equality, Ozouf goes back to misogynist cliches, exposing the asymmetry of her lifelong liaison with Sartre, her servile subservience to Sartre's work, projects, timetable, and mistresses. At the same time, Ozouf blames Beauvoir for taking an "oblique vengeance" (p. 320) by exposing Sartre's physical degradation in stark and crude details in La Ceremonie des adieux. In such instances, the reader identifies with surprise distant echoes of so much conventional literature on women that she wonders what difference it makes that the portraitist is an enlightened woman. By privileging intimate details over public life without searching for the connections between the two, Ozouf furthermore can be accused of perpetuating the kind of "small lens history" that men often associate with women and that she herself censures in Pierre Bourdieu's statement: "what essentially constitutes women's vision, the small aspect of history ... reflected history, the public seen from the private, the domestic realm." (p. 397)