Only paradoxes to offer: French feminists and the rights of man

Abstract

When feminists argued for political rights in context of liberal democracy they faced an impossible choice. On one hand, they insisted that differences between men and women were irrelevant for citizenship. On other hand, by fact that they acted on behalf of women, they introduced very idea of difference they sought to eliminate. This paradox - need both to accept and to refuse sexual difference in politics - was constitutive condition of long struggle by women to gain right of citizenship. In this book, historian Joan Wallach Scott reads feminist history in terms of this paradox of sexual difference. Focusing on four feminist activists - Olympe de Gourges, who wrote Declaration of Rights of Woman and Citizen during French Revolution; Jeanne Deroin, a utopian socialist and candidate for legislative office in 1848; Hubertine Auclert, the suffragist of Third Republic; and Madeleine Pelletier, a psychiatrist in early 20th century who argued that women must virilize themselves in order to gain equality - Scott charts repetitions and variations in feminist history. When sexual difference was taken to be a fundamental difference, when only men were regarded as individuals and thus as citizens, how could women also be citizens? The answers feminists offered to such questions are subject of this book.