Ask the Author: Lisa Greenwald
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Lisa Greenwald
I moved to France in 1986 and went looking for a university "women's center" of the kind that feminist university students had established all around the US. I couldn't find one and no one I asked seemed to know anything about it. There was a different attitude about women and their relationship to men--not all of it was bad--but it seemed to be absent the politics of feminism of which I had been so familiar in the US. I wanted to understand why.
The other reason I wrote the book is summarized in the book's introduction: "This book was written, at least in part, as a response to [a] truncated vision of French feminism that continues to hold sway in the United States. A political and intellectual history of the feminist movement in France that flourished in the 1970s, it attempts to clarify the narrative and the place of "French feminism" in France's particular history. The understanding of this vibrant movement has been stunted by a lingering belief that women philosophers and writers were the prime representatives of second-wave French feminism. This is starting to change as American scholars become interested in parity politics, but the generalization still holds true."
The other reason I wrote the book is summarized in the book's introduction: "This book was written, at least in part, as a response to [a] truncated vision of French feminism that continues to hold sway in the United States. A political and intellectual history of the feminist movement in France that flourished in the 1970s, it attempts to clarify the narrative and the place of "French feminism" in France's particular history. The understanding of this vibrant movement has been stunted by a lingering belief that women philosophers and writers were the prime representatives of second-wave French feminism. This is starting to change as American scholars become interested in parity politics, but the generalization still holds true."
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