THE CONTEMPORARY WOMEN'S MOVEMENTS IN FRANCE AND THE USA: A PRINT MEDIA ANALYSIS (FEMINISM, UNITED STATES)

VIRGINIA LOHNER, Purdue University

Abstract

This cross-cultural comparison and contrast of women's liberation movements in the U.S.A. and in France from 1968 to 1980 is based on women's negative critique of establishment print media and the women's movement presses which developed as a result. It focuses on patterns common to both contexts without diminishing the marked differences between them. Women's deepening awareness of their oppressed status in patriarchal culture led them to speak out, to validate their experience and to begin collective analysis of the constraints which limited their choices. The women's movement press bore witness to this intense process of discovery and reevaluation. By joining reexamined experience (the testimonial voice) to the elaboration of their critical insights (stocktaking), women articulated the theoretical as well as practical understanding that would serve as the frame for developing feminist critical theory. The elucidation of feminist critical theory was a complex undertaking in both settings, and neither movement can claim to have resolved all the issues that their fundamental questioning of the status quo has raised. Yet, the two movements, facing specific problems and seeking particular solutions to them, arrived at similar insights and awareness based on their capacity simultaneously to tolerate difference and affirm commonality. In spite of their differences, they shared in a process that rejected the dualist bases of patriarchy by recognizing the legitimacy of women's knowledge and the double consciousness on which it rested.

Degree

Ph.D.

Subject Area

Womens studies

COinS