Daughters of 1968: Redefining French Feminism and the Women's Liberation Movement by Lisa Greenwald

Author:Lisa Greenwald
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Women's Studies, Europe, European, World, Political Science, France, POL058000 Political Science / World / European, Social Science, HIS013000 History / Europe / France, History, SOC028000 Social Science / Women's Studies
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Published: 2019-01-01T00:42:35.264000+00:00

“I Myself Am the Material of My Struggles”

Antoinette Fouque’s work also belongs to the category of “women’s writing,” but Fouque is a case apart for a few reasons, among them that she has only a very small body of writing that is definitely attributable to her, that she functioned more as a publisher than as a writer, and that she was intensely engaged in the debate over the term feminism.58 Fouque and Psych-et-Po took part in the publishing ferment of the second half of the 1970s; her comment in an interview—“my ‘historical’ ambition as woman: I myself am the material of my struggles,”—defined both her personal and professional activities.59 By early 1975 her group had launched the first attempt to publish a daily newspaper of the women’s liberation movement. Quotidien des femmes survived for two years but never managed to make the leap to daily publication. The difficulties it encountered taught its publishers how much money and work such a venture required, but, difficulties notwithstanding, the Quotidien did give Psych-et-Po space to develop its positions. It tried to adopt the broadest possible interest in women and their movements for liberation, printing at least as many articles on women’s struggles around the world as on those in France. The sentence “This edition was composed, written, fabricated by colonized, menaced, imprisoned, struggling women in all countries” was emblazoned under the masthead of many issues of the Quotidien. “In South Vietnam, Women Chase the Rapists from the Land,” was the cover story of issue number 3, while numbers 5, 6, 7, and 9 published protests against Franco’s repression of political dissenters in Spain—in particular Eva Forrest, whose prison journal and letters of appreciation to her women supporters the Quotidien quoted at length. The Quotidien was a different kind of journal, published regularly (although not daily as the title implied) and printed on glossy paper and with large print runs. It was Psych-et-Po’s mouthpiece and an important place to lay out its ideology of antifeminism which, for a while, was Fouque and Psych-et-Po’s calling card—it stood out from the cacophony of voices and attracted media attention.60

The connection between Fouque’s business and her politics was close and brought more attention to women’s issues while garnering more visibility and sales for the publishing house. It blurred the line separating it from its readers by speaking about the collective process of creating the newspaper and its liberating potential, and it blurred lines between Fouque’s own personal journey and public writing with her claim that she was the “material of her struggles.”61 “Women’s relation to writing is the most fundamental problem of the women’s struggle,” Fouque commented. “Women—people without writing—absent from history, have entered in the struggle. We are in a tactical, political, and historical need to publish as a matter of priority, and exclusively women’s texts.” Writing women into history (discursively) and into themselves (symbolically) were twin objectives of the Quotidien. “I was as greedy to read as to eat food that would never fill me, . .

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