Flora Tristan was one of the earliest activists for feminism and socialism and campaigned under the July Monarchy in France. This thesis aims to highlight the relationship between feminism and socialism through the medium of Flora Tristan's life and work. It is based on a chronological study of her writings to illustrate how her egalitarian feminism developed from her personal circumstances and flourished into literature. It focuses mainly on the evolution of her ideas as she rejected both egalitarian and messianic feminism in favour of socialist militancy among the French working class. Her /- effort to insert feminism, as a high priority, into the nascent socialist movement, is closely scrutinised. In the light of more recent developments in France, the conclusion suggests that her life's work was a microcosm of the relationship between feminism and socialism as it was to develop after her death in 1844.

This dissertation is an attempt to understand how early twenty-first century French films (2000-2002) position themselves in relation to late twentieth century feminist public discourse in France. More specifically, this study will examine how cinematic narratives are modifiers of feminist debate. Four selected films are analyzed for this research: Catherine Breillat's Fat Girl (2002), Patrice Leconte's Girl on the Bridge (2000), Pascale Bailly's God is Great and I am not (2002), and Agnes Varda's The Gleaners and I (2001). The study focuses on how these four films illustrate the historical moment of the changing role of French women in society, as they move from a more private sphere to a larger public sphere. Following a renewed feminist debate in the 1990s, both male and female film directors express their ideas on this public discourse, that of the future role of women in French society. These films depict, through the narrative medium of cinema, proposals for a revised role of women, with its assets and its difficulties. Often, there is a merging of the private and public realms of the woman protagonist's life. A critical reading of each of the four chosen films for study traces the methods used by directors to depict a public debate, focusing on those techniques unique to film. This study shows the power of cinema to construct, propose, question and/or resolve potential real-life situations in relation to a historical public discourse.

The definition of one's femininity and its reflection in poetic language are two recurring issues examined by contemporary feminist critics. In their works, they consistently challenge the opinion that true poetry is essentially masculine, and that a woman poet is inevitably an inferior poet. Sylvia Plath, whose poetry represents the central subject of this thesis, could hardly be considered an inferior poet. Despite her early death, Plath's poetry continues to be immensely influential, and it tends to be adopted as an example by feminist critics who attempt to define the branch American women's poetry, reaching back to poets such as Anne Bradstreet and Emily Dickinson. From their point of view, Plath's works illustrate the fact that women's poetry has not only its history, but also its language. One may thus discover interesting parallels between the French-based concept of l'écriture féminine and Plath's poetic language. For the representatives of the l'écriture féminine movement Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva, Western discourse is phallogocentric, i.e. based on the centrality of the phallus as a primary signifier. To disrupt the traditional (masculine) discourse, they neither propose a total split between the "male" and the "female" signifiers nor do they encourage women to...

This is a creative thesis that focuses on the infertility experiences of the author. The introduction examines the author's justification for choosing personal essay as a genre and French feminism as the guiding theory in writing the essays. Six personal essays center on the author's attempts to have a child and the discoveries and failures along the way. Throughout literary history, women's bodies have traditionally been viewed from the outside looking in, as objects to be reified and preserved or exploited and used. Using the writing the body critics as a theoretical framework, the essays discuss the comforts and discomforts of being inside a female body looking out. Although personal, the essays attempt to connect to the larger world. In several of the essays associations are made between the experiences of the author and the experiences of other women. Several essays also reveal the differing perspectives between her and her husband as they experience infertility.

Despite the emphasis Proudhon placed on the significance of his ideas on women’s status within society, the patriarchal family, and the conjugal couple for his political thought, scholars of Proudhon display a tendency to bracket off Proudhon’s sexual politics from his general political philosophy. This dissertation comes to grips with Proudhon’s sexism and anti-feminism by first taking Proudhon at his word regarding its importance to his whole political project. I treat Proudhon as a strategist of patriarchal domination in the face of emerging feminist challenges and I argue that his ideas, all of them, should be examined in the light of his own claims about their relation to his anti-feminism. His was a vision of a new patriarchate in which men held full authority within their individual households and, beyond the household, freely associated and federated with each other—in other words, what Proudhon demanded was an anarchism of patriarchs. Proudhon erected the sovereignty of each man out of their absolute mastery over women and crafted mutualism and federalism in order to prevent any intrusion into that sovereignty, making apologetic readings that separate Proudhon’s revolutionary political thought from his patriarchalism difficult to accept. In addition to my engagement with Proudhon’s anti-feminism, this dissertation situates him in the context of 19th century debates around the so-called woman question in French socialism. I have chosen to directly engage with Proudhon’s feminist opponents such as Jeanne Deroin, Jenny d’Héricourt, and Juliette Lambert. On the basis of this feminist literature, this dissertation reconstructs Proudhon’s anti-feminist ideas and agenda dialogically by placing them in opposition to the women whose ideas and movement had actually motivated his writing on the subject in the first place. / Graduate / 2023-08-15

<p>French Feminism has little to do with feminism in France. While in the U.S. this now canonical body of work designates almost exclusively the work of three theorists—Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva—in France, these same thinkers are actually associated with the rejection of feminism. If some scholars have on this basis passionately denounced French Feminism as an American invention, there exists to date no comprehensive analysis of that invention or of its effects. Why did theorists who were at best marginal to feminist thought and political practice in France galvanize feminist scholars working in the United States? Why does French Feminism provoke such an intense affective response in France to this date? Drawing on the fields of feminist and queer studies, literary studies, and history, “Inventing ‘French Feminism:’ A Critical History” offers a transnational account of the emergence and impact of one of U.S. academic feminism’s most influential bodies of work. The first half of the dissertation argues that, although French Feminism has now been dismissed for being biologically essentialist and falsely universal, feminists working in the U.S. academy of the 1980s, particularly feminist literary critics and postcolonial feminist critics, deployed the work of Cixous, Irigaray, and Kristeva to displace what they perceived as U.S. feminist literary criticism’s essentialist reliance on the biological sex of the author and to challenge U.S. academic feminism’s inattention to racial differences between women. French Feminism thus found traction among feminist scholars to the extent that it was perceived as addressing some of U.S. feminism’s most pressing political issues. The second half of the dissertation traces French feminist scholars’ vehement rejection of French Feminism to an affectively charged split in the French women’s liberation movement of the 1970s and shows that this split has resulted in an entrenched opposition between sexual difference and materialist feminism, an opposition that continues to structure French feminist debates to this day. “Inventing ‘French Feminism:’ A Critical History” ends by arguing that in so far as the U.S. invention of French Feminism has contributed to the emergence of U.S. queer theory, it has also impeded its uptake in France. Taken as a whole, this dissertation thus implicitly argues that the transnational circulation of ideas is simultaneously generative and disabling.</p> / Dissertation

The period spanning from the late 1850s to the mid-1860s frames a historical moment in Victorian England when lactation and breastfeeding came under intense public scrutiny in both medical and creative writing. While popular domestic author Isabella Beeton wrote on the dangers that an unwary mother’s milk represented for her child and herself in her serial publication, Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management (1859-1861), prominent physicians C.H.F. Routh and William Acton launched a public dispute in medical journals contesting the physiological and moral dangers that the fallen wet nurse posed for the middle-class household (1859). Meanwhile, the medical community catalogued the bizarre long-term physical and dispositional side-effects of an infant’s consumption of “bad milk” – among them, syphilis, swearing, sexual immorality, and death (Matus 161-162). But it is not only medical writers who were latching on to the breastfeeding debate as a means of voicing social and political concerns of the day; recent literary critics have gestured towards the troubling manifestations of lactation in popular mid-century novels like Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son (1848) and George Eliot’s Adam Bede (1859) as entry points into Victorian anxieties about classed and gendered embodiment. This project stipulates that the mid-century preoccupation with managing women’s milk represents an intersection of two overlapping cultural paradigms pertaining to female expression: a cultural devaluation of female physiological expression as unconscious if not dangerous leakage, and a deprecation of female linguistic and poetic expression as an analogously unmeditated and potentially disruptive kind of communication. Mid-century manuals, articles, and novels offered public voice to a number of existing anxieties surrounding breastfeeding which accompanied the mid-nineteenth century, a historical moment at the cusp of a waning popularity in wet nursing and at the advent and rise of patented infant formula. This project stipulates that at least three female poets of the mid-nineteenth century employ lactation imagery in their works as a means of recasting a cultural devaluation of female expression – inventing a new critical terminology of feminine poetic signifiers that uses the symbolic medium of breastmilk as its ink. Informed by the medical and cultural context of the High Victorian age, I explore how poets Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861), Christina Rossetti (1830-1894), and Augusta Webster (1837-1894) not only participate in the preoccupation with unstable bodies and fluids, but capitalize on female leakage in an elaborate rhetorical strategy that embarks on a new embodied female poetics. Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh, Rossetti’s “Goblin Market,” and Webster’s Mother and Daughter all enlist the lactating and feeding breast in a series of elaborate metaphors of female identity construction, literary expression, and poetic voice.