Cette thèse porte sur les processus de constitution – problématiques – de femmes comme intellectuelles au XXe siècle. Pour ce faire, trois cas, nés vers 1900, sont étudiés : l’artiste et écrivaine proche des avant-gardes en général et des surréalistes en particulier dans le Paris des années 1920-1930 Claude Cahun, la journaliste martiniquaise du Paris colonial de ces mêmes années et figure militante et intellectuelle importante de la Martinique d’après-guerre Paulette Nardal ; et enfin Viola Klein, juive tchèque exilée en Angleterre et pionnière oubliée de la sociologie féministe. Cette étude repose sur une analyse conjointe de la trajectoire et de la production culturelle de chacune de ces femmes. Il s’agit de comprendre comment leur expérience intellectuelle s’enracine dans des processus de prise de conscience de soi en tant que sujet renvoyé à l’altérité, femme, mais aussi sujet racialisé, qui déterminent les formes d’entrée dans la pensée. Cette thèse rend également compte du positionnement complexe, dedans/dehors, de ces femmes par rapport aux mouvements (le surréalisme pour Cahun, la culture noire en général et la négritude en particulier pour Nardal), et disciplines (la sociologie de la connaissance et du travail pour Klein) « dans » lesquels elles s’inscrivent et ce qu’elles y apportent ainsi que la pluralité des formes de pensée et d’engagement qu’une telle position liminale révèle. Il s’agit enfin d’interroger le processus de diffusion et de réception des oeuvres et des idées, dans lequel les logiques d’invisibilisation et d’oubli, mais aussi de redécouverte, jouent un rôle fondamental. Ce dernier point ouvre sur une réflexion relative aux logiques (nationales, disciplinaires, idéologiques) de construction du savoir. Cette thèse, interrogeant le devenir sujet des femmes et ce que peut lui faire la postérité, se propose ainsi de contribuer à une histoire intellectuelle transnationale des femmes et du genre. / This thesis analyzes the problematic ways in which women were able to become intellectuals in the XXth century. The cases of three women, born around 1900, are here studied. The artist and writer close to the Avant-Garde in general and the Surrealist movement in particular in the 20s and the 30s Claude Cahun; the Martinican journalist of colonial Paris in those same years Paulette Nardal, an important intellectual and activist figure in Post War Martinique after 1945; and last but not least, Viola Klein, a Czech Jew, exiled in Britain, and a forgotten pioneer of feminist sociology.This study is based upon an analysis of both the itinerary and cultural production of each of these women. It aims to understand how their intellectual experience is rooted in processes of self-awareness – as subjects who have to deal with otherness, as women, but also as racialized subjects – which shape the way in which these women intellectuals come to thought and commitment. This thesis also examines the complex position, Inside/Outside, of these women in relation to the movements and disciplines they join (Surrealism for Cahun, Négritude for Nardal, Sociology of Knowledge for Klein), the contribution they make to these movements and disciplines, and the plurality of the forms of thought and commitment such a liminal position entails. The aim is to question the ways in which works and ideas are spread and received – a process in which “invisibilization”, oblivion, but also rediscovery play a major part. This last idea opens up a reflection about the conceptions (national, disciplinary, ideological) pertaining to the construction of knowledge.

This thesis provides the first rigorous history of the concept of midlife crisis. It highlights the close connections between understandings of the life course and social change. It reverses accounts of popularization by showing how an idea moved from the public sphere into academia. Above all, it uncovers the feminist origins of the concept and places this in a historically little-studied tradition of writing about middle age that rejected the gendered "double standard of aging." Constructions of middle age and life-planning were not always oppressive, but often used for feminist purposes. The idea of midlife crisis became popular in the United States with journalist Gail Sheehy's Passages (1976), a critique of Erik Erikson's male-centered model of ego development and psychoanalytic constructions of gender and identity more generally. Drawing on mid-century notions of middle life as the time of a woman's entry into the public sphere, Sheehy's midlife crisis defined the onset of middle age, for men and women, as the end of traditional gender roles. As dual-earner families replaced the male breadwinner model, Passages circulated widely, read by women and men of different generations, including social scientists. Three psychoanalytic experts-Daniel Levinson, George Vaillant, and Roger Gould-rebutted Sheehy by putting forward a male-only concept of midlife as the end of a man's family obligations; they banned women from reimagining their lives. Though this became the dominant meaning of midlife crisis, it was not universally accepted. Feminist scholars, most famously the psychologist and ethicist Carol Gilligan, drew on women's experiences to challenge the midlife crisis, turning it into a sign of emotional instability, immaturity, and egotism. Resonating with widespread understandings of mental health and social responsibility, and confirmed by large-scale surveys in the late 1990s, this relegated the midlife crisis to a chauvinist cliché. It has remained a contested concept for negotiating the balances between work and life, production and reproduction into the present day.