File spoon-archives/marxism-feminism.archive/marxism-feminism_1997/marxism-feminism.9705, message 19


From: cbcox-AT-rs6000.cmp.ilstu.edu (Carrol Cox)
Subject: M-FEM: Review of Joan Scott, _Only Paradoxes To Offer_ (fwd)
Date: Mon, 19 May 1997 12:49:48 -0500 (CDT)


This message will probably not be of interest to all or most of the
members of marxism-feminism, but it may be useful to some. It was
forwarded to the list femecon-l, and I am forwarding to m-fem.

    Carrol

Forwarded message:
> From femecon-l-AT-bucknell.edu Mon May 19 12:31:54 1997
> Date: Mon, 19 May 1997 13:29:07 -0400
> From: Kevin Quinn <kquinn-AT-cba.bgsu.edu>
>
> Forwarded from another list--
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
>
>
> Date:         Fri, 16 May 1997 09:27:46 -0400
> Sender: H-Net Review Project Distribution List <H-REVIEW-AT-h-net.msu.edu>
> From: H-Net Review Project <books-AT-h-net.msu.edu>
> Subject:      Schalk on Scott, _Only Paradoxes To Offer_
>
> H-NET BOOK REVIEW
> Published by H-France-AT-vm.cc.purdue.edu  (January, 1997)
>
> Joan Wallach Scott, _Only Paradoxes To Offer: French Feminists and
> the Rights of Man_.  Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
> 1996. xiii + 229 pp.  Notes, bibliography, and index.  $27.95
> (cloth), ISBN 0-674-63930-8.
>
> Reviewed for H-France by David L. Schalk, Vassar College
> <schalk-AT-Vassar.edu>
>
> Those of us who have read and re-read, often assigned, and long
> admired Joan Scott's prize-winning first book, _The Glassworkers of
> Carmaux_ (Harvard University Press, 1974), may have been surprised
> to see her carve out a reputation as a leading feminist historian.
> One might have expected her to have become an eminent social
> historian, probably focusing on the development of the modern
> industrial labor force.  I went back and checked the index of
> _Glassworkers_, and there is only one woman listed, the early
> socialist organizer, Paule Minck.  Minck is cited strictly for her
> political role in introducing socialism to Carmaux in 1882. Indeed,
> the word "feminism" does not appear in the index of _Glassworkers_.
>
> Social history's loss is feminist history's gain, and Joan Scott has
> given us a book of extraordinary brilliance and lucidity.  It is
> carefully structured, with a theoretical introduction, four
> substantive case studies that move effortlessly back and forth
> between theory and praxis, and an illuminating conclusion discussing
> the condition of Frenchwomen and of French feminism since women
> began to vote and to hold office in 1945 (though, and this is part
> of the paradox, their parliamentary representation has always been
> very small, even minuscule).
>
> This work is a model of theoretically informed scholarship, setting
> up its arguments with clarity and concision. Scott has acquired an
> amazing command of the most abstruse theory, a command that a
> professional philosopher might well envy--and ought to imitate--in
> that she makes complex theoretical points with such precision and
> elegant simplicity that the layperson can follow her arguments
> without difficulty.  On several occasions after reading a
> particularly succinct and luminously clear theoretical formulation,
> I went to her footnotes to see what philosopher she was relying on
> at that point in her argument, and found a reference to the
> notoriously indecipherable Jacques Derrida!
>
> Joan Scott lays out the central paradox she is determined to examine
> (but not resolve, since technically a paradox is unresolvable) so
> concisely that I quote it here:
>
>         Feminism was a protest against women's
>       political exclusion; its goal was to eliminate
>       'sexual difference' in politics, but it had to make
>       its claims on behalf of 'woman' (who were
>       discursively produced through 'sexual difference').
>       To the extent that it acted for 'women,' feminism
>       produced the 'sexual difference' it sought to
>       eliminate.  This paradox-the need both to accept
>       and to refuse 'sexual difference'--was the
>       constitutive condition of feminism as a political
>       movement throughout its long history (pp. 3-4).
>
> On one level Scott's book is a history of nineteenth- and
> twentieth-century French feminism, an always interesting, often
> moving account of the efforts of a series of brilliant, energetic,
> determined French women to acquire political rights.  None of her
> principal characters lived to see their primordial goal of suffrage
> realized.  Scott's most recent subject, Madeleine Pelletier, died in
> 1939, five years before the Committee of National Liberation, then
> based in Algiers, issued an ordinance enfranchising women. Hence one
> of the key questions Scott addresses in her work (subsumed under the
> generic or all-encompassing paradox discussed above), is to explain
> the "repetitious quality of their Ythe feminists" actions" (p. 3).
>
> Joan Scott began her project with a study of Olympe de Gouges, who
> in a statement of 1788--describing herself as a "woman who has only
> paradoxes to offer and not problems easy to resolve"--provided Scott
> with her marvelous title.  As is well known, the elusive and
> imaginative but obviously in the end deadly serious de Gouges paid
> with her life in 1793 for her early feminist writing and political
> action.  Scott's discussion of de Gouges is subtly combined with a
> concise articulation of the beginnings of feminism in France.  After
> completing her study of de Gouges, Scott decided to continue the
> "deconstruction of the 'equality versus difference' opposition," and
> "began to think about which other feminists... Yto" include in such
> a book" (p. xii).
>
> I would have been fascinated to know a little more about Joan
> Scott's thought processes, and why she made the choices she did.
> After de Gouges, who is deservedly a central figure whom one could
> not imagine ignoring, Scott decided to write about Jeanne Deroin,
> Hubertine Auclert, and Madeleine Pelletier. Did she select these
> three remarkable feminists because of the threads that join them?
> Jeanne Deroin explicitly and consciously linked her political
> activities in 1848 with Olympe de Gouges's campaign for women's
> rights during the first Revolution and Republic.  Hubertine Auclert
> admired Deroin and wrote to her in London in 1886, where Deroin had
> been living in exile since 1851. Pelletier in turn was involved with
> Auclert, joining with the older woman in militant suffragist action,
> invading polling places in 1908.  I rather suspect that different
> threads leading back to Olympe de Gouges and forward to the
> twentieth century would be found with a different sequence of
> feminists.
>
> Why, for example, did Joan Scott decide _not_ to write about Flora
> Tristan, Louise Michel, and Maria Verone, to take another remarkable
> and roughly synchronous trio?  And if Joan Scott had picked my
> alternative trio, could their private experience and public action
> be "read" according to Scott's theoretical model, which works so
> well for the case histories she selected?  I rather think they
> could, but would be most interested in Scott's view..
>
> Joan Scott's concluding chapter, "Citizens but Not Individuals: The
> Vote and After," helps us understand why Claude Servan-Schreiber
> could claim in 1992 that essentially nothing had happened for women
> since the granting of suffrage.  Scott begins by listing a series of
> reasons, each of them convincing, as to why the Free French
> government in exile of General de Gaulle decided to enfranchise
> women in 1944.  I would simply add one reason to round out the
> explanation.  How could full civil rights be denied to those who had
> shared in the trauma and pain of the Occupation and so willingly
> joined the Resistance?  Though the particular case I mention below
> could not have been known when the decision to grant suffrage was
> made, many others were.
>
> In Dijon on a comfortable stone school building on
> the rue Condorcet (coincidentally the only Enlightenment figure who
> was a feminist, a friend of Olympe de Gouges, and like her a victim
> of the Terror), one may read the following plaque:
>
>                _Lycee Marcelle Parde
>
>                Honneur et Patrie
>
>                A la memoire de Marcelle Parde
>                Directrice du Lycee (1935-1945)
>                Et de Simone Plessis sa Secretaire
>                Officiers des Forces Francaises Combattantes
>                Deportees en Allemagne et Mortes a Ravensbruck
>                (janvier 1945-mars 1945)
>                Un pays vit tant que ses enfants
>                sont prets a mourir pour lui._
>
> I would hope that Joan Scott's marvelous book will soon be
> translated into French, so that the current generation of students
> at the Lycee Marcelle Parde, and many others, both men and women,
> will have a better understanding of the "reasons for the
> intractability of the dilemmas YFrench" feminists have confronted
> and for the necessarily paradoxical responses to them they continue
> to have" (p. 174).
>
>      Copyright (c) 1997 by H-Net, all rights reserved.  This work
>      may be copied for non-profit educational use if proper credit
>      is given to the author and the list.  For other permission,
>      please contact H-Net-AT-h-net.msu.edu.
>
> --- end forwarded text
>
> *********************************************
> Linda Lopez McAlister, Editor, HYPATIA; Listowner SWIP-L; Chair
> Dept. of Women's Studies, University of South Florida, Tampa.
> Tel. 813-974-0982/FAX 813-974-0336/mcaliste-AT-chuma.cas.usf.edu
>
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
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