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Women in the Western World

Karen Offen

Journal of Women's History, Volume 7, Number 2, Summer 1995,

pp. 145-151 (Review)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press

For additional information about this article

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Book Reviews

Women in the Western World

Histoire des femmes en Ocddent. Vol. 5: Le XXe siÃ¨cle. FranÃ§oise ThÃ©baud,ed. Georges Duby and MicheUe Perrot, series editors. Paris: Pion, 1992.644 pp. ISBN 2-259-02386-X (d); 320FF. PubUshed in English as AHistory of Women in the West. Toward a Cultural Identity in the TwentiethCentury. FranÃ§oise ThÃ©baud, ed. Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Pressof Harvard University Press, 1994.713 pp.; Ul. ISBN 0-674-40374-6 (d);$29.95.

Karen Offen

This massive anthology, edited by FranÃ§oise ThÃ©baud, replete withiUustrations, extensive endnotes, and bibUography for further read-

ing, is the fifth and final of the History of Women in the West pubUshedinitiaUy in ItaUan by Laterza. It is now avaUable in half a dozen Europeanlanguages, inducting the new EngUsh edition issued by Harvard Univer-sity Press, which suggests that its intended audience is broad and that its

editors mean it to have a significant impad.The foUowing review is based on the Frendi language edition (1992),with reference to the more recently pubUshed American edition, which isvirtuaUy identical in contents. Some of the essays in the volume aremagisterial, and the book is worth its price for these alone. Others, byacademics who are not trained historians, are less satisfying because theylack historical depth. The translations seem, on the whole, satisfactory.

The contents of this book, overaU, stand in a surprisingly paradoxical,if not conflicting relationship to its general title, and particularly to the

subtitle added to the American edition. In the introduction, ThÃ©baudexplains that the volume is intended to "nourish" its readers' "reflec-tions." She warns that it offers neither a chronological narrative of women's "Uberation" ("emancipation," in the French)Â—namely, no linear history of women's "progress." Indeed, she says, women's"achievements" ("acquisitions") can also be taken away. She underscoresthe point made by the series editors, Georges Duby and MicheUe Perrot,that women cannot be studied in isolation from men; and that what countsis the "relation between the sexes," a sodal relationship "constructed and

incessantly remodeUedÂ—at once an effect and a cause of the sodaldynamic" (p. 4, U.S. edition). Thus, this coUection clearly privÃ¼eges gender as a "useful category of analysis," in Joan Scotf s formulation. Indeed, "theevolution of the gender system" is given deUberate precedence over

Â© 1995 Journal of Women's History, Vol 7 No. Î¶ (Summer)

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146 Journal of Women's History Summer

women's gains or achievements, and even over evidence of women'sagency. Let us examine what kind of a history of women this approach has

produced.The volume is divided into four major parts, entitled "The National-

ization of Women" (eight chapters), "Women, Creation, and Representa-tion" (four chapters), "The Century's Great Changes" (three chapters),and "Current Issues" (four chapters). It concludes, as do its four prede-cessors, with a short section on "Women's Voices," featuring poignantand startling excerpts from the writings of Christa Wolf and NeUyKaplan. No essays have been added or omitted in the English-languageedition.

The eight essays of Part I, "The Nationalization of Women," composenearly half the volume. These essays synthesize recent scholarship thatcoUectivdy testifies to the preoccupation of national leaders with mobiliz-ing and regulating women in a period marked by total war and fiercecompetition between nations. FranÃ§oise ThÃ©baud's lengthy essay onWorld War I opens the section by surveying the eartier historiography onwomen and war, which, she argues, was predicated on the questions of how war and women's emandpation were related and whether war was

conducive to women's emandpation. Her approach, evocative and de-gant, nuanced by layer after layer of detaÃ¼ (though by few women'svoices), questions the thrust of the earUer feminist historiography: sheargues that the overaU effed of the war on gender relations was conserva-tive, reinforcing old roles, expectations, and images. Successive essays by

Nancy Cott and Anne-Marie Sohn reinforce this pessimistic perspective asthey explore the interwar period in the United States, France, and England.They emphasize espedaUy the prescriptive Uterature direded towardwomen on the subject of motherhood. This Uterature attempted to counter

the rapid sodoeconomic changes that were propelling women increas-ingly out of family-centered Uves and expedations.Three complementary and informative essays by Victoria Di Grazia,

Gisela Bock, and Daniele Bussy Genevois, explore what happened togender relations, and espedaUy to European women in the 1920s and1930s with the advent of Fasdsm in Italy, Nazism in Germany, andFranquisme in Spain. Di Grazia emphaticaUy charaderizes Mussolini'sregime as a fasdst patriarchy, "a new system of sexed exploitation domi-nated by a global strategy of state expansion." She insists, too, on the

extent to which fascist laws and mores carried over into the new post-1945repubUc. Gisela Bock explores the sexual poUtics of Nazism, underscoringthe extent to which an emphasis on viritityÂ—and a condemnation of female emandpation as an "emanation of Jewish influence"Â—lay at the

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1995 Book Review: Karen Offen 147

center of the National Sodalist project. This essay, which can be charader-ized as a feminist analysis of Nazism, focuses on what the Nazi govern-ment did to women, not what women did. In particular, Bock points to thesexual partiaUty of the Nazi sterilization laws, which targded thousandsof women of so-caUed "inferior" groups for reproductive annihilation, tounderscore the extent to which (contrary to popular betief) Nazi poticy didnot encourage motherhood. These findings are shocking, even today.Daniele Bussy-GÃ©nevois provides a gendered history of Spanish poUtics inthe interwar period, a "history from a feminine perspective." She exam-ines the new RepubUcZs attempts, from 1931 on, to ad on feminist claimsinducting suffrage, and discusses the subsequent poUtical mobilization of

right-wing women through the Falange in support of Franco and nationalCathoUdsm. This latter essay offers an object lesson in how significant newgains for women at the poUtical level can quickly evaporate when there isno strong cultural support for them.

Two final essays in Part I, by HÃ©lÃ¨ne Eck on French women under Vichy, and by FranÃ§oise Navailh on Russia, complete the gloomy coUageon the nationalization of women. Eck's essay provides a moving overviewof recent historical findings, detailing the enormous problems that Frenchwomen faced during the Nazi occupation and highlighting their attempts

at agency. Navailh's essay on Russia, for aU its emphasis on the intricadesof the Bolshevik government's weaving and bobbing on famÃ¼y poticy inan extremely difficult sodoeconomic context, begs the important questionof the dramatic, if not invariably positive, poUtical and ideological effectof the reputed Bolshevik experiment throughout the rest of the westernworld. Treatment of this issue might have been placed eartier in the cluster,where the incontestable impad of Soviet poUcies on the other nationalistexperiments discussed could also have been assessed.

These eight essays starkly demonstrate that the history of European

poUtics in the twentieth century cannot be adequately understood withoutreference to its impact on both sexes. To put it a different way, takingaccount of "gender" is fundamental to a comprehensive grasp of poUticalhistory in the nation-state. A few historians of women (myself induded)have been insisting on this point for years, but these essays, with their varying approaches and dramatic data, drive home its importance. But isthis aU that can be said in a "history of women"?

The essays in Part Î address issues of gender in artistic and cultural production. FranÃ§oise Collin explores the woman question debate in twen-

tieth-century European phÃ¼osophy. Although Simone de Beauvoir doesget some space, the focus is predominantly on works by male theorists,from George Simmel to the post-Marxist, post-Freudian contributions of BaudriUard, Foucault, Derrida, Levinas, and Jacques. English-language

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readers wÃ¼l find this essay useful for understanding the genesis of thedebates on "essentialism" and on the "equaUty vs. difference" conundrum

that has so troubled feminist theory in recent years. MarceUe Marini'smoving inquiry into women's contributions to French cultural productionin the later twentieth century indudes a harsh critique of French schoolsfor effectively depriving girls of works by women writers. Luisa Passeriniquestions daims about the feminization of mass culture, looking particu-larly at American, French, and Italian materials. Anne Higonnef s evoca-tive yet incondusive essay on women, images, and representations is moretruly international in scope than some of its companions, surveying pho-tography, painting, and film with examples drawn from France, Britain,Germany, Russia, and Austria.

Part Î Î™ addresses the "great changes" of the mid-twentieth century,with particular attention to issues of women's work, maternity, and thegenesis of national welfare states. Gisela Bock's essay, "Poverty andMothers' Rights in the Emerging Welfare States," covers virtuaUy everyEuropean state, along with AustraUa and Canada, in an exemplary com-

parative study. She concludes that without the agitation of women's move-ments and women's acquisition of the vote, today's welfare states would

look very different. The contributions of Nadine Lefaucheur ("Maternity,Family, and the State"), and Rose-Marie Lagrave ("A SupervisedEmandpation") complement and extend Bock's observations. Speaking tothe historiographical issues in particular, Lagrave warns women not to bemisled either by extant favorable legislation nor by the present-day rhdo-ric of sexual equaUty. Despite the seemingly objective facts of women'ssocial progress in the twentieth century, she gloomily insists that"women's history should be seen above aU as the history of a deposed sex,as the mirror image of the sovereign history, the history of men" (pp.

488-489, U.S. edition).The essays of Part IV deal with several current issues. Less"historical" than exploratory, three of these four essays offer perspectiveson seleded contemporary problems. Mariette Sineau examines the impor-tant issues surrounding "Law and Democracy," probing obstades towomen's access to fuU poUtical partidpation since 1945. Writing in thespirit of the contemporary quest for poUtical parity in France, she askswhether the sphere of poUtics may not have become the last refuge of viritity. ReUeving the gloom aU too briefly, Yasmine Ergas examines

women's aspirations to become (autonomous) subjeds, painting a broadcanvas of developments in the most recent feminist "wave" in Europe and North America from the late 1960s into the 1980s. FinaUy, JacquelineCosta-Lascoux explores contemporary issues on the frontiers of procre-

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ative technology and bio-ethics, but without spedficaUy addressing their impUcations for women's history.

Yolande Cohen offers a fascinating historical case study of the trans-formation of "traditionalist" women's groups from "feminine" to"feminist" in twentieth-century Quebec. Asserting their centraUty to theFrench-Canadian nationalist projed, women of the Cercles de fermiÃ¨res(Farm Women's Sodeties) effedively rechanneled that projed and insertedwomen's daims, based on complementarity of the sexes, the famÃ¼y, andthe French language, into the poUtical arena. Cohen claims that the mudimisunderstood Quebec fermiÃ¨res succeeded in changing the course of Quebec'sÂ—and thus of CanadianÂ—history. This essay, because of its con-

tents, belongs in Part I.Luce the eartier volumes in the series, this final volume of the Historyof Women in the West condudes with two different, equaUy disturbingexcerpts from women writers that complement the nineteen precedingessays. Both might be considered meditations on a "final solution." Thefirst excerpt comes from Quista Wolf's ruminations on the horrors of Auschwitz and the problem of innocence and individual responsibÃ¼ity inGerman history. The second (reminiscent of Margaret Atwood's dystopia,The Handmaid's Tale) is drawn from Nelly Kaplan's perverse feminist

fantasy (pubUshed in French in 1966) of a male captive under matriarchy,who turns to reading history as a means of pondering and coming to gripswith the subjection of his sex.

The mental calories provided by the individual contributions in thisHistory of Women in the West add up to more than the cumulative nourish-ment offered by the volume, which left this reader with a somewhatunsettled feeting accompanied by hunger for what seemed absent from the plate. Problems posed both by the general approach and by the theoreticalunderpinnings stimulated a further series of reflections.

The first problem that emerges is the editors' and authors' under-standing of "the West." This volume, like its predecessors, offers a historyof women in the West from a distinctively continental-Eurocentric stand- point; even England appears only in a comparative context (Anne-MarieSohn's essay on the interwar period). The editors' choices traverse theAtlantic only twice, offering a chapter each on the United States (by NancyF. Cott) and one on Quebec (by Yolande Cohen). Not surprisingly, theunquestioned center is France, flanked by Germany and Italy, with someattention to Spain and Russia. The Scandinavian countries get short shrift,

as do the spin-off countries of the Austro-Hungarian empire and theBenelux countries, not to speak of Ireland and Switzerland, which alwaysseem to turn up missing, along with Portugal and Greece, in surveys of thiskind. The rest of the United Kingdom (Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland)

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is absent from the picture, as is EngUsh-speaking Canada and the Ameri-can West; Australia makes a cameo appearance in one of Gisda Bock's

chapters, but the distindively "Western" countries of Latin America aremissing, save for the excerpt from the writing of the Euro-Argentinianfilmmaker NeUy Kaplan. Eva Peron remains unmentioned, even in theindex, and so do the mothers whose protest against the "disappearance"of their poUticaUy susped sons and daughters provided a dramatic exam-

ple of women's poUtical activity in Argentina. Surely these more discretecultures offer their particular variations on the problems of women's andgender history in our century, just as they contribute their particular solutions. But they are eclipsed, as is so often the case in surveys, by

developments in the larger countries of continental Europe. Nor is anyeffort made to address the history of women in Europe's one-time coloniesand their relation to the colonizing powers, or the gender issues resultingfrom decolonization and the immigration of the formerly colonized (inFrance, the recent controversies over veiling and infibulation come imme-diately to mind). Feminist historiography has yet to find a satisfadoryapproach to this problem of indusiveness and comparison in speaking of "the West."

A second problem is manifest in the appUcation of gender analysis inthe volume offered here. New and creative insights, such as those embod-ied in the concept of "gender history," can take a variety of forms. Here,however, "gender history" seems to have congealed into a new orthodoxy.How quickly yesterday's conceptual breakthrough seems, at least in someof the essays in this book, to construd new boundaries which limit therange of questions that can be explored.

Further, and more problematicaUy, once again this volume's approachto gender history (aU too much tike the old male-centered history thatfeminist scholars deplore) disempowers women as historical adors.

Would it be inappropriate to suggest that the broad audience of readers for this series might benefit from revisiting the dramatic and substantialadvancesÂ—in education, in law, in economics, and in poUticsÂ—that pre-date the 1970s and that have, ironicaUy, made it possible for this distin-guished team of women historians, the very legatees of these earner vidories, to cast into doubt the narrative of "progress"? Should not femi-nist historians themselves take pleasure in, even derive strength from, thevidories that women have adtieved in Western sodeties? Why this resis-tance to the history of women's achievements, of women's accomplish-ments, of women's ads?

This brings us to a third, related problem. With the exception of a few,more upbeat essays, this volume is marked by an overwhelming tone of "mal du siÃ¨cle." In an account of a century which, whÃ¼e certainly traumatic,

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has witnessed such major changesÂ—yes, even actual improvementsÂ—inthe status of so many Western women and in their Uves, what can explain

this melancholy air, this gloom and doom, this perverse authorial andeditorial resistance to presenting advances that were often achieveddespite the attempts of male-dominated states to manipulate and usewomen? Is it primarily a reflection of the shadow of the Holocaust thatcontinues to hang so heavÃ¼y over European inteUectual production? Or can it be attributed to the demise of faith in Utopian ideologies, includingMarxism, predpitated by the coUapse of the Iron Curtain? Is it born of contemporary economic uncertainty? Of phÃ¼osophic postmodern pessi-mism? Of anxiety about the future of Europe? Or can there be some other,

simpler, explanation, one perhaps tied to the poUtics of the French aca-demic world, a peculiarly insidiousÂ—because unnamedÂ—version of "poUtical correctness," a masochistic rationale designed to placate inteUec-tual authorities who are more receptive to gender analysis than to awoman-centered women's history? The essays by the French feministhistorians seem unusuaUy constrained by their understanding of gender,and of how it operates historically. What is the price of success for anapproach to writing "women's history" that effectively disempowers itsostensible subjects? What message does it detiver to the broad audience for

which this series is intended? What kind of historiographical exampledoes it offer us?

Certainly women's history should be studied in relation to that of men, but this does not mean that women's agency need be discounted, or women's actionsÂ—successful or notÂ—muted or ignored. My reading of thehistory of women in the troubled twentieth century suggests that womenin the Western world may nevertheless, both relative to men and across the

board, be materiaUy and moraUy far better off than at any previous timein history. Women have clearly done more that is historicaUy significant

according to older criteria of achievement and, thanks to the new sodalhistory, we understand better the historical significance of their daÃ¼yactivities. What seemed so costly to the editors of this History of Women inthe West about acknowledging such points?

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