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Non Fiction
Mar 2007 |
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Dear all,
March 8th marks International Women’s Day. In France, the online review “Mouvements” (www.mouvements.asso.fr) has dedicated a special edition to this event, while the March 9th edition of Le Monde des Livres is entitled “Feminism, the difference of opinions between sexes. The Struggle against inequalities, Debates on male domination: Up-date on a continuing controversy” (« Féminisme, le différend des sexes. Luttes contre les inégalités, débats sur la domination masculine : actualité d’une controverse »). For the occasion, we would like to present you with a selection of recent publications dedicated to the question of women in France.
First, we selected two global analyses of the state of women today, in the world and more specifically in France..
For the report Le Livre noir de la condition des femmes, Christine Ockrent and Sandrine Treiner have secured the participation of 40 contributors. Each author in turn takes stock of the particular scourges that affect women the world over and share their analysis and expertise on a specific region or problem. The objective of the work is to take a census of the affected individuals in the areas in which women are the main victims, namely: safety, integrity, freedom, dignity and equality. Christine Ockrent also authored Ces femmes qui nous gouvernent (published by Plon) this month.
In her most recent work, entitled De l’Alcôve à l’Arène. Nouveau regard sur les Françaises, Michèle Sarde revisits the path established by women in France over the last 30 years. In this thick volume – a mix of studies and interviews – the author raises the principal questions that have been in the French news: new forms of conjugal union, sexual harassment, legislation concerning prostitution. Moreover, she raises certain themes specific to France, which stem from the colonial era: secularism and multiculturalism (the question of the veil), equality and co-education.
But, whereas the feminist movements of the 60’s and 70’s have run their course and the emancipation of women seems to be progressing too slowly today, Dominique Méda and Hélène Périvier raise the question of the revival of this committed process. The cost of this slowdown for women and also for society as a whole deserves to be studied. The French may have succeeded in combining an "honorable" birth rate and a significant female employment rate, but some nuances are to be added to this positive account. According to their book Le Deuxième Age de l’émancipation : la société, les femmes et l’emploi, close to eight out of ten women are in the workforce, but their jobs are often part-time, and the employment rate falls to 50% when recalculated with the full-time equivalent. Women’s jobs are still less lucrative than those held by men. Furthermore, this horizontal discrimination is joined by a vertical discrimination (the glass ceiling).
Turning now to the « physical » part of discrimination against women, we selected two books, as frightening as they are full of hope.
In Quand les femmes auront disparu, Bénédicte Manier examines the demographic “split” between male and female children which has always existed in India and in Asia, and which has unfortunately widened over the past twenty years. There are one hundred million missing female children, one third of them from India alone. To this phenomenon we must add the ever-growing number of abortions and the standing ancestral practice of infanticide, resulting in the development of a new classification, “feticide.” The originality and the relevance of this study come from its focus on this paradox: tradition, instead of disintegrating under the assault of modernity as one might think, seems to be kept alive, even reinforced by it.
According to Amnesty International, an estimated 135 million of the world’s girls and women have undergone female genital mutilation (FGM), and two million girls a year are at risk of mutilation – approximately 6,000 per day. It is practiced extensively in more than 28 African countries as well as Asia. Until now, this procedure was considered irreversible. Yet now, Hubert Prolongeau writes, thanks to the brave efforts of Doctor Pierre Foldes, the renowned French urologist and surgeon, more than a thousand women have thus far undergone his unique and pioneering technique of clitoral reconstitution. Victoire sur l'excision : Pierre Foldes, le chirurgien qui redonne l'espoir aux femmes mutilées tells us how they have been given relief from chronic pain and even a chance to experience sexual pleasure for the first time.
Publishing house Actes Sud present us two means of discovering the quotidian life of women living at the far end of the world. Sorour Kasmaï was seventeen years old when she and her sister fled the Islamic Republic of Iran. They crossed the Turkish border, on foot and horseback, over the mountains. After more than twenty years, she shares the thrilling story of her ordeal in La Vallée des Aigles. Autobiographie d’une fuite.
The journalist Anne Brunswic decided to seek out the women of Siberia, be they poets, singers, journalists, cooks, professors or museum curators. In Sibérie, un voyage au pays des femmes: chroniques, Natalya, Tamara, Ludmila, Irina ... share with her their professional and personal stories, their political and religious beliefs, the tragedies which have touched their families, their bereavement, how they manage in their day-to-day lives, speaking quietly about the dreams they had when they were young.
Finally, on a lighter note, we draw your attention to a book from a man “who knows how to talk to and about women”: Jean-Paul Enthoven. Above all, La Dernière Femme shows that Enthoven is one of those who knows how to write marvelously about women, about those he knew and loved and those who just passed through his life, images from magazines or ships passing in the night, sometimes embodied on film. Of the nine women presented in this collection, eight are already well-known from literary, intellectual, artistic or society life, on this side of the Atlantic or the other, including Françoise Sagan, Louise Brooks and Zelda Fitzgerald. The ninth, the last woman (la dernière femme), is an unknown for the reader, but not for the narrator, because she is his last woman, at once sublime and mysterious, like the eight others, like all other women.
We truly hope you will enjoy these books as much as we did, and we would be very happy to hear your reactions and discuss this selection.
Bonne lecture!
Fabrice Rozié
Anne-Sophie Hermil
Anne-Sophie Simenel
Maud Lourau
Special thanks to: Rachel Spiegel, Paula Cianci and The French Publishers’ Agency