Féminisme et féminité : formes de récupération
Féminisme et féminité : formes de récupération

Summary/Abstract: Beginning with the Enlightenment and with the women’s more free access to books, the feminine status has refused more and more explicitly the decorative-passive role in the society, even though this role has never been otherwise, the major difference lying at the level of the direct social manifestation. As early as the XVIIth century, Poullain de la Barre spoke about the fact that “the spirit has no sex”, the feminine nature is specific, but not inferior, and women should have the same possibilities and rights to education. The Era of Preciousness (la préciosité) imposed the fashion of the literary salons moderated by women, a fashion which spread around Europe. In the XVIIIth century, Lady Miremont underlined the woman’s vocation in education, her power to write something different or to be the heroin of sentimental stories and of domestic histories. The French Revolution brought the type of the citizen-woman, which became the starting point of a new feminity – the pursuit of the self-esteem, the pursuit of the self accomplishment. The governesses, then the elementary teachers, then the female teachers prevailed in France and Great Britain (despite the increased number of male teachers in the German schools); the British female teachers being the first analysts of the socio-professional divergences between sexes. The literature, as a sublimate artistic repository of the social, reflects evolutions and mentalities regarding the forms of manifestation of the feminity, and then the new types of feminity, which are incorporated into feminism. The French cultural space has had, not only once, the role of the initiator and accelerator of the woman’s role and status on the social scene.

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