A BITTER-SWEET VICTORY: FEMINISMS IN FRANCE (1918-1923)

摘要

Post-war feminisms were confronted by new issues. Pacifism, relatively absent as a notion before 1914, was added to their programme, although it meant different things to different branches of the movement. Some women embraced pacifism from a sense of guilt. In 1918, for example, Andree Jouve considered that women "have accepted or sought to assume a share of responsibility in this monstrous crime", and that, as a consequence of this, they behaved either as "servants, dolls, or as copies of men".28 Her position was close to that of the writer Romain Rolland: "You could have opposed or fought this war in the hearts of men".29 By contrast, Gabrielle Duchene, who came from the same circles as Jouve, thought that "women, because of the distance at which they have been kept from public affairs, are still not responsible for the past".30 For all feminists, granting women the right to vote and stand in elections would allow the ideal of peace between nations to become a reality. The mobilisation of women for peace was sufficiently threatening, indeed, for male nationalist politicians to use it as a good reason for refusing the suffrage to women.In 1923 it was clearly not possible to predict that feminism would be thwarted for another two decades in France. However, the first signs of weakness among radical feminists, embroiled as they were in a stormy relationship with the Communist Party, were perceptible. The first expulsions from the party had already occurred, and others would follow shortly afterwards with the Stalinisation of the party. At the same time, the virulent anti-Communism of the post-war period