Thoughts on "Culture et Pouvoir des Femmes"

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COMMENT: Thoughts on "Culture et Pouvoir des Femmes" Karen Offen History in France these days aspires to be both a philosophical and a historical "science"; it is also a terrain for intellectual gamesmanship. It is steeped in sociological, anthropological, and philosophic theory, with particular reference to the contributions of Lévi-Strauss, Derrida, and the speculations of Foucault on the relativity and subjectivity of knowledge, especially historical knowledge. Historians write in a rich literary language, full of allusions to the contributions of other Parisian literati, some jargon that is specific to current intellectual speech in France (reflexion, sujet/objet, etc.), and plays on words, most often reversals, which often makes their writing dazzling (in French), difficult to access for uninitiated foreigners, and nearly impossible to translate. Sometimes the articles display a brilliant pyrotechnical rhetoric of "reflection," a rhetoric that often eclipses the research that undergirds the argument. Their attention to the weight of cumulative evidence, to chronology, and to causation is often less concentrated than American historians would deem acceptable. Their inattention to foreign sources may be viewed by some as inexcusable. The essay "Culture et Pouvoir des Femmes" has to be read as a critique of sexism within what is now the dominant school in French historiography —a "new history" that in the wake of 1968 has risen to the fore on a critique of an older "event" history and that has focused on retrieving the history of marginal groups, of the thought of ordinary people (mentalités), and on the "longue durée." Through a critique of recent French scholarship in socio-cultural, or anthropological history, the ten authors urge their readers to a new form of political history, a "histoire du politique," which focuses explicitly on the changing mechanics of male domination, a study of power mechanisms, of conflict and dissension. What seems familiar to us is their call to put the politics back into social history, including the sexual politics. What is innovative in the French context is their call—to social historians—to closely examine gender politics in historical "ruptures" or break points, not only grand ruptures such as the Renaissance (one thinks here of the stimulating suggestion of Joan Kelly over ten years ago) but on a smaller scale as well. The key phrases in this article include the following: "Relationships between the sexes cannot be reduced to a single and unalterable and universal explanation: masculine supremacy"; "What we must now do is to understand how a feminine culture develops within a system of unequal relationships"; "In the perspective adopted here, 'masculine domination ' is no longer a constant over which any reflection would stumble, but ©1989 Journal of Women-s History, Vol. l, No. ι (Spring)_____________________ 90 JOURNAL OF WOMEN'S HISTORY SPRING rather the expression of an unequal social relationship whose mechanisms can be understood and whose specifics must be gauged according to historical systems. It is an essential instrument for understanding the overall logic of all social relationships." And, "It would permit us to . . . establish an internal history of familial, social, and political power." Such arguments are by no means unfamiliar in American feminist historiography. What is less familiar for an English-speaking audience is the insistence of these historiennes on a rigorous theoretical methodology for achieving their end. The argument is carefully worded, even in its abstraction ; it proceeds one step at a time (elaborating in painful detail a series of points that many historians in the United States have assumed as self-evident for some time). Authors must keep their audiences in mind. They are writing for the men of the Annales school. As an American historian of France, I am invariably intrigued by what the French historians, and historiennes, take for granted about their own culture. Consider, for instance, their discussion of women's power and influence itself. What remains unrecognized in this article is that, perhaps more than in any other major country in the world, French women have regularly been accorded recognition by men as being vastly powerful and influential, even as they were being stripped of institutional power. This immediately puts French women in a different position with reference to politics and power than they occupy...

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