How have French women of Arab and North African descent become the subject of a collective fantasy? If the language of immigration reveals collective imaginaries and social and discursive practices that are worth analyzing, then the word beurette also deserves our attention.
In her memoir, the renowned French researcher Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch looks back on her Jewish childhood, her first experience of Africa in the 1960s, the neo-colonialist stance of some academics, and her intellectual and political career, in which anti-racism has played a pivotal role.
How do working-class and lower middle-class women experience their youth in rural environments? Based on a study of several rural and exurban spaces, Yaelle Amsellem-Mainguy revisits the question of women’s social trajectories.
C. Schmoll invites us to feminize our view of migration towards Europe. Public migration policies select women according to frequently incompatible principles of morality, vulnerability and utility, and determine the positions that they will come to occupy in our societies.
By retracing the itineraries of their mothers, two authors reconstruct the lifestyles of two teachers in the 1960s and 1970s and their quest for economic and intellectual emancipation.
Despite the black legend that surrounds her name, the Empress Eugénie, Napoleon III’s wife, was the embodiment of maternity and Christian virtues, even as she played a political and diplomatic role.
Éliane Viennot continues her investigation of the history of the inequality, hierarchies and disqualifications that have been imposed on women. Legally organising their subjection is not enough; the latter also has to be legitimated.
Through an ethnographic investigation allowing them to go behind the scenes of notaries public’s offices and law firms, two sociologists show the origins of profound gender inequalities in the distribution of family assets.
From personal accounts to anthropological analyses, from emancipatory discourses to debates on mutilation: having long been ignored, female pleasure is now being put into the spotlight.
Gender not only reached an unprecedented level of exposure in public debates but has become a structuring element of contemporary conservative discourses. This text discusses how gender can be incorporated into assessments of the current crisis of democracies
In this new biography of Susan Sontag, Benjamin Moser draws on hundreds of interviews and on the writer’s restricted archives to offer a fascinating portrait of a woman driven to extremities both personal and intellectual.
Initially designed to protect the population, public health systems can lead to demands being made for personal rights. This process is illustrated by an unexpected comparison between the legalisation of abortion and the provision of drug consumption rooms.
For the first time, the Pléiade collection is publishing the work of a contemporary historian. This event celebrates the centennial of the birth of this great mediaevalist, a historian of mentalities who found a way to make historical knowledge accessible to a wider audience. Felipe Brandi, an expert on Duby, edited and annotated the book.
Since the Weinstein affair, there has been a great deal of debate over men’s sexual urges. The sociology of Norbert Elias is a precious resource to help understand that historic moment and move beyond the opposition between the “freedom to pester” and the moral duty to “rat out your pig”.
Thanks to the success of Peter Mullan’s film The Magdalene Sisters, Magdalene laundries—institutions meant to punish Ireland’s “fallen” women—are now part of the country’s collective memory. Despite tremendous social advances, survivors still await reparation and an official apology.
“Wood runners” is the name given to travelling fur traders in the age of pioneers. Focusing on two centuries of their risky adventures and on their relationship with Amerindian populations allows Gilles Havard to write a monumental multicultural history of the early North American West.
While ideal Victorian women were supposed to be “angels in the house”, female criminals were seen as “demons in the jailhouse”. As such, they were a disruptive force and had to be dealt with. Deconstructing and reconstructing these deviants to make them more “womanly” became a major issue in the late 19th century.
Among the recipients of the 2009 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics was Elinor Ostrom, for her analysis of economic governance, especially in relation to the commons. While this choice took many in the profession by surprise, her life-long quest for an understanding of successful common property resource management holds important lessons for our future.
During the Belle Époque, the women who took on “men’s work” – doctors, journalists, and lawyers, but also coach drivers and postal workers – met with incredulity, hilarity, and more generally hostility. Postcards began to spread as a medium during the rise of early feminism and offer a striking representation of these reactions.
For more than thirty years, Joan Scott has been informing and transforming both our history and the way we write history, while encouraging us to question categories and change our modes of thinking. From class struggle to sex differentiation, sexual emancipation and race, she proposes a critical analysis of Republican rhetoric to undermine naturalized forms of inequality.
What is the situation for women’s employment in the different European countries and what are the latest developments? This study aims to identify the policies that seem most favourable to women’s employment in the context of a “life cycle”, in other words taking into account the specific phase that is the potential birth and upbringing of very young children.
While women are first and foremost seen as victims of violence, C. Cardi and G. Pruvost show that they can also perpetrate it. Women’s violence tends to be sidelined, downplayed or made invisible, and is inextricably linked to their image, testifying to the sexual dimension of the notion of violence itself.
Has love been invented by French women ? In what sense can we say that the breast has a history linked to politics, motherwood and erotica? As a specialist of these subjects, literary scholar Marilyn Yalom offers unexpected answers to these questions while drawing an interesting parallel between the United States and France.
In his new work, François Singly continues to explore the transformations of marital bonds. This time, he approaches it from another angle—that of the “process of uncoupling” experienced by women who have recently separated from their partner. More than just a sociological study of the gender relations at play in a separation, this investigation explores the engagement and disengagement of the self within the ties of marriage.
Lee Ann Banaszak examines the case of the ‘feminist insiders’ who fought for the feminist cause both inside and outside the American state. Her study questions the assumption that protest activism always regards the state as a target.
Domestic chores and paid work are unequally distributed between men and women. Elena Stancanelli shows that the taxation system has an impact on the allocation of chores between spouses. Joint taxation system discourages wives who earn much less than their husbands from working. Moving to a separate taxation system would tend to equalize the time devoted to professional activities and domestic work between spouses.
In the USA, husbands are on average two years older than their wives. When people born during a baby boom are ready to get married, there are more women on the “marriage market” than men, their bargaining power is consequently lower. According to Shoshana Grossbard, cyclical variations of the labour force participation of women could thus be explained by demographic conditions on the “marriage market”.
