Abstract
As Benoîte Groult noted, Elisabeth Badinter ‘a une place très prestigieuse dans notre paysage intellectuel’ and called her ‘la grande féministe de notre temps’.1 This is a view supported by the 2010 Marianne poll, which named her ‘l’intellectuelle la plus influente auprès des Français’2 making her one of the most high-profile women studied in this book. Dubbed ‘Beauvoir’s spiritual heir’3 by Catherine Rodgers, Elisabeth Badinter is known for her work on a range of subjects including studies on the age of enlightenment,4 maternity and motherhood,5 gender and the evolution of French feminism.6 She shares many of the core values of the protagonists in this book such as a commitment to women’s rights and the defence of Republican principles, themes which motivate her interventions in fiercely contested issues in the public domain. These achievements and the recognition she has gained as a result have seen her included in the 2002 edition of Julliard and Winock’s dictionary. While this is not necessarily the final arbiter, inclusion in the dictionary is nevertheless a public symbol of acceptance.
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Notes
Catherine Rodgers, ‘Elisabeth Badinter and The Second Sex: An Interview’, Signs, 21 (1995), 147–162.
Elisabeth Badinter, L’Amour en plus: histoire de l’amour maternal (XVIIe–XXe siècle) (Paris: Flammarion, 1980).
Elisabeth Badinter, XY: De l’identité masculine (Paris: Odile Jacob), 1986.
‘Her [Millett’s] views of patriarchal politics are obviously deeply influenced by Simone de Beauvoir’s pioneering analysis in The Second Sex, but this debt is never acknowledged by Millett, who makes only two tangential references to Beauvoir’s essay.’ Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (London and New York: Methuen, 1985), p. 25.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Qu’est-ce que la littérature? (Paris: Gallimard, 1948).
Toril Moi, ‘Meaning What We Say: The “Politics of Theory” and the Responsibility of Intellectuals’ in The Legacy of Simone de Beauvoir ed. by Emily R. Grosholz (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), p. 139.
Elisabeth Badinter, Le conflit: la femme et la mère (Paris: Flammarion, 2010).
‘Although the term was not really used at the time, we can still talk about “intellectuals” in the 18th century.’ Elisabeth Badinter, Les Passions Intellectuelles I: Désirs de gloire (1735–1751) (Paris: Fayard, 1999), p. 10.
Elisabeth Badinter, Emilie, Emilie: L’Ambition féminine au XVIIIème siècle (Paris: Flammarion, 1983).
James Corbett, ‘Cherchez la femme! Sexual Equality in Politics and Affirmative Action in France’, The French Review, 74 (2001), 882–890 (p. 884).
‘The position held by Minister for Education Lionel Jospin — that pupils should be dissuaded from wearing religious items through dialogue, but if they continued to do so should not be excluded from class — brought a very sharp response from five philosophers.’ Jean Bauberot, ‘Les Avatars de la culture laïque’, Vingtième Siècle, 44 (1994), 51–57 (p. 55).
www.ina.fr/economie-et-societe/education-et-enseignement/video/CAC890 46508/invitee-plateau-gisele-halimi.fr.html. Consulted 5 August 2012. I left this association because the approach taken in this matter fails to take the protection of women’s dignity into account. There was not one reaction which spoke about women. French law makes a school education compulsory for all. The veil is a symbol of submission [...] these girls are manipulated by the yoke of patriarchy and by Muslim religious fanatics. For more on this see: Norma-Claire Moruzzi, ‘A Problem with Headscarves: Contemporary Complexities of Political and Social Identity’, Political Theory, 22.4 (1994), 653–672 (p. 670).
See Sylvie Tissot, ‘Excluding Muslim Women:From Hijab to Niqab, from School to Public Space’, Public Culture, 23.1 (2011), 39–46.
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© 2013 Imogen Long
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Long, I. (2013). Dans la lignée de Beauvoir: Elisabeth Badinter. In: Women Intellectuals in Post-68 France. French Politics, Society and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137318770_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137318770_6
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