This document explores the role of women's bodies in their struggle for emancipation in the 20th century, highlighting the ways in which they used their bodies to challenge patriarchal ideologies and achieve greater autonomy and equality.
Extract
[...] Thanks to the battles that women have fought with their bodies and the image they represent, they have been able to make it clear that these situations were dangerous and that justice had to take care of them. They have succeeded in obtaining, for example, the right to abortion in 1975 and the criminalization of rape in 1980. The 20th century was a turning point for women, the achievement of these laws and the fact of having control over their bodies as they see fit have made a great step for feminism. [...]
[...] This emancipation is also reflected in literature. Some women have written about their experiences so that people who have gone through the same thing can have representations and not feel alone and ashamed. In literature, the women's body is directly represented since it is the center of their story. Writing and highlighting their sexual life was something extremely shocking for the time, but authors have taken advantage of it to denounce certain conditions and situations. - Annie Ernaux published in 2000 The event, a autobiographical novel where she describes her fight to illegally abort when she was a 23-year-old student in 1963. [...]
[...] The only representations we have of her are made through the gaze and the word of Des Grieux. Her description is only physical and we never have access to her thoughts or her word. It is clear here that the woman only serves to satisfy a carnal pleasure. Her person is even completely abandoned to present only her physical aspect, always in a masculine vision and description. - In The Douai Notebooks of Arthur Rimbaud published in 1919, one can find a poem where he describes the body of Venus, the goddess of love. [...]
[...] They must please men, be modest, be useful to them, they must make men's life pleasant. According to what can be read, he mainly sees woman as an object of desire, something that must please visually but also sexually. - Nietzsche is a 19th-century philosopher. One can find in several of his books such as Human, all too human, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, the Gay Science or even Twilight the vision he had of women. According to him, women should be serene, exuberant, tender, sweet and have a personal behavior towards their husband. [...]
[...] It had to wait for the intervention of Simone Veil, who fought for this right. She therefore shows with this novel the difficult path that women who decided to interrupt their pregnancy had to take, risking a fine, a prison sentence, or even death. - Vanessa Springora published in 2020 The Consent, an autobiographical novel where she recounts the relationship she had with Gabriel Matzneff, when she was 14 years old and he was over 50. In her novel, she describes what she endured when she was under his control. [...]
