ABSTRACT
In the second half of the 1970s, academic literary critics in the United States began to talk about something called "French feminism." Like many other countries, France had witnessed a surge of feminist consciousness and activity in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The phrase "French feminism" referred, however, to only a narrow sector of feminist activity in France, a sector we perceived as peculiarly French. "French feminism" is a body of thought and writing by some women in France which is named and thus constituted as a movement here in the American academy. Its most effective context may thus be American literary studies where it became a force to be reckoned with by most critics, feminist and non-feminist alike. Accounts of feminist criticism published in the mid-1980s give ample time to "French feminism."} Thus it seemed necessary to take this brief detour outside of American feminist literary criticism.
