‘Bliss was it in that dawn . . .’: contemporary French women's writing and the Editions des femmes

The publishing house had been founded in 1974 and went on thriving and expanding until the late seventies. It was the golden age of the women’s movement in France. In Wordsworth’s phrase about the early stages of the French Revolution, ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive’. Women were fighting against all the discourses that place woman in the position of the Other. Catherine Weinzaepflen was beginning her extraordinary destruction of authority/authoriality within the text, creating a texture whereby each aspect, voice-of-the-author, reader, characters, word associations, words inside the sentence, was regarded as having as much importance as every other aspect, as being equal, equidistant. The Second Sex, inspired by period Sartre, had drawn upon the Hegelian dialectic of the master and slave to account for women having arrived at the position in which Julien Benda could write: ‘Man is the Subject, the Absolute; woman is the other’.