Women’s History in France: An Ill‐Defined Subject

As a new approach and subject, women’s history in France is ill‐defined as an academic category and remains on the margins of mainstream history. The concept of gender , a necessary analytical tool, cannot in itself suffice; the historicity of the tensions between men and women must be restored. At stake is the tension between a continuous linear history and the historical discontinuities which arise in its gaps and flaws, the tension between female individuals [ individues ] who, as objects of representation, are taken to be representative of their sex, and critical subjects who confront representation as a form of power.