FRACTURING THE PRIVATE-PUBLIC DIVIDE THROUGH ACTION

READING LES CAHIERS DU GRIF

Abstract

Feminism in the 1960s and 1970s was innovative and productive, despite its tendency—similar to that of previous emancipatory movements—to forget its past. This paper proposes Françoise Collin’s notion of transmission as a fruitful relationship with which to palliate this tendency and to propel women as innovative participants in the symbolic. In order to do this, I analyze Les Cahiers du Grif, the first francophone magazine of “second-wave” feminism, as an example of how women’s actions in their plurality fractured the division between private and public as presented by Arendt and thus produced a fertile corpus for disciplines in the humanities. To close, I argue that the difficulties presented by this corpus are a positive consequence of the magazine’s plurality, as well as a worthy legacy that transmission challenges us to focus on.