Content area
Abstract
This cultural history investigates a series of unexamined debates on sexuality, honor, singleness, violence, and subjectivity through the foil of a widely publicized French feminist dueling challenge in 1911. Accused of lesbianism by a male journalist due to an inflammatory anti-marriage article she penned, Arria Ly judged her honor “outraged” and issued a demand for reparation to the paper's editor-in-chief. I approach the “Ly-Massat Affair” as a microhistorical lens that offers new perspectives on, and suggests a reevaluation of, the dominant historiographical views of feminism, the system of honor, and sexual politics in early twentieth-century France. In each chapter, I examine how a shifting socioeconomic terrain that provided new opportunities to women prompted many to reconceptualize conventional forms of honor, language and sexuality to fit their altered roles. In response to the Ly-Massat incident, numerous individuals delineated an independent form of feminine honor detached from both sexual virtue and from motherhood. My thesis challenges the consensus among historians that public honor was exclusively attached to male bodies and relationships throughout the prewar era. I further explore attempts to negotiate the outlines of the professional woman's identity through debates on the meaning of virginity, on the significance of the double appellation “Madame/Mademoiselle,” and on the personal and political significance of sexuality within the feminist movement. While this case points to women's endeavors to move beyond established feminine stereotypes, it also exposes the persistence and reformulation of theological traditions that have not been studied in this context. Examining textbooks and diaries of former Catholic boarding school students, I argue that these institutions offered a powerful alternative to the narrow definition of sexual identity available to women in secular society, and contributed to Ly's formulation of a modern feminist doctrine. Moreover, the Ly-Massat affair reveals the historically specific dilemma of a sizeable segment of women neglected by scholars of the French women's movement. It draws our attention to the increasingly conspicuous strata of single women in the early twentieth century who struggled to create sexual identities for new lived realities, and who, in fact, formed the base of support for French feminism.
