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Alain Touraine

Le monde des femmes

• Alain Touraine
  Paris, Fayard, mars 2006
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Women's World
  In response to the question, "Who are you?" women reply as follows: "I am a woman", "I construct myself as a woman" and "To begin with, I think of my sexuality".
  After the fieldwork on which this analysis is based, sustained moreover by the most up-to-date discussions, the author considers that women live in a coherent universe of representations and practices which appears to be radically different from that of men because it is directed towards the creation of self and the recomposition of society, whereas men conquered the world by concentrating resources in the hands of a few and by reducing workers, the colonised, women and children to figures of inferiority. Because they had never been defined as anything other than adjuncts of men, in the words of Simone de Beauvoir, women are now endeavouring - for their own benefit and for that of men - to go beyond the opposition between body and mind, private and public life and men and women.
  With women, the conquest of the world gives way to the construction of self. In these circumstances, is it astonishing that they assume with such evidence and determination the advent which we are witnessing of this predominantly cultural universe ?

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