Contenu du sommaire : La cause des femmes

This article examines the first French periodical targeting a female, working class audience in revolutionary Paris, “La Lettre Bougrement patriotique de la Mère Duchesne,” Mother Duchesne's Damn Patriotic Newsletter. This report, intended to be read out loud, was structured around the character of Mère Duchesne, introduced as the wife of famous Père Duchesne. During the first half of 1791, issues, in the form of letters written by Mother Duchesne, were addressed to either readers explicitly identified by the letters as female commoners, or to political groups and figures. The object of this paper is to study both the representation of working class women, and how this representation was used in the building of a female viewpoint and public opinion.

A Foot in the Door of Journalism, a Step Toward Social Representation ?
Between 1830 and 1870, a number of politically active women created their own newspapers or wrote articles to participate in the public debates of their time. Even though they were a small minority, their activity allows us to understand the role that the press could play for persons or groups which, like women, were excluded from political life and nevertheless seeked to be recognized as citizens.

Female/Feminist/Journalist : writers of La Fronde and the professionalization of the written press
A feminist daily newspaper written by women, La Fronde is created in 1897. This article contributes to the analysis of the continuing professionalization of journalism, starting at the end of the 19th century through the beginning of the 20th century. Based on a study of the various curriculums of the authors of La Fronde, this paper highlights the links between the two types of struggle these writers go through, as feminists and as professionals.

From Activism to Journalism ?
From 1892 to 1991, the Austrian socio-democrat party put up with a women's press as long as it was under control and could attract woman voters and militants. In the twenties, Die Frau (The Woman) and Die Unzufriedene (The Malcontent) had a wide circulation and sometimes took feminist undertones whereas in the fifties and sixties, Die Frau appeared as a cog in the machine of the male leadership of the party. Its editors seemed torn between being militants and being journalists.

A nun's way through the media (1950-1975)From 1950 to 1975, a nun, Françoise Vandermeersch, runs Échanges, her congregation's review. Her mission is to promote both the use of the media within the congregations and the nuns'image in the media. However, in the male-dominated Catholic Church, she truly turns into a press tycoon when the review gains its independence at the turn of the seventies. Only then can she use the media as a tool to claim a woman's voice in the Church.

Feminism – and Female Viewers – Taking the Stage : The 1,500th installment of Femme d'Aujourd'hui, and French speakers of Quebec and Canada in 1973In 1973, in celebration of its 1500th show, the daily television program Femme d'aujourd'hui invited some 200 female viewers in the Montreal studios of Radio-Canada in Quebec, to discuss the status of women. A number of discourses are present, mainly feminist within the liberal tradition. Almost all of the main themes of the Second Wave are raised, but the most radical feminist discourses are marginalized.

Femininity to Modernity : Media coverage and use of the media during Michelle Calmy-Rey's presidencyIn 2003, Micheline Calmy-Rey is elected at the Swiss government. Five years later, she becomes, for a year, president of Switzerland. Her presidential year coincides with the federal elections where her group, the socialist party, matches against the UDC, the tough right wing party led by Christoph Blocher. Our contribution analyzes the way Micheline Calmy-Rey uses the media to modernize the image of Switzerland and of women. This modernization is done through her political actions, but also through her physical appearance.

Birth-control and Abortion in Marie-Claire (1955-1975) : from the Knaus-Ogino method to the Karman method (Bibia Pavard)Marie-Claire, a popular culture women's magazine, is taken here as a case study to witness the gradual acceptance and diffusion of new ideas on contraception and abortion between 1955 and 1975, in France. Offering a traditional and Catholic reading of society, it unexpectedly dealt with the “serious issue of birth control” as early as 1956. Journalists'personal beliefs, social movements, and the issue of the economic survival of the magazine all contributed to the development of a strategy to legitimize change.

Avatars of Television Advertisement, or the dream life of women
Since the early days of broadcast commercials, the image of the woman occupies a strategic place in TV advertising. For a long time subjected to a patriarchal ideology, these fictions of our everyday life testify of a plurality and a much bigger freedom of representation today. But they also give evidence, through three avatars (the heir, the warrior, the icon), of the fragmentation of the feminine identity and the conflicts of definition concerning its status and its universes of skills.

Women in the Headlines : Two decades of evening news, or the ‘Voice of France'(1982-2002)Through the study of twenty years of prime-time news reports on International Women's Day, this article attempts to define the mutations and the consistencies within the official rhetoric regarding women. An essential ambiguity is found, the progressive nature of the topic undermined by relations of domination pertaining to both mass media and society at large.

The Role of the Media in the Emergence and Popularization of Immigrant Women's Emancipation Movements. This paper studies the popularization of emancipation movements through the French media, with immigrant women or women from ethnic minorities as a focus, and with such examples as the Ni Putes Ni Soumises movement. After being for a long time excluded from activism and social representation by French institutions, and confined to the role of immigrants' wives, these activists understood how to use various communication strategies to be seen and heard in new ways.

Comics do not have the reputation of giving women their due. Female characters used to be not only scarce, but also stereotyped. Heroines have only liberated themselves with the turning point of the sixties and seventies, following in the footsteps of Jean-Claude Forest's Barbarella. Then, even more committed characters appeared, such as Laureline in the Valerian et Laureline series (by Christin and Mezières). During the eighties, highly talented female writers created female characters who could at last question the role of women in society.

Young Women in the Motion Pictures of Occupied France
This article proposes an analysis of the reception of new young female actresses who appear in French cinema under the German Occupation and to whom the female spectators can, for the first time, identify in a positive way. It shows that these young heroines, who fight the patriarchal power while carrying reassuring values, are alternatives to propaganda directed against women and young women.

Introducing a New Era of TV Fiction : Buffy the Vampire Slayer as women's power incarnate ?
If television is a reflection of contemporary Western society's symbolic system, American series Buffy the Vampire Slayer echoes the renewal of fantasy series for the 10-25 and the interest for feminism through this original genre. The series created by Joss Whedon in 1996 narrates the adventures of a Vampire Slayer who has to conciliate her high school and college life with the battle against the forces of Evil. Beyond the basic diegetic aspect of the programme, the author sought to convey an overtly feminist message in synch with new expectations from female viewers. This regeneration of fiction paved the way for the emergence of new independent and confrontational heroines.

Le Quotidien (1923-1936), a key to electoral conquest and a relay of influence Le Quotidien, a newspaper founded in 1923 by Henri Dumay, gathers a team of left-wing authors whose ambition is to promote an alternative program to the policies of the national Bloc and of Poincaré's administration. The voice of the Cartel des gauches until 1926, the newspaper follows the complicated political career of its main sponsor, Jean Hennessy, a rich Cognac merchant and elected official of Charente. What we offer to examine in this article is less the contents of the newspaper, than the media venture and the political circle underpinning it. Through a study of its network of collaborators and of its financing, we see Le Quotidien as privileged grounds for the observation of the developments of the media during the inter-war period. Its history shows a double failure : on the one hand, of the resistance to the influence of capitalism on the press, and on the other hand, a failure under the pressure of the relation between the press and the political, a relationship based on the exploitation of the newspapers for the parliamentary and political interplay.

Portals as Hypermedia : the economic, ergonomic, media and hypertext evolution of general-interest Internet portals (1994-2008)With the development of the Internet, the reconfiguration of media space is questioned under new lights. General-interest portals became significant sources of information for the general public. This article examines the simultaneous evolution of the content, economic strategies, and layout of these hypertext, multimedia – or hypermedia – platforms, since 1994.

The cultural turn that most of the social sciences have choiced since the past thirty or forty years deals partially with the new importance of cultural matters in our societies. Beyond the social demand, this article set out to study the links between some disciplines that make of culture and media their field of inquiry : history and sociology of culture, cultural studies, sciences of information and communication. We also propose a program of research on a topic on which these disciplines may be useful : the history of pornography.