On Parité!

I always love reading Joan Scott’s work, and this short piece is no different. In many ways, it’s a sequel to her earlier book, Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man, in that it deals with the same questions of the contradiction between gender/sexual rights and republican universalism. While Scott found that nineteenth- and early twentieth-century French feminists were unable to reconcile the paradox that all women should be given equal rights as men while using rhetoric suggesting that women were essentially different, she comes to a significantly different conclusion in this work.

Activists encouraging parity (“paritaristes”) in elected office instead argued that the abstract “citizen” with no baggage or defining characteristics of French republicanism was a sexed being and functioned with two sides—male and female. In doing so, they argued that republican universalism as it existed in the 90s was not pure, as it missed half the coin. In the French language, the “neuter” gender is always coded as male (if you don’t know if a person is a man or woman, you always refer to them as “il” (he). In groups mixed of men and women, you use “ils” (them, masculine). By arguing that the ideal abstract citizen had been coded as male, paritaristes were able to encourage the French state to require equal numbers of men and women on party lists.

I apologize if my review seems convoluted—the logic involved is convoluted and there’s no way around that. Nevertheless, I find it both persuasive and effective. It must be mentioned that this is a distinctly French way of thinking about citizenship, and I do not think it would be nearly as effective in the United States or the United Kingdom.