Conclusion

Amy E. Varela

pp. 104-108

in: Imogen Long, Women intellectuals in post-68 France, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013

Abstract

It is then clear from the findings presented here that women have been, and in fact continue to be, systematically marginalised from accounts of the public intellectual in France. This is despite the fact that women have undertaken significant campaigns in the public sphere both in the name of feminist action and in the broader field of human rights. While this emblematic phenomenon of gender inequality is a longstanding one, it is particularly salient in the context of the public intellectual in a post-68 climate where the certainties of political engagement as exemplified by Zola in the Dreyfus Affair and conceptualised by Sartre in theories of committed literature or littérature engagée are destabilised by a new era which questioned the politics and pragmatics of interventions in the public arena as suggested by Michel Foucault's writings on the intellectuel spécifique.