Bridges to Feminism

While most people who have waited in grocery or newsstand checkout lines today will recognize the magazines Elle and Marie-Claire, few know that two journalists, Marcelle Auclair and Marcelle Ségal, were critical to the success of these magazines when they began publication in France. True celebrities of the postwar decades, they wielded greater influence on French society than Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Lacans, or Michel Foucault. Through their columns and their appearances on radio and television, Auclair and Ségal became familiar figures in everyday life. Bridges to Feminism is a dual biography of these trailblazing French journalists--Marcelle Auclair of Marie-Claire and Marcelle Ségal of Elle--who helped reshape how women saw themselves in postwar France. Through their writing, they built powerful connections with readers, offering advice, empathy, and a vision of womanhood that defied convention. Their lives vividly distill the tumult of the twentieth century and its impact on women: war and peace, collaboration and resistance, race and gender, marriage and divorce, parenting and loss. Although they both followed the expected paths of marriage and motherhood, life had other plans and they were forced to reinvent themselves. By 1939, they were uprooted by the German invasion of France, and after the war, they rebuilt their lives and careers, becoming beloved voices for women across France. They used their platforms to encourage women to trust themselves, embrace their strength, and challenge traditional roles. Together, Auclair and Ségal inspired French women to imagine new possibilities for their futures and created personal, powerful bridges to feminism.

Sarah Fishman is the John and Rebecca Moores Professor of History at the University of Houston. She is the author of From Vichy to the Sexual Revolution: Gender and Family Life in Postwar France (OUP, 2017) and The Battle for Children: World War II, Youth Crime, and Juvenile Justice, among other books