French Feminist Awareness

Résumé

My intention in producing this study is to provide a compendium of information about women writers
and the world they lived in Space limitations forced me select only a few. My first decision was to limit the
women authors included to those writers who lived and worked mainly in France. In terms of my methodological
approach, I asked the reader to focus on the development of a "feminist" consciousness, on each writer's
awareness of the ways in which her gender shaped her outlook and her opportunities, and to reflect on the way
categorizations, structures, and terms used to describe literary works have been defined for women and the ways
in which women writers have responded to these definitions.