Marine Rouch, Toulouse historian of feminisms and gender, specialist in Simone de Beauvoir and her correspondences, has just published her first book with Flammarion editions: Dear Simone de Beauvoir, Lives and voices of “ordinary” women, cross correspondences 1958-1986 . Meeting with this young 33-year-old author who will sign her book, on November 28 in Saint-Gaudens (L'indépendante bookstore) and in Muret at the media library in January 2025 and at the À demi-mot bookstore, on March 7, 2025.
Where are you taking your readership?
This is not a special dive into the glorious 30s. It is a dialogue that allows us to question current political questions, neocolonialism, feminism: what does it mean to fight together? And question ourselves about having privileges and how to overcome them, in a society which only creates divisions, particularly for minorities. There is real news in reading these letters. With the possibility of integrating them into one's personal life, in terms of questioning existence: giving meaning to our interpersonal relationships, about the impact that we can also have in our society… In particular one's commitment, as a intellectual, in the Algerian war of independence, alongside the Algerian separatists.
Why Beauvoir?
We have talked a lot about Beauvoir, it is a way of entering differently into her journey, through the prism of her readers, to rediscover her commitment and her work. She who appears overbearing is also very engaged with ordinary individuals. We often write the history of great personalities, this work makes history from below, putting at the center the working classes that we forget in our history, even though they are fully part of it. Addressing very intimate things about sexuality, marriage, motherhood, we understand how women lived in this society which was very limited in terms of rights for women. The distress of these women is moving, at a time when our rights are currently in decline around the world.
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