A French Feminist Tells Us to Embrace Our Inner Hag

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/08/books/review/mona-chollet-in-defense-of-witches.html

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IN DEFENSE OF WITCHESThe Legacy of the Witch Hunts and Why Women Are Still on TrialBy Mona CholletTranslated by Sophie R. Lewis

Catalonia’s left-leaning Parliament recently passed a resolution pardoning the hundreds of women executed as witches between the 15th and 18th centuries. A similar bill is making its way through the Scottish Parliament. Both were inspired by growing outrage about historical — and contemporary — femicide and by a post-MeToo impulse to honor women who were burned, hanged or drowned as heretics.

This same spirit of exoneration runs through “In Defense of Witches,” a thought-provoking, discursive survey by Mona Chollet, a bright light of Francophone feminism. Chollet celebrates not only the witches of the past, but also the so-called “witches” of today: independent women who have chosen not to have children, aren’t always coupled, often defy traditional beauty norms (letting their hair go gray), and thus operate outside the established social order. That’s especially true in France, which may celebrate the femme libre, but which, from its tax laws to its robust public day care, is built to promote the family and motherhood. It is also, not incidentally, a country where a certain vision of femininity supports the economy through the biggest beauty industry in the world.

Clearly, Chollet has struck a nerve. “In Defense of Witches,” her first book to appear in English, was a best seller when it came out in France in 2018. A Swiss-born journalist and an editor at Le Monde Diplomatique, she has grown a following with work that calls attention to sexism, the gender gap in salaries and the societal pressures placed on French women in a culture with clear ideas about how women are expected to look and act — and of course to make it all look effortless. Anglo-American women have long been obsessed by clichés of French femininity. (Today that’s perhaps best exemplified by the series “Emily in Paris,” in which a naïve American is inducted into the worldly ways of the French.) But in today’s real France, Chollet has emerged as a quiet revolutionary, pushing back against the clichés and the patriarchy that shapes them.

And as an embodiment of female power and resistance to male domination, what better figure than the witch? Since Chollet’s childhood, the word “has had a magnetic hold on me,” she writes. “Something about it fizzes with energy. The word speaks of a knowledge that lies close to the ground, a vital power, an accumulated force of experience that official sources disdain or repress.”

“In Defense of Witches” explores how women who assert their powers are too often seen as a threat to men and society, how those who don’t bear children are too often seen as a disturbing anomaly and how women at middle age too often disappear. These days they’re not burned at the stake but sidelined at work by the insidious invisible hand of midcareer misogyny, or by standards of beauty that place a higher premium on youth, with women’s “expiry date” tied to their fertility. Sometimes, by choice or by circumstance, a woman becomes what Chollet calls a “femme fondue,” or dissolving woman, who becomes overwhelmed by “the service reflex” and disappears into motherhood or child care, losing her grip on the first person.

Chollet is particularly hard on men who dump their wives for far younger women. In a chapter titled “Shattering the Image of the Old Hag,” she quotes the late, great Carrie Fisher, who before she died at 60 once observed: “Men don’t age better than women, they’re just allowed to age.” For the witches of the past — who are a through-line in the book — and women of today, what still seems “most problematic about women’s aging is their experience,” Chollet writes. But this experience doesn’t always lead to confidence. “A woman who is self-assured, who asserts her opinions, her desires and dislikes, is very swiftly written off as a harpy, a virago, by both her partner and her peers.”

Above all, “In Defense of Witches” explores what it means for a woman not to have children, and how women can find a positive identity without motherhood. In a chapter called “Wanting Sterility,” Chollet explains her own choice not to have children: because she has misgivings about civilization and the environmental impact, as well as for more personal reasons. “Nothing on earth could persuade me to guide a new person through those terrible ordeals known as childhood and adolescence,” she writes.

Chollet’s scope here is largely circumscribed to women who could have children but choose not to. She barely mentions those women who decide against children because they can’t afford them, or because their partners don’t want them, or because they lack easy access to fertility treatments — which France legalized for single women and lesbians only last summer, following a years-long fight over bioethics. For a woman not to have children in a country with some of the best maternity benefits in the world definitely means flying against the wind. (She also does not address the experience of trans people.)

Although Chollet draws on French sources — Simone de Beauvoir’s “The Second Sex” remains a foundational text — much of her vocabulary comes from the Anglosphere, popularizing American-style feminist thinking for French audiences. “In Defense of Witches” is a kind of French answer to Rebecca Traister’s 2016 “All the Single Ladies,” which Chollet cites admiringly. She also references Gloria Steinem, Susan Faludi, Adrienne Rich, Susan Sontag, Elizabeth Gilbert, Audre Lorde and Rebecca Solnit.

Chollet’s style is accessible. She mixes personal experience with astute analysis of pop culture, leavened but not dominated by feminist theory. Her tone is one of self-aware curiosity. She is a journalist, not a polemicist. (Sophie R. Lewis’s translation into British English is crisp; the book itself would have benefited from a more rigorous edit.) “In Defense of Witches” has resonated in France for its exculpatory effect; it’s helped remove stigmas and made women feel recognized. In Le Monde, the journalist Valentine Faure defined Chollet’s work as aimed at “personal political development: liberating and encouraging revolt, but through changing oneself as much as through changing the world.”

Still, for all Chollet’s endeavors to reclaim the witch as a positive symbol, I frankly wish we could retire the role. Can’t we come up with a better term? Chollet’s entire project underscores the paucity of our vocabulary for describing womanhood outside biology or family. Her most recent book, “Réinventer L’Amour,” or “Reinventing Love” has a chapter titled “‘Making Yourself Small’ to Be Loved?,” which highlights French magazine covers in which Carla Bruni appears no taller than her husband, the former French president Nicolas Sarkozy. It has shared space on best-seller lists with the latest jeremiad by Éric Zemmour, a television pundit turned far-right presidential candidate who has often lamented how the empowerment of women to roles beyond motherhood has weakened French society. The sociologist Emmanuel Todd has made headlines this year with a book in which he criticizes contemporary feminism, claims the patriarchy never existed, and says women shouldn’t see men as antagonists and aggressors — all that fuss about femicide! — but as necessary partners in the struggle against economic collapse.

The feminist backlash to his book has been harsh. In light of these atmospherics, Chollet’s work has broken ground and provided important pushback. “In Defense of Witches” demonstrates that a woman’s decision to go against the grain — especially by not having children — inevitably becomes a political act, even an act of resistance.