The myth of the Eternal Feminine has always crystallized social behavior and gender relations. . The history of society, mainly written and considered from the angle of the male vision, has contributed to make the woman a second class being relegated to the strict framework of the roles to which she seems to be assigned by nature: the wife, the mother, the housewife, the mistress. Prisoner of male desire, the woman has never ceased, however, according to the times and spaces, to want to assert herself and thus to try to go beyond these roles and to free herself from these bonds which represent so many obstacles for her to succeed in existing, to succeed in “« être au monde ». However, since a woman has sought to get out of her "natural" roles and has asserted an intellectual position, she has become in the eyes of society, suspicious if not dangerous. The simple fact that a woman can participate in social, political, cultural life, disturbs and disrupts the codes predetermined by the ambient phallocratic system. "The rejection of women’s genius is the last retrenchment of those who do not want to give them a place in society," said Madeleine Pelletier. However, genius undoubtedly lives in women's minds. Many women have sought by the past and still seek today to emancipate themselves, to pass over, to resist the misogynist vision. In many fields, women are deploying their skills at the service of Progress and Ideas, at any cost, with the aim of making their freedom of thought the anchor of their freedom of action and to make their freedom to think a way to move society.
This study seeks, in a multi-ethnic, transcontinental and cross-cultural approach, to put a spotlight on women who have imposed themselves / who impose themselves by their ideas and who have, whether in the shade or in the light, managed to conquer sections of society from which they were excluded by putting forward their knowledge, their claims, their ideas.
We want to talk about these women, often pioneers or avant-gardists, who voluntarily or involuntarily, by the implementation of their thought, have subverted the social order, knowingly or not returned the stigmas of their gender by making sometime their feminine attributes the conditions of their success. By their actions, by their writings, they make an act of resistance towards the uniform thought and the doxa which remains arched on the masculine principle like organizing and regulating principle, standing up like fighters of the gender oppression of kind.
The articles will attempt to decipher the issues of identity and gender equality in the humanities and social sciences. How does the feminine community, through its thought and actions, manage to transform representations of women and their place in society and beyond those of the human?
The book in its composition will seek to present this evolution, by highlighting feminine figures of the past but also by analyzing the relationships between women and men and the construction of their identities through different contemporary cultures.
Several types of women may be convened as: women of power, women of influence, women of letter, artists, journalists and reporters, women combatants and women involved in conflict, women politicians or politician women, activists, scientists, sportswomen, musicians, media women, women of justice, everyday heroines, nuns, women in the shadows...