Une Biographie Critique de Marie-Thérèse Eyquem : Pionnière du Sport, du Féminisme, et de la Politique

Abstract

This thesis explores in the form of a critical biography the life trajectory of Marie-Thérèse Eyquem (1913-1978). As sports administrator under the Vichy regime, author, feminist, and Socialist activist under Pres. François Mitterrand, Eyquem worked in a variety of social, political spaces where she exerted considerable influence. In this thesis, I argue over the course of five chapters that Eyquem claims a model of women’s liberation distinguished from the dominant model of the female intellectual and writer: that of the sportswoman and the institution builder. In her political work, her personal life, and her writing Eyquem embodies this alternate way of thinking about the autonomous woman. Eyquem played a little known and crucial role in the fight for legalizing women’s reproductive rights. Further, in each chapter save the first I compare Eyquem to her better-known contemporaries in the rhetorical form of a diptych. This technique allows me to nuance her life through comparison and understand her decisions as part of a network of larger social relations. In this biographical thesis I aim to contribute to the only existing work on Eyquem’s life (Florys Castan Vicente, 2009). My structure and focus on Eyquem’s feminist model provides a more complete portrait of Eyquem’s influential life and contributions while it adds to ongoing debates in feminist thought.