In 2012, Christiane Taubira, Guiana’s representative in the French National Assembly, offered this meditation on the French Republic: “It was built on a delightful and wonderful fiction: egalitarianism.”1 In Black French Women and the Struggle for Equality, Larcher and Germain query this fiction, assembling fifteen authors whose interdisciplinary research addresses African and diasporic African women’s lived experiences and their activism in post-abolition France and French Empire. This volume investigates the foundations, evolutions, and contemporary instances of gender- and race-based inequities in a France that is both “former empire and a postcolonial democracy deeply entangled with Africa and the Americas” (xiii). The editors bridge disciplinary boundaries by emphasizing continuities and connections among diverse black French women who challenged their societies and governments to recognize their humanity. This volume contributes to debates concerning public life, French feminism, black internationalism, and the very meaning of Frenchness.
Chapters concerning female politicians, activists, and...