My Escape An Autobiography Benoite Groult by Benoite Groult 9781590515440, 1590515447 instant download after payment.

Young people today can’t truly imagine the extraordinary course of history that belonged to women of the twentieth century.

As someone born in 1920, who grew up well behaved in a Catholic institution and who reached adulthood without possessing the legal means of expressing an opinion about my country’s direction (I didn’t have the right to vote until 1945, when I was twenty-five years old!), and who realized, around the age of forty, that I had lived a good part of my life without contraceptives or legal abortion (which is not to say, unfortunately, without abortions),1 without being able to attend the schools of my choice, or attain political power or the higher offices of government, and as someone who did not even possess parental authority over my own children, I know the feeling of being condemned to a never-ending series of obstacles.

At an age when it’s high time to write one’s autobiography, I see my past life as a long march toward an autonomy that always seemed out of reach, and toward an independence that could no longer be limited by others but conquered, step by step, by going in the direction of my choosing.

With Story of an Escape in 1997, I had wanted to take stock of the feminist revolution that sought to transform the lives of women. I also wanted to shake up human relations, and to impact, little by little, men the world over, whether they liked it or not. Rather than my life story, this book was a self-examination, never completely finished since prison bars and fences have a maddening tendency to crop back up again, like bamboo.