Plaidoyer pour la femme française

First edition, false statement of ninth edition, no deluxe issue printed.

Small marginal tears without significance to the soiled boards.

Presentation copy signed by feminist activist Yvonne Netter of her important essay on the emancipation of women and their right to vote.

After her admission to the bar in 1920, Netter actively fought against the injustice of women's legal situation. While raising her son, she was active within feminist and Zionist organizations, and pursued a flourishing legal career. She wrote hundreds of articles on legal subjects for *La Femme de France* and published articles on family law and civil law in a dozen other journals.

Beyond her campaign for the right to vote – for in 1936 "the French woman is not a citizen" she writes – the present work clearly and eloquently revisits the fundamental themes of family law that she wanted reformed: marriage contracts, divorce, paternal authority, paternity suits, married women's right to dispose of their own income (the 1907 law), and illegitimate children, while also decrying the great difficulties faced by women in obtaining a passport, which could only be issued with their husband's consent. She also quotes examples from current news and legal cases.

This essay, part manifesto and part legal handbook, is a direct response to the difficulties and questions constantly put to her over her decades of private practice: "Frenchwomen, whoever you may be, mothers or single women, shopkeepers or employees, industrialists, ladies of leisure or working women, here is your plea!" (p. 6).

"Yvonne Netter fought bitterly for the right to vote [...]: lectures, demonstrations, throwing bouquets of forget-me-nots along with socks at senators, hurling rice powder at the heads of policemen (she made the powder speak!)" (Christine Bard, "Yvonne Netter (1889-1985): the career of a feminist and Zionist lawyer in the first half of the century in France")