The symptom of "American-style feminism"

This essay is about what French critics of the United States call “American-style feminism” (le féminisme à l’américaine) and the way it has been used in public debate, essays, and media accounts throughout the 1990s. The end of the Vietnam War, the progressive decomposition of the Soviet Bloc, and the liberalization of French political and cultural life in the 1980s had led many to believe that the traditional anti-Americanism of the cultivated elite, especially in its Cold War version, was on its way out. In fact, new sources of hostility toward the United States emerged in the following decade, forcing observers of the French intellectual scene to revise this somewhat hasty diagnosis.