Free

Speakers: Florence Rochefort and Michelle Zancarini-Fournel
In today’s world, several conceptions of secularism compete with each other. To understand this, it is helpful to go back in time looking at the implementation of secularism since the French Revolution.

Today, secularism is centered around girls and women. Since 1989 when the first case of 'a girl wearing a headscarf at school' hit the headlines, this subject has hardly left the public stage and it has clashed with the longstanding feminist claim that women can take control of their bodies. We will examine whether this claim, that women are free to decide what they can or cannot do with their own bodies, is really a secular freedom.