Abstract EN:

This is a research on the formation of a feminist consciousness in 19nth century Greece. It focuses on the changing process of the objective conditions of women's lives, among the urban middle class, during the transition from tradition to westernization and capitalism. It studies the reorganisation of the social relations of the sexes, the new definitions of sexual difference, the establishment of a new mode of gender domination, within the idependent greek nation. It tries to grasp the contradictory dynamics of these transformations which, on the one hand constituted important factors of women's isolation, exclusion and reification while, on the other hand, enabled middle class women to arrive at an awareness of their opression as a social group. The first part focuses on middle class women's objective position, on the articulation of the new economic and social relations with the status of these women. The second part focuses on the multiple ways in which urban middle class women bypassed, subverted or compromised with these objective determinations, how they came to developp a sense of gender belonging and common interrests, how they came to developp a "gender consciousness". It suggests that although this consciousness did not automatically lead to feminism, it constituted a necessary stage for its appearence. Finally, through a content analysis of the ladies newspaper, the first feminist weekly in greece, this work studies feminist consciousness in its making, focusing on a central and problematic feature: the tension between difference and equality.