Women, Global Protest Movements, and Political Agency

Rethinking the Legacy of 1968

Sarah Colvin, Katharina Karcher, Sarah Colvin, Katharina Karcher

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351203692
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This volume analyses and historicises the memory of 1968 (understood as a marker of an emerging will for social change around the turn of that decade, rather than as a particular calendar year), focusing on cultural memory of the powerful signifier '68' and women's experience of revolutionary agency.

After an opening interrogation of the historical and contemporary significance of "1968" – why does it still matter? how and why is it remembered in the contexts of gender and geopolitics? and what implications does it have for broader feminist understandings of women and revolutionary agency? – the contributors explore women's historical involvement in "1968" in different parts of the world and the different ways in which women's experience as victims and perpetrators of violence are remembered and understood.

This work will be of great interest to students and scholars of protest and violence in the fields of history, politics and international relations, sociology, cultural studies, and women's studies.

Part I
Gender and cultural memory

1
Remembering 1968

Feminist perspectives

Kristina Schulz

It is difficult to determine the exact moment when a social movement comes into being. The process of formation is open, not linear, and its structures not yet contoured. Once a social movement has come into existence, however, the question of the ‘birth’ of that movement concerns, even perhaps – haunts – its activists. They strive to establish a consensual and valid version of the movement’s past in order to design its future, to legitimate its mobilisation strategy and its decision-making structures. Who can legitimately speak for, of, the movement is a crucial question, closely linked to the problem of its origins.

All that holds true for the women’s liberation movements in Western Europe and the US, whose relationship to the 1968 protest movement was fiercely contested – from the inside as much as from without. The internal ‘memory contest’ (Fuchs and Cosgrove 2006: 164; see also Fuchs, Cosgrove, and Grote 2006) was a conscious one.¹ Those who intervened referred to very concrete persons, texts, and groups, which they celebrated as the ‘founders’ of the movement. As for the two cases discussed in this paper: France and West Germany, the conflict about the movement’s origin divided the women’s liberation movement itself in a fundamental way. The controversies were expressions of diverging, concurrent attempts to challenge dominant schemes of perception about the ‘gender order’, that is, the ways in which societies shape notions of masculinity and femininity through power relations, as Connell (1995) would later theorise it.

This chapter explores the struggles over the symbolic significance of ‘1968’² that have simultaneously, I shall argue, been struggles around the ‘why’ and the ‘how’ of feminist activism. Earlier accounts of the formation period of the women’s liberation movement, my own included (Schulz 2002, 2014), have focused on the continuities between the student movement and the women’s movement in terms of individual participation, groups, practices, and ideas. In fact, in Western societies, most of the leaders of second-wave feminism took part in the upheavals and youth cultures around 1968, and many of its supporters recall having been politicised by the events. Also, some important groups and networks that constituted the women’s liberation movement in the early 1970s arose in the context of the extraordinary dynamic triggered by the protest movements of the late 1960s. Their action repertoire, including provocative forms, spontaneous gatherings, and scepticism of traditional forms of organisation and institutionalisation, was built upon the experiences of the student movement. Finally, key concepts of the 1968 protest movements, such as ‘participatory democracy’ or ‘sexual liberation’ provided a critical impetus to rethink women’s place in society and in the New Left.

This chapter will foreground the function of ‘1968’ as a symbol and point of reference for feminist activists. Focusing on the sources that underpinned the women’s liberation movement (statements made by its well-known representatives, the feminist press of the 1970s, as well as pamphlets, almanacks, year-books, etc.), I shall explore how judgements on and memories of 1968 structured feminist debates and feminist politics in France and West Germany, including the discussion of violence against women.

The theoretical framework that I develop in this essay is based on my earlier work on the French and the West German cases (Schulz 2002), and can offer critical insights into debates, developments, and controversies in feminist movements beyond this geopolitical context. Usually feminist movements are divided into different periods (‘waves’) and ideological strands (e.g. radical, socialist, and liberal feminism). Rather than prioritising ideological differences, this chapter explores two competing feminist transformation strategies in feminist movements since the 1960s. Groups and individuals associated with the ‘cultural’ approach to the transformation of society have tried to challenge patriarchal structures in the cultural domain by giving femininity and women’s creative potential a voice. The ‘social’ approach, by contrast, sought to challenge patriarchal structures by enforcing social and legal equality. As the comparative analysis of feminist movements in France and Germany in this chapter illustrates, the two approaches did not only imply different strategies for working towards a feminist future but also different narratives on the feminist past and the relevance of 1968 to feminist activism.

Debating the ‘origins’ of the French women’s liberation movement

In France, the women’s liberation movement grew into an important social movement during the early 1970s (Touraine 1982). It was initially linked to the struggle over reproductive rights and to the decriminalisation of abortion specifically. The French women’s liberation movement intervened in a public discourse on reproduction that had emerged during the second half of the 1950s around the issue of contraception. By 1969, when a new law on contraception came into force (called the Loi Neuwirth), abortion was mainly considered a medical and ethical problem. The women’s liberation movement altered the public debate by framing abortion in the context of female emancipation and self-determination (Pavard 2012: 135). Feminist activists published a manifesto in the Nouvel Observateur in April 1971, signed by 343 women who declared they had had an abortion (Nouvel Observateur 1971). Some of the signatories were famous personalities in the film business or intellectuals such as Catherine Deneuve, Monique Wittig, and Simone de Beauvoir. By signing the manifesto, they showed solidarity with the many ‘nameless’ women who suffered criminalisation, disdain, and/or medical problems because they had secret abortions in unhygienic conditions. The manifesto, ridiculed as the ‘manifesto of the 343 sluts’ (‘manifest des 343 saloppes’), launched an extraordinary mobilisation dynamic, in Paris as well as in the French provinces. After the adoption of a liberalised abortion law in 1974 (called the Loi Veil), differences within the movement became more visible, as the search for a new orientation went on.

The controversy about the place of 1968 in feminism’s past and present was part of arousing conflicts between different wings of the movement. It can be studied in a paradigmatic way through the interventions of two leading figures who could both, through their early engagements with feminist ideas and circles, legitimately claim to give competent answers: Antoinette Fouque and Christine Delphy. Their differences were not about finding out whose memory was closer to the historical ‘truth’. As students of social sciences and humanities, bathing in the intellectual discourse of their time, the reception of Maurice Halbwachs’ works on ‘collective memory’ (Halbwachs 1992 [1925]) and, in the early 1980s, of Eric Hobsbawm’s and Terence Ranger’s Invention of Tradition (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983) included, both women were aware of the social constructedness of memory and identity. Thus, the controversy about the history of feminism was not primarily about historical facts, but about their weighting. As a consequence, from the end of the 1970s, two narratives about the origins of the French women’s liberation movement competed within the movement: one narrative that assigned great importance to the social upheavals of the ‘French May’ and another that was reluctant to acknowledge their significance.

Antoinette Fouque (1936–2014) represented the first position. Born in Marseille as the daughter of a Corsican syndicalist and an immigrant worker from Italy, Fouque (born Gugnardi) worked as a journalist and a lecturer in Paris. She had started university in the late 1960s. Fouque was inspired by the post-war debates about female sexuality that were taking place in the psychoanalytical community at that time (Chasseguet-Smirgel 1964). Soon she discovered the work of Jacques Lacan, and in 1969 attended Lacan’s lectures at the University of Vincennes (Paris VIII) where she eventually began to study psychoanalysis with him (Roudinesco 1986). In 1972 she founded the first women’s bookshop in France, the ‘librarie des femmes’, alongside what would become an equally distinguished publishing house, also called ‘Des femmes’. Later in the 1970s, Fouque registered the name MLF (an acronym for Mouvement de libération des femmes) as the property of her group. This act of appropriation was widely contested within feminist circles (Association du mouvement pour les luttes féministes 1981).

Fouque’s version of the founding story of the French women’s liberation movement started in 1968. In a talk she gave at a conference on social movements in Cerisy-la-Salle in 1979 she recalled: ‘In the beginnings, in October 1968, we were three; […] three women, daughters of the antiauthoritarian revolt of May 68, each impatient to bring more women together’ (Fouque 1982: 226).³ The circle she referred to soon became the group psychanalyse et politique (psychoanalysis and politics, psy & po). The University of Vincennes was the sphere of action of Michel Foucault, Hélène Cixous, Jacques Derrida, and Jaques Lacan’s students. Affected by that intellectual and political climate, psy & po initiated an ongoing debate about the political implications of psychoanalysis and the transformation of the symbolic order.

Defending the idea that ‘1968’ brought the women’s liberation movement into life, Fouque describes the protests as the beginning of a ‘new era’. For her, the two years between 1968 and 1970 had been a period of fruitful reflection after the ‘awakening’, the ‘explosion’, the ‘cry’, and the ‘rebirth’ that ‘1968’ represented. Fouque emphasises the meaning of ‘1968’ as a ‘symbolic revolution’ (Fouque 1995: 15). According to her, this symbolic revolution made it possible to overcome the dominant phallocentric paradigm, replacing it with new ideas about femininity and female sexuality.

The opposite position was held by Christine Delphy. Born in Paris in 1941, Delphy studied social sciences at the Sorbonne and the Ecole Normale Supérieur (Jackson 1996). She spent time in the United States at the end of the 1960s and was involved in the civil rights movement, as part of an organisation called the Washington Urban League. After her return to France she assisted in the protest movement of May 68 and joined the group Feminin Masculin Avenir (FMA, which later became Feminisme Marxisme Action). FMA had been founded in 1967 as a discussion group within the socialist Women’s Democratic Movement (Mouvement démocratique féminin). It benefited from the move of the socialist party’s attention towards women during François Mitterrand’s presidential campaign in 1965 (which he lost to Charles de Gaulle; Mitterrand would only become president in 1981).⁴ The women (and few men) associated with FMA were interested in reading and debating recently published studies about the situation of women in society, such as Andrée Michel’s and Geneviève Texier’s La condition de la Française d’aujourd’hui (Michel and Texier 1964). They also reconsidered Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949), a hugely influential book for feminists at that time (Chaperon 2017). The members of FMA were overwhelmed by the events of what became to be known as the ‘French May’: the mobilisation of a social movement that united students and workers and led to a general strike that paralysed the whole country for over a fortnight. During those events, the members of FMA organised a public meeting in the Sorbonne at short notice in early June 1968, after which the group grew rapidly. But, as for so many other committees and initiatives, the dynamic of mobilisation was disturbed by violent confrontations between the protest movement and police forces, who wanted to end the occupation of public institutions and places and to put an end to strikes, and the August summer break followed, when Parisians and students traditionally leave Paris. In autumn, only a couple of activists returned to join FMA. Christine Delphy was one of them. In 1970, she published her essay ‘The main enemy’ (‘L’ennemie principal’; Delphy 1980b).

Delphy is recognised nowadays as a leading figure in French feminist theory, identified with a materialist approach. Her interpretation of the significance of 1968 for the women’s movement differed strongly from Fouque’s. In an article published in the feminist review Questions féministes in 1980, Delphy announced: ‘Women’s liberation: the tenth year’ (Delphy 1980a: 3).⁵ By this she referred to 1970 as the founding year of the MLF, as well as to its first collective work: a special issue of the New Left review, Partisans, called ‘Women’s Liberation: Year Zero’,⁶ published in the autumn of 1970 (Partisans 1970). From Delphy’s point of view, the French women’s liberation movement had been the product of a fusion between different groups and individuals since the spring of 1970. Here and in her essay ‘The origins of the women’s liberation movement in France’ (Delphy 1991) she defended the idea that the movement developed against the ‘spirit of 68’. In particular, she contends that the project of the so-called ‘sexual revolution’ was a ‘trap for women’ (‘une piège pour les femmes’). The sexual revolution proclaimed in 1968, she argued in Libération, was nothing more than a ‘hygienist, simplistic, masculine conception’, in which women served as the ‘receptacle’ (Delphy 1998). Feminists in other countries expressed similar views: Andrea Hajek and Chris Reynolds argue in the chapters that follow that second-wave feminism in Italy and Northern Ireland developed despite and not thanks to 1968; and in the feminist movement in the Federal Republic of Germany, the question of the relationship to the 1968 movement was as controversial and divisive as in France.

1968, abortion, and the women’s liberation movement in the Federal Republic

In West Germany as well as in France and other Western societies, the women’s liberation movement gained growing public visi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Introduction: 1968 – the year that rocked whose world?
• PART I Gender and cultural memory
• PART II Violence and/as counterviolence
• PART III Women as violent actors
• Index