Women and Politics in France 1958-2000

Dr Gill Allwood, Gill Allwood, Dr Khursheed Wadia, Khursheed Wadia

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN: 9781134667697
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

An essential guide to the role of women in the political life of France under the Fifth Republic. It shows that the unique political history of France ensures that it remains an important and exceptional example of women's participation in the politics of a Western European country. Its study is essential in order to have a complete understanding of women and politics today. This is the first English language study to capture the new enthusiasm engendered by the campaign for parity in 1992 which produced constitutional reform and a record number of deputies and ministers.

1 Women and the state

In traditional political science, the state has long been regarded as a privileged site of political participation and representative democracy. Hence, apart from focusing on voting, parties and pressure groups, studies of political participation have emphasised the importance of involvement in state structures and processes in order to assess the contribution of various social groups or classes to the preservation or transformation of political life and of society in general. In examining political participation in the state, traditional political science has paid very little, if any, attention to women’s political involvement. On the basis of crude sex-stereotyping, it has argued that women are uninterested in, uninformed about or psychologically unsuited to politics and therefore, that their levels of participation are low and by implication unworthy of study. The French political scientist, Maurice Duverger, who synthesised the findings of a UNESCO-funded survey in the 1950s of women’s political participation in France, the German Federal Republic, Norway and Yugoslavia, noted, ‘the survey seems to have encountered… a certain degree of indifference. The political scientists and most of the organisations invited to supply information often tended to regard its purpose as a secondary one, of no intrinsic importance’ (1955b: 8). Such indifference and dismissiveness were also clearly demonstrated by Mattei Dogan (1955: 292) who studied the social background of deputies elected in June 1951, but who refused to include women, arguing that not only did they form a mere 3.5 per cent of deputies but that most of them were housewives rather than profession-holders. Where traditional political science has shown an interest in women, it has only done so in order to demonstrate women’s similarity to or difference from men’s political behaviour (taken to be the norm) within a strictly defined ‘political’ sphere. For example, Duverger’s study, mentioned above, does just that.

The contention that traditional political science has defined ‘politics’ and political activity to include a set of roles which are male stereotypes did not gain currency until the beginning of the 1970s when burgeoning women’s movements across the industrialised world began challenging sex-roles generally, and the differentiation that these roles reproduced in the political sphere. Feminist academics and activists in France and elsewhere¹ challenged the type of data chosen by traditional political science in its analysis of women’s participation and the interpretations which flowed from such analysis. In 1965, Andrée Michel wrote in criticism of political scientists:

The majority of works within this new [political] science emphasise the study of political behaviour more or less exclusively in the context of political parties. It is from such an angle that Dogan and Narbonne, [and] Maurice Duverger study the political behaviour of women (electoral behaviour, the presence of women in parties, female candidatures, the activity of elected women representatives, etc.).

(61)

In contrast to traditional political scientists, feminists sought different reasons to explain the disparities in political participation of men and women, reasons which did not place the blame for women’s under-participation on their supposed lack of knowledge or interest. They questioned not only the interconnection between roles, status and power distribution in politics but also the definition of politics itself, and in doing so they rejected politics as an activity only carried out within the restricted sphere of state institutions, parties and elections (sites of representative democracy). Since its beginnings, the women’s movement set out to enlarge the definition of politics to include feminist activism in favour of women’s rights. Feminists, engaged in the study of activity and activism beyond traditionally defined politics, deliberately chose to act (without men) outside that restricted patriarchal domain:

In opting for separatism, in affirming the principle according to which the struggle against oppression belongs to the oppressed themselves… the feminist movement of the early 1970s had brought about a fundamental break in the traditional conception of politics. But there is another central idea within feminism which is that, in order to understand as well as to fight women’s oppression, one cannot build on any form of existing ‘top-down’ social analysis: one has to ‘build collectively from below’.

(Viennot 1984: 167)

This approach held sway throughout much of the 1970s. However, in the 1980s a new interest in women’s participation in formal political structures, in particular the state, emerged amongst feminist academics and activists. Again, this is as true for France as for other countries. A number of reasons explain this emergence of interest in the state.

First, the post-1968 feminist movement had started to disintegrate by the late 1970s as a result of internal dissension over ideology and strategy.

This left a sizeable proportion of women activists who were prepared to reconsider more traditional or formal ways of acting politically. Although the women’s movement had been ‘anti-state’ it had nevertheless made demands on the state to further women’s rights, and in making demands a large number of feminists had found themselves dealing with parliamentary parties or state agencies which could be influenced and which had, in return, influenced them.

Second, the conjunction of women’s growing presence within education and the labour market and the influence of feminist ideas had pushed thousands of ordinary women out of the private sphere of the home into the public arena and the further this process continued, the more women saw themselves as holding a stake in society. Consequently women outside the feminist movement gained a greater interest in traditional policy agendas onto which so-called ‘private’ issues (such as abortion and contraception, violence against women, divorce, etc.) had been placed in the 1970s. In the 1980s, then, there emerged a desire to further influence such agendas by reshaping the existing organisation of public roles. Also, at the same time, male politicians were having to re-examine the needs of their women constituents who were not the passive and private beings that they had always perceived.

Third, in France, the establishment of a Ministry of Women’s Rights in 1981 focused public attention, whether critical or supportive, on the relationship between women and the state as never before. The choice of title, ‘ministry’, indicated that the state was approaching the aspirations, experiences, interests, and rights of women in a more dynamic way than it had done in its previous history. The new Minister for Women’s Rights, Yvette Roudy, stated that the ministry would represent a permanent dialogue between French women and the state: ‘The moment a group exists, an association is registered, in short can be identified, as soon as there are people who have faces, a constitution, they must be recognised and a dialogue must begin’ (Ducrocq 1985: 64). The construction of this dialogue was to be based on feminist demands to empower women’s associations through the allocation of real resources,² to fund specific projects (e.g. the Maison des femmes and the Simone de Beauvoir Audio-Visual Centre in Paris), to establish vocational training programmes, especially in new technologies, to introduce feminist studies and research in higher education and to extend women’s rights through legislation.

Fourth, initiatives throughout the 1980s and 1990s, at European³ and international level,⁴ to encourage the presence of women in the state have helped to create a climate within which the question of women’s political participation in the highest decision-making bodies cannot be avoided by established parties and politicians.

The increased interest among feminist academics and activists in women’s engagement with the state has led, in the 1990s, to a gradual development in feminist theory of a different conceptualisation of the (liberal democratic) state as either a privileged public political space or at least one which cannot be ignored, in which women (among other ‘different’ and under-represented interests) can contribute to the revitalisation of democracy and citizenship and where the realisation of feminist ideals can be pursued.⁵ However, on the whole very few feminist academics,⁶ whether French or otherwise, have made the state a central part of their concerns and consequently a distinct and coherent set of feminist theories of the state has still to emerge.

In France, the 1980s and 1990s have produced numerous works on women, democracy and citizenship in the context of the debate on parity (see Chapters 8 and 9), a number of works on what one might conveniently term ‘state feminism’ (Batiot 1986, Jenson 1987, Mazur 1995a, 1995b, and 1996, Mossuz-Lavau 1986, Stetson 1987) and an abundant literature (comprising empirical analysis, essays, biographies and autobiographical accounts by women who have held decision-making responsibilities within state structures) on women and decision-making (Adler 1993, Gaspard 1996, Jensen and Sineau 1995, Mossuz-Lavau and Sineau 1983, Sineau 1988).⁷ While none of these works focuses exclusively on the state, together they provide a bank of information, albeit far from complete, and analyses from which a picture of women’s participation in the state can be constructed and developed. The importance of the state in traditional political science studies of politics and political participation, and the recently developed interest within feminism in the state’s structures and processes, as outlined above, constitute the rationale for considering the question of women’s involvement with state structures and processes in Fifth Republic France.

The aim of this chapter is threefold. Its main aim is to assess the extent of women’s participation in decision-making state structures at national and sub-national level. But it also considers, albeit briefly, the type of roles that women have played within these structures, and the issue of their performance. T...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Acronyms and abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1: Women and the state
• 2: Women and the political parties
• 3: Women and the trade unions
• 4: Electoral behaviour and attitudes
• 5: Explaining women’s absence from politics
• 6: Women’s political activity in the ecology movement and coordinations
• 7: Feminist politics
• 8: Increasing women’s political representation
• 9: Parity, democracy and citizenship
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography