In May 1981, François Mitterrand appoints Yvette Roudy Minister Minister for Women’s Rights and provides her portfolio with a real budget. A year later, he invited 400 women to the Elysée to celebrate, for the first time in France, the International Women’s Day, which has become the International Women’s Rights Day today. In L’Express, Sylviane Stein explains how, behind the “Elysée label” granted to this celebration, French feminist movements are with pulled knives.
In the Express of March 5, 1982
The Élysée label
After the time of success, feminist movements are tearing themselves apart. Power offers them a rattle.
If there are men who will make a funny head on Monday around 11:30 am, when 400 women invest the Perron of the Elysée, it is indeed the Marseille taxi drivers. Drown in the mass of guests, the silhouette of Alice Soscia, this investigator who managed to slip into their profession – forbidden women, in Marseille, until 1977 – will take advantage of the advice of the wisdom of the “Return to make your dishes!” And “you eat our bread!”.
For once, we receive not heads of state to the presidency, but women, active or mothers, representing more than 27 million citizens, with whom François Mitterrand will inaugurate the International Women’s Day. A celebration that dates from 1910, a souvenir of a strike by American workers which ended in a bloodbath, celebrated, until now, in official gravity by popular democracies and as a provocation by Western feminists. Of which the French, who had made their 14-July 14 for five years from March 8.
Why, then, this desire on the part of the government to want to formalize the thing? In a clumsy statement, disseminated by the services of Yvette Roudy, at the beginning of the month, we learn that this decision appeared all the more normal since, “for the first time since they voted, women have mainly contributed to the change of power” … It would therefore be to thank them for the service rendered that this rattle would have been granted to the French.
However, since May 10, Yvette Roudy, full minister, unlike her predecessors in this position which had neither budget nor portfolio, worked hand in hand with feminists. These are, for example, activists from the League for Women’s Law, created, in 1974, around Simone de Beauvoir, who animated internships intended to raise awareness among the police of the police in the police stations of women victims of violence. It is also the antisexist bill, drawn up, improved, claimed by several feminist groups, including the Choose De Gisèle Halimi movement, and the League for Women’s Law. It will be presented this fall in Parliament, at the same time as a bill on the equality of men and women before hiring.
All of this should delight activists from the start, despite the reproaches of “lack of imagination” that these former left seventy-eight do to their minister. They are, alas! Too busy paying for their internal disputes to make them their honey.
Because their divergences, which was in the hand, materialized in hatred on a beautiful day in 1979, when psychoanalysis and politics, a group of the informal movement of women has deposited, as ceremoniously as a noodle manufacturer, “its” brand, MLF, at the Institute of Industrial Property. It is therefore now forbidden to anyone to use this acronym without the consent of its owner, under penalty of prosecution … “It is as if someone, one day, had deposited the Mouvement Ouvrier brand, to protect it, it does not make sense!” Fulminates the “other” movement. Designated by Simone de Beauvoir as a “sect of anti-feminist feminists” … This “MLF-exposed”, as we nicknamed it with derision in the other camp, cultivates its respectability behind the green facade of Editions of Women. It was he who called for a female strike on March 8, which lined the walls of the cities with large posters “the strength of being women”, which publishes the weekly Moving women.
Aging feminism
On the evening of May 10, the other MLF, which claims the purity of the origins, almost exploded in two: some of its activists-including Simone Iff, ex-animator of the family planning today Yvette Roudy’s advisor-wanted to organize a feminist federation on the model of that of ecologists, to counter the “deposited”, and to make only one voice to this government contributed to bring to power. A project that remained without a tomorrow, because none saw the gluttony hydra of political upholders were looming …
Without being able to exist publicly, for lack of themes as mobilizing as rape, contraception or abortion, that the legislation made deciduous, the “movement” began to think and work. The arrival of the left provided him with a few subsidies: half a side to pay a permanent permanent of the recent house of women in Paris, but above all, a few hundred thousand francs for three larger projects: the creation of a center of research and feminist information-which will be, on occasion, a laboratory of ideas for the ministry; A video center, hosted by Delphine Seyrig; The launch of a large survey on the economic and ideological benefits of sexist advertising.
But so much entrepreneurial spirit manages to hide either the lack of enthusiasm of the troops or the little interest that aging feminism arouses outside the small circle of its faithful. “The upheavals that this movement caused were too heavy for him,” said a longtime activist. Never, however, he was so likely to flourish, encouraged that it is by the very convictions of the socialists. But what revolution has never survived a national holiday?