Feminism in France

Feminism in France founds its origins in the French Revolution. A few famous figures emerged during the 1871 Paris Commune, among whom Louise Michel, Russian-born Elisabeth Dmitrieff, Nathalie Lemel and Renée Vivien.

French Revolution

Further information: French Revolution

In November 1789, at the very beginning of the Revolution, a Women's Petition was adressed to the National Assembly. However, it was not discussed. Although various feminist movements emerged during the Revolution, most politicans stood on Rousseau's bases outlined in L'Emile, which confined women to the role of mothers and spouses. Condorcet was a notable exception to the rule.

Claude Dansart founded in 1790 the Société fraternelle de l'un et l'autre sexe (Fraternal Society of one and the other Sex), which included Etta Palm d'Aelders, Jacques Hébert, Louise-Félicité de Kéralio, Pauline Léon, Théroigne de Méricourt, Manon Roland, Talien and Merlin de Thionville. The following year, Olympe de Gouges published the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen, a letter adressed to Queen Marie Antoinette which requested actions in favour of women's rights. Gouges ended up guillotined.

In February 1793, Pauline Léon and Claire Lacombe created the Société des républicaines révolutionnaires (Society of Revolutionary Republicans — the final "e" implicitly refering to Republican Women), which boasted 200 exclusively female members. Qualified by the historian Daniel Guérin as a sort of "feminist section of the Enragés" , they participated to the fall of the Girondins. Lacombe advocated arming of the women. The Society, however, was outlawed by the revolutionary government on the following year.

From the Restoration to the Second Republic

The feminist movement developed itself again in Socialist movements of the Romantic generation, in particular among Parisian Saint-Simonians. Women freely adopted new life-styles, susciting indignation of the public opinion. They claimed equality of rights and participated to the abundant literary activity, for instance with Claire Démar's Appel au peuple sur l'affranchissement de la femme (1833) feminist pamphlet. On the other hand, Charles Fourier's Utopian Socialist theory of passions advocated "free love." His architectural model of the phalanstère community explicitly took into account women's emancipation.

The Bourbon Restoration re-established the prohibition of divorce in 1816. Then, since the July Monarchy restricted the political rights of the majority of the population, the feminist struggle rejoined the Republican and Socialist struggle for a "Democratic and Social Republic," leading to the 1848 Revolution and the proclamation of the Second Republic.

The 1848 Revolution became the occasion of a public expression of the feminist movement, who organized itself in various associations. Women's political activities led several of them to be proscripted as the other Forty-Eighters.

The Commune

Further information: Paris Commune

Some women organized a feminist movement during the Commune, following on from earlier attempts in 1789 and 1848. Thus, Nathalie Lemel, a socialist bookbinder, and Élisabeth Dmitrieff, a young Russian exile and member of the Russian section of the First International (IWA), created the Union des femmes pour la défense de Paris et les soins aux blessés ("Women's Union for the Defense of Paris and Care of the Injured") on 11 April 1871. The feminist writer André Léo, a friend of Paule Minck, also was active in the Women's Union. Believing that their struggle against patriarchy could only be followed in the frame of a global struggle against capitalism, the association demanded gender-equality, wages' equality, right of divorce for women, right to secular education and for professional education for girls. They also demanded suppression of the distinction between married women and concubines, between legitimate and natural children, the abolition of prostitution (obtaining the closing of the maisons de tolérance, or legal official brothels). The Women's Union also participated in several municipal commissions and organized cooperative workshops. Along with Eugène Varlin, Nathalie Le Mel created the cooperative restaurant La Marmite, which served free food for indigents, and then fighted during the Bloody Week on the barricades On the other hand, Paule Minck opened a free school in the Church of Saint Pierre de Montmartre, and animated the Club Saint-Sulpice on the Left Bank . The Russian Anne Jaclard, who declined to marry Dostoievsky and finally became the wife of Blanquist activist Victor Jaclard, founded with André Léo the newspaper La Sociale. She was also a member of the Comité de vigilance de Montmartre, along with Louise Michel and Paule Minck, as well as of the Russian section of the First International. Victorine Brocher, close to the IWA activists, and founder of a cooperative bakerie in 1867, also fought during the Commune and the Bloody Week .

Famous figures such as Louise Michel, the "Red Virgin of Montmartre" who joined the National Guard and would later be sent to New Caledonia, symbolize the active participation of a small number of women in the insurrectionary events. A female battalion from the National Guard defended the Place Blanche during the repression.

20th century

Despite some cultural changes following World War I, which had witnessed women replacing men, gone to the front, as workers, the Années folles and their exuberance was restricted to a very small group of female elites. Victor Margueritte's La Garçonne (The Flapper, 1922), depicting an emancipated woman, was seen as scandalous and caused him to lose his Légion d'honneur.

Women obtained the right to vote only with the Provisional Government of the French Republic (GPRF)'s ordinance of 1944. Despite some forerunners such as Simone de Beauvoir, who published The Second Sex in 1949, a strong feminist movement would only emerged in the aftermaths of May '68, with the creation of the Mouvement de libération des femmes (Women's Liberation Movement, MLF), allegedly by Antoinette Fouquette, Monique Wittig and Josiane Chanel in 1968. The name itself was given by the press, in reference to the US Women's Lib movement. In the frame of the cultural and social changes occurred during the Fifth Republic — more and more women beginning to work — they advocated the right of autonomy from their husbands, right to contraception and to abortion.

In 1971 the feminist lawyer Gisèle Halimi founded the group Choisir ("To Chose"), to protect the women who had signed the Manifesto of the 343 (Manifeste des 343 salopes, Manifest of the 343 bitches) admitting to have practices illegal abortions and therefore exposing themselves to judicial actions and prison sentences . The Manifesto had been published in Le Nouvel Observateur on 5 April 1971. In 1972 Choisir formed itself into a clearly reformist body, and the campaign greatly influenced the passing of the law allowing contraception and abortion carried through by Simone Veil in 1975. The Veil Act was at the time hotly contested by Veil's own party, the conservative Union for French Democracy (UDF).

In 1974, Françoise d'Eaubonne coined the term of "ecofeminism."

After the election of the socialist candidate François Mitterrand in 1981, Yvette Roudy passed the 1983 law against sexism.

In 1999, Florence Montreynaud launched the Chiennes de guarde NGO (which could be translated as "Watch-bitches", being a play of word on "Watchdogs" and "female dogs"). Their manifesto was signed by a variety of persons, including the historian Michelle Perrot, the navigator Isabelle Autissier, the journalist Laure Adler, the ethologist Boris Cyrulnik, the bishop Jacques Gaillot, the writer Pascal Bruckner, the sociologists Françoise Héritier and Alain Touraine, the MEP Olivier Duhamel, Geneviève Fraisse and Alain Lipietz, the politicians Yves Cochet, Roselyne Bachot, Véronique Neiertz and Huguette Bouchardeau, and other intellectuals such as Régis Debray, Pierre-André Taguieff and André Comte-Sponteville. It was opposed, however, by the feminist psychoanalyst Elisabeth Roudinesco, who criticized the passing of new anti-sexist laws, believing the existing legislation was sufficient.

The creation of the NGO Ni putes, ni soumises (Neither Whores, Nor Submissives) in 2002, related to the conservative Union for a Popular Movement (UMP), was also largely mediatized.

French Feminism

Main article: French Feminism

The Anglo-Saxon world refers to literary works by French feminists of the 1970s as "French Feminism".

Further readings

• Marie Cerati, Le club des citoyennes républicaines révolutionnaires, Paris, éd. sociales, 1966
• Marc de Villiers, Histoire des clubs de femmes et des légions d’Amazones (1793-1848-1871), Paris, Plon-Nourrit et cie, 1910

See also

• History of the Left in France
• LGBT rights in France