Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Liberation and Rethinking Gender Roles
1944–1950
The day will come when we have the right of citizenship. Then, the social and political contribution of women — those beings of daily courage, ready to devote themselves, those believers in the embrace of a mystical nationalism — will be born in their hearts, bringing with it even nobler actions, and will be, I am certain, the very basis of our renewal.
— Raymonde Machard, Les françaises (French women) (1945)
In 1944, in the newly fluid circumstances that followed the Liberation, the old querelle resurfaced again. Disgust with fascism and collaboration and an egalitarian spirit of resistance made traditional attitudes about women appear tainted by Vichy and cleared a path for a different approach to social renewal. Women's concerns were not among the most pressing issues for the French and their new government at the Liberation, and the feminist movement was decades from becoming a political force. Nonetheless, the Liberation period through the early 1950s was marked by a flurry of writings by a variety of authors on women's role in a revitalized France and a campaign for concrete action. Most of these women writers had been active in social movements before the war and resistance movements during the war, engaging in nontraditional roles. Nevertheless, the arguments they employed echoed the nineteenth-century tradition of using women and their bodies to fulfill state goals, albeit with elegant and old-fashioned defenses of women's status. Women once again came to symbolize resurrection — as they had after World War I and under Vichy — through a combination of personal virtue, domestic guardianship, and fecundity, but this time through France's ultimate victory rather than its humiliation.
Despite its early promise, the postwar period would not change much regarding women's private roles, although their political status changed significantly. The men and women who actively sought to define the new womanhood and the politicians who would implement it largely agreed on a modest plan for women. France was in turmoil for much of 1945 to 1947 and the French people were very hungry. They appeared to want order — gendered and otherwise — and food, not revelation or revolution. Reading forward from the Liberation period gives us a much clearer understanding of French feminism in the 1970s and beyond: We can acknowledge the strength of the arguments in defense of the French patriarchy — how they were deliberately and clearly elaborated during this period, albeit with some modern adjustments, even as Vichy and its nationalist ideology were debunked. Read in the context of Gaullism, with its masculinist posturing and reinvigoration of the republic, this cannot be taken lightly. In contrast, we can see that French ideas of republicanism and women's elaboration of them continued a thread initiated during the French Revolution by playwright and activist Olympe de Gouges, who demanded that revolutionaries make good on their universalist principles of the rights of man by explicitly including women. Many of the female authors discussed in this chapter recalled these principles and challenged the men in charge to honor them; indeed, we can trace the claims made for political parity in the 1990s directly back to these postwar voices. Studying writings by and about women in this period allows us to understand how later feminism rewove a recognition of women's particular identity and capabilities together with demands for women's full participation in the French universalist model. At times, this weaving would look like compromise; at other times, like a contradiction.
My analysis will often highlight a contrast between people who wrote about women (men and women in equal numbers) and people who worked on behalf of women (generally women themselves). I have examined more than fifty monographs and articles published between 1945 and the early 1950s that were aimed at reelaborating women's special role in a revitalized French society and that represent a cross-section of the debate. Works about gender issues varied. Paul Archambault, an influential Christian Democrat, authored a philosophical treatise called La famille: Œuvre d'amour (The family: Work of love and spiritual witness). Pierre Fougeyrollas, researcher at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS; National Center for Scientific Research), conducted a detailed survey focused on how women's relationships with their husbands and families had changed. German soldiers still occupied French soil when Raymonde Machard, in Les françaises: Ce qu'elles valent, ce qu'elles veulent (French women: Their values and aspirations), cried out against the injustices women had faced in earlier decades. And Odette Philippon's L'ésclavage de la femme dans le monde contemporain, ou la prostitution sans masque (The slavery of women in contemporary society, or prostitution unmasked) condemned prostitution in all its disparate forms, including exploitative marriage practices. While these and other works display an array of concerns about women and their past and future roles in society, all rely on conventional and deeply rooted French elaborations of gender, individualism, and republicanism. Some authors, such as Alfred Sauvy and Maryse Choisy, were widely read and discussed by both academic and popular commentators. Others, such as Paul Crouzet and Suzanne Nouvion, were holdouts from a previous era. Taken together, however, they represent a body of work from which we can draw conclusions about popular and academic discourse on women and its connection to French governmental policymaking. One piece of writing in the postwar period did challenge France's most cherished cultural and intellectual assumptions about women, The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir. But it was a theoretical anomaly, and, while highly influential in the lives of many women who read both volumes when they appeared, this work would not be viewed as a blueprint for action until decades later. Instead, more traditional articulations of womanhood maintained currency and would continue to hold sway throughout the 1970s alongside a more beauvoirian-inspired feminism.
From Ruins to Reconstruction
Much of Europe had been destroyed during World War II. France lost over half a million of its citizens and saw a large chunk of its male workforce shipped off to Germany; those who remained in France subsisted on rations and endured investigations, purges, and vicious reprisals. The Liberation was hard fought, and France endured months of bombardment as the Allies battled against entrenched German positions after the Normandy invasion. The Liberation brought a short few months of celebratory triumph in the spring of 1944, and then France was faced with hunger (official rations fell below 1,000 calories per day for over six months) and some recognition of its participation in the Nazi war machine and its own homegrown fascism. What had France become? This question frightened many and generated debate and scapegoating.
After France's liberation, the French populace enacted vigilante justice against those who collaborated with the enemy. Women who, the argument went, had been seduced by the charms of a strong and dominant occupier were easy targets in many respects. After the war the victors punished "horizontal collaborators" (women who had consorted with the occupiers) as one way to settle political scores and restore moral (and gender) equilibrium. Moreover, women as a group came to symbolize the collective failure and national weakness of France. Some argued that white, Catholic France had been weakened by unfavorable elements within, such as immigrants and Jews, as well as by modern ideas such as contraception, women's employment, and feminist equality, which, the argument went, had weakened the family, the backbone of French society. France's domination by the Nazis was likened to feminine submission, and as early as the summer of 1944 many women were "relieved of their duty" in the Resistance to make way for young men, recently joined, who could rediscover their "manhood" through fighting. Indeed, women's resistance work was rarely referred to as political work but rather as patriotic work. Once the period of "purging" (épuration) was over, the government focused on juvenile delinquency — particularly the sexual behavior of girls, which "perverted young women's 'femininity.'" On many levels during the postwar period, the government and social agencies focused attention on girls and women, and much of that focus was on reining in their sexuality and exploitation but also their independence.
Scholars have suggested that the focus on women and girls' sexual behavior to restore moral order and on the active cultivation of French womanhood as the symbol of French resurrection enabled the newly formed government to ignore the far greater moral issue of France's fascist regime under Vichy and its active participation in the extermination of its Jewish population. But this restoration could not mask the weakness of France's entire manufacturing and agricultural sector, its aging infrastructure, and the wartime destruction of property. Much of the writing that focused on improving the "feminine condition" represented women either as a bellwether of France's success at building a modern liberal society or as a means of returning France to an unblemished past. "Familialism," an obsessive focus on the family as the backbone of society and the countervailing force to the general loss of morals and depopulation, was the official doctrine of Vichy. After the war many Vichy bureaucrats who had enacted the policies of the 1920s through the occupation were pardoned and quietly absorbed into the new government. Not only was de Gaulle fully in support of natalist policies, but so were the Christian Democrats, Socialists, Communists, and the unions. Even as France shed some of its sclerotic economic behavior and launched itself into the postwar world with renewed fervor, Vichy's family policies, and thus a large chunk of its social programs and infrastructure, were retained. In the new republic, familialism, together with natalism, triumphed because economic and social expediency were wedded to political legitimacy.
In the post-Liberation context, consciously reviving patriarchal ideas over universal republican values served other purposes: France could repair what many in the government believed had been and continued to be its greatest weakness — dénatalité. From the 1850s onward, France's population growth stagnated and stubbornly remained lower than that of all its European rivals. France, exceptionally, suffered from negative growth from the end of the nineteenth century through the 1920s — a unique combination of a low birthrate and the tremendous death toll of World War I. Over a quarter-million French men — the majority in their prime — had died in the course of World War II and the occupation, compounding the large demographic imbalance left by World War I. By 1946 the female population aged fourteen and higher had reached 1,129 for every 1,000 men, causing young, single women particular economic and emotional hardship. Given the loss of such a significant portion of the workforce and France's need to retool and increase production, it seemed quite possible that women would be called upon both to produce children and to take on "nontraditional" roles. These two national requirements would form the crux of the government policy aimed at women from the 1920s onward. With this national obsession over the birthrate, the government focused on women's obligations, not women's rights.
After World War I, pronatalist campaigns, societies to foster hygienic practices for mothers and infants (to reduce mortality), programs to educate girls on aspects of maternity, and medals bestowed on large families were a mainstay of Third Republic state-building. By the 1930s the social security system had been enlarged and family subsidies were linked to the number of children. The Vichy government ratcheted up the pressure in 1941 by making abortion a capital offense. Despite all this, however, the French remained resistant to producing more children through a variety of means, both natural and illegal. After World War II, with Vichy discredited, the French state became more scientific in its approach, subsidizing the creation of demography centers such as the Institut national des études démographique (National Institute of Demographic Studies) and scholarly journals devoted to population study. Even as France entered a thirty-year period of expansive economic growth (often referred to as les Trente Glorieuses), many French people in government and industry believed that without a reversal of its population decline, French civilization was doomed. Robert Prigent, the first general commissar of the family and minister of population in the 1940s, insisted that "family" was not a Vichy issue but a French issue. The Fourth Republic agreed. In 1946 the family allowance was 20 percent of base salary for two children, with an additional 30 percent of base salary added for each subsequent child. Men expressed far more concern over the falling birthrate than did women. Men's fear of dénatalité and dwindling male authority seemed to drive their critiques of feminism and gender equality.
An institutionalized approach to reviving the patriarchy worked hand in glove with natalism. This was certainly what a number of male postwar authors had in mind when they wrote about women's role in a new France. Regardless of political persuasion, these male authors viewed the small reforms of the Napoleonic Code, the Fourth Republic's constitutional mention of gender equality, the enlargement of workers' rights, and women's increasing activity in the public sphere as evidence that France was headed off the rails. By their lights, the consequences were serious and included the possible dissolution of social hierarchies or even the collapse of France. The philosopher Jean Lacroix said, "To emancipate women and children at the same time as workers — to weaken the power of the father — is at the same time to weaken the power of the master, the priest, and the boss. ... The death of patriarchy is the end of governance over both state and family." This idea was a cornerstone of the Vichy regime, and it is interesting to note to what extent it was retained after Vichy's destruction. It would reappear in identical form for the next three decades in response to attempts to update the Civil Code and to win the legalization of contraception. Women would be forced to chip slowly away at its arguments to free themselves from its contradictory and suffocating "protection."
Many writers and advocates of the women's cause during this time felt that they were working from scratch, since the Vichy regime had stamped out a once-flourishing feminist movement, which in the first decade of the twentieth century had even managed to establish a state-funded feminist library. Before the war, the Nazi triumph in Germany in 1934 had led a large number of feminist militants to focus on the destruction of fascism rather than on feminism. The Popular Front — a coalition of Socialists and Communists that came to power in France in 1936 and that was theoretically predisposed to progressive legislation — did not accept women's suffrage. Even the Communist Party, officially committed to the equality of women with men, adopted a pronatalist position that celebrated motherhood and women's beauty. France's capitulation to Germany in 1941 largely crushed feminism, or drove it entirely underground, its advocates choosing nationalism and resistance if they were politically active at all. After the war, some of its proponents, for example Cécile Brunschvicg and Andrée Lehmann, attempted to rally the feminist forces, but old age, the granting of women's suffrage, and a general lack of interest in "women's rights" marginalized their efforts.
De Gaulle's April 1944 pledge to extend suffrage to women (a decision hashed out by the Consultative Assembly in Algiers with pressure from the Americans even before France was liberated) set the stage for other policy changes that placed women's new role at the center of French reconstruction. The pledge could be seen as a practical and symbolic gesture of national reconciliation allowing all the French (whatever their circumstances or choices during the occupation) to rally around an ideal and forget their political differences. Right and Left approached women's new political participation with different apprehensions and strategies. On the Right, the Mouvement républicain populaire (MRP; the Christian Democrats) believed that women's natural conservatism would swing the vote their way and toward de Gaulle's new party, the Rassemblement du peuple français (RPF; Rally of the French People) and away from the Communists and Socialists. During the previous republic, the idea of women's conservatism had provided one of the most powerful arguments against women's suffrage, as republican anticlericals feared the undermining influence of France's Catholic Church. Now, fearing a Communist takeover, they reminded women of their sacred duty to vote. The Left (the French Communists and Socialists) insisted on their respective parties' moral superiority — many in the Resistance had been members — and competed to prove themselves more sensitive to women's desires and better able to respond to their needs. At times political parties seemed torn between the hope that women would be an electoral boon and the fear that women would champion feminine values and theoretically undermine republicanism, but in reality the concern was about male privilege. The Communist Party, for example, was dedicated to retaining the male industrial class as its rank and file and resisted taking up women's causes that might threaten such traditional support.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Daughters of 1968"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Lisa Greenwald.
Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
