2 - 1975: The Year of Women

Summary

In the heady early days of post-1968 feminism, 1975 stands out as a year particularly dense with new forms of activism and with the appearance of feminist texts and films that would resonate through the following decades. It was also the year designated ‘International Women's Year’ by the United Nations and the year in which France first established a government department charged with improving what was termed women's ‘condition’. These intergovernmental and state initiatives were sceptically received by the feminists of the MLF, who saw in them attempts to appropriate and defuse their own radical aims: the 1975 postface to Les Femmes s’entetent warned that oppressors came not only in traditional guise but also in the camouflage of reformist ‘liberators’ (Bernheim et al., 1975, 478). 1975 was ‘women's year’ in more senses than one, and in its course the tensions between state-endorsed, reformist feminism and the thoroughgoing radicalism of the new movement were played out on the public stage. This chapter addresses these two very different modes of feminism through the prism of a single, eventful year, and assesses the relationship between them.

New Feminisms: The MLF

Siân Reynolds’ chapter shows how the MLF was preceded by a long history of feminist struggles in France and how even the apparent quiescence of the 1950s and 1960s concealed threads of quiet militancy that would feed into the movement after May 1968. Some reforms had been won, from the vote to the partial legalisation of contraception and women's greater access to all levels of education, yet in the early 1970s the paltry presence of women in public and, notably, political life1 confirmed the continuing dominance of the ‘first sex’. In some ways the nation's rapid post-war transformation ‘from a rural, empire-oriented Catholic country into a fully industrialised, decolonised and urban one’ (Ross, 1995, 4) had further consolidated traditional gender roles, for pro-natalist policies and the new consumerism promoted motherhood and sexual allure as central to female identity. In other ways, though, the modern consumer culture set up tensions that encouraged women to become critically aware of the restrictions on their lives. The booming economy produced more opportunities for female employment, while the new youth culture that developed from the 1950s on (New Wave films, rock’n’roll, teenage magazines, fashion) emphasised self-fulfilment, freedom from authority and a style of music, dress and behaviour that was (albeit often superficially) oppositional.