French Feminists: Old Parties, New Visions

In the last two years, the French women's movement has grown rapidly from a small core of highly politicized, predominantly far-left activists to a mass movement whose ideas are beginning to influence all French women and create a force which no political party or trade union will be able to ignore. Currently the emphasis is on building grass roots structures such as workplace and neighborhood women's groups and rape crisis centers. In the past year at least eight national feminist publications were launched. They illustrate the richness and diversity as well as the lack of coordination, which have emerged as part of the movement's commitment to non-hierarchical political forms.

THE POLITICAL LEFT

Following their loss in the March legislative elections after years when nearly everyone had thought victory was in reach, the Communist and Socialist parties and the small Movement of the Radical Left lost no time in continuing and even intensifying their pre-election squabbles. Within the parties, old assumptions were reexamined; rank and file members began to make their views known in a fashion unheard of in France and, it should be added, impossible in the amorphous, top-down structure of the major American parties.

BEYOND SOCIALISM

A new voice was raised on May 11, when Cecile Goldet, Francoise Gaspard and Edith Lhuiler announced that they and other women were forming a third faction outside the left and right groups within the Socialist Party. Before the shock within and outside the SP had died down, the entire country was stunned exactly a month later when the Communist Party was "stripped bare by its women, as the essay which appeared in the French daily Le Monde put it somewhat indelicately.

"The autoromous women's movement has become so important that it now represents a major force," explained the Socialist Goldet, a 62-year-old with years of experience in party and feminist activity.

By the end of June, the Socialist feminist caucus had received nearly 2,000 offers of adherence from party members and 1,000 people who are not in the SP pledged to join the party as members of their caucus. If it receives more than 5 percent of the vote at the party congress scheduled for May 1979, it will be officially recognized and guaranteed a place in party deliberations.

Goldet finds confirmation of her charges of Socialist sexism in the widespread suspicion among members of the two existing factions that the women were being manipulated to alter the party's balance of forces. "A woman is always supposed to have a man behind her as far as they're concerned," she observed. "But now that they have realized that nobody is manipulating us and that we are likely to have real strength, they want to coopt us. Some have come with threats, while others say that they agree with us entirely and always have.'

The new group hasn't yet developed a detailed political platform, but Goldet promises it will be within the Socialist Party spectrum. In the words of its first manifesto, "As women we refuse to separate our struggles against exploitation and those of men; as Socialists we refuse to forget that we are women. .. We would like to show that it is possible to create a different relationship to politics." Men will be allowed to join although some women jokingly suggest that they be limited to 10 percent of the membership and Francoise Gaspard has promised that "our statutes will ensure that we remain mistresses of the situation."'

BEYOND COMMUNISM

Unlike the Socialist women, the feminists in the Communist Party have no desire to found a caucus which is not permitted by the party statutes in any

case. They are demanding only open discussion of women's issues. As it has on other issues the CP leadership refused to allow a forum in l'Humanite, the party daily. In addition, members were offered the customary assurances of party leader Georges Marchais that they belong to "the party of women's liberation."

Many Communist women are not satisfied. While acknowledging the Party's work "in defense of women's working and living conditions," the position paper, which circulated widely within the Party before surfacing in Le Monde, demands "a much more considerable contribution to women's liberation than a thousand speeches by those who would lecture to us on the subject".

Although I'Humanite had refused to publish the document, all but five of the signers preferred to remove their names from it rather than endorse its appearance in a "bourgeois" paper such as Le Monde. The five stalwarts are sticking by their pens and have announced their intention to launch a journal this fall "addressing itself to all women with the aim of creating a new relationship between Communist and non-Communist women.

"In the party, it is said that the working class doesn't exploit anyone," explained two of the five co-signers, Edith Thevinin and Peggy Sultan in an interview. "We say that even in the working class, sexist ideology is reproduced and divides the workers' movement. The struggle against this oppression, far from dividing the revolutionary movement, can only help it progress.

The two added that women in the Communist

Party are cut off from the feminist movement. "We thought that a publication could develop a dialogue and aid the circulation of information." Only three weeks after their announcement, they had already received over 50 responses from women in the Communist Party and an encouraging reaction from outside as well. "All feminists want to work with us," said Sultan. "They say that this is something that they have long waited for and hoped for, to work in solidarity with Communist women.

While these women are focusing their attention on others within the Communist Party, another group organized a meeting of Communist, far left and other feminists held eight days after the appearance of the "Stripped Bare" document in Le Monde. "This group believes that it has an important role to play in the women's movement by posing the question of the relationship between women's struggle and class struggle in a comprehensive way," says Daniele Ohayon, a journalist from the independent feminist journal le Temps des Femmes who attended the gathering. "During the meeting many activists wanted to know specifically what the Communist women hoped to contribute to the movement." Non-Communist women appear to have been less impressed by the originality of the ideas presented than by the fact that Communist Party members were expressing them, and ready to follow through: Working groups organized around specific themes at the meeting are already functioning.

The Communist leadership has responded in several ways. Although Georges Marchais repeated

"This group believes that it has an important role to play in the women's movement by posing the question of the relationship between women's struggle and class struggle in a comprehensive way.”

that women are at ease in our party," a report of the Communist Party political bureau published in the June 12 issue of l'Humanite contains an unprecedented critique of the party's traditional backwardness on the questions of abortion and contraception firm opposition to any birth control for demographic reasons and in the name of national interest. In the same article, however, the leadership stated its determination to "firmly repulse certain attempts to form women's groups in the Party."'

The violence of the official attack indicates that the Communist leadership believes that the groundwork laid by the autonomous women's movement over the past 10 years poses a potential, if not immediate, threat to their own positions. "Perhaps, we are witnessing the birth of something which already exists in Spain and Italy," suggested Daniele Ohayon, "a current within the movement consisting of CP women.'

Communist Party feminist Edith Thevinin clearly expressed what is worrying the Socialist and Communist headquarters: "The combination of a revolutionary position and a feminist position can transform the traditional view of politics. ... it can be a new force.'

.. Judith Ezekiel Seven Days September 8, 1978

Judith Ezekiel is an American living in Paris. where she is a member of the collective publishing the feminist journal La Revue d'en Face.

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October, 1978/What She Wants Page 7