Magazine / Society / Women / Commentary | 14/04/2008

Liberté, égalité, fraternité: Women in France

French women are independent, working and nevertheless having many children. That's what many other Europeans think. But French women are complaining: political influence by women? Much to less! Jacqueline Remy shows the contradictory reality of french women.

France is a strange country. For the first time, in May 2007, a woman, Ségolène Royal, qualified for the final stages of a presidential election and a government, that of François Fillon, was constituted in which half of the ministers were female.

French woman: business women and femme fatale?Photo: Photocase

The same year, at the second ballot, candidate Nicolas Sarkozy's wife refrained from going to vote for her husband, then she ostensibly appeared with a pale countenance on the evening when he won. Ten months later, in March 2008, President Sarkozy's new wife did not vote in the municipal elections, because she wasn't registered as a voter. These were two acts that would have been unimaginable two decades earlier. 'Aunt' Yvonne, General De Gaulle's wife, must be turning in her grave!

Politics and parity

Political life has changed. Women have changed. They are no longer required to play the wives of… It is accepted that they are themselves, indifferent, remote and independent.
Not only secondary roles have changed. In parallel, French women who wish to play a senior role are officially encouraged. Sealed into the wording of the law on parity, passed in 1999 and reinforced in 2007, was 50% participation by women on the electoral roll. So the municipal elections of 2008 were to illustrate the magnitude of female victory. In villages with more than 3500 inhabitants, the lists are compulsorily mixed, at parity, and the municipal councils deriving from the vote must transfer powers in their executive and deputies' posts to as many women as men. Hence the fact that, in spite of all these constraints, in France there is only a tiny minority of female chief candidates and therefore, mayoresses? Well, life in politics has certainly changed. Women have changed. But… not men.

All the fragile beauty of the beginning of this millenium is reflected. French women have reached a particularly exciting stage in their emancipation. On paper, they have equal entitlement with men to all rights, freedoms and powers. In France, at present, no-one would dare openly stigmatise the mother of a family who wishes to have a career, leaving her children with carers. And yet, women come up against barriers in life that they have to identify as clearly as possible, if they wish to destroy or get past them.

Women in France: particularly independent?

Apparently, they have a lot of opportunities. They wish to assume all roles and, at least in principle, nothing prevents them from doing so: at the same time they can be both: mothers of families and working, independent but lovers, feminine and feminists. French women have won the right to play a very wide range of scores and they manage, better than anyone else throughout the world, to reconcile having children with having an occupation. This is a success that may be summed up in two figures: 80% of women between 25 and 49 years of age work during their reproductive years, which does not prevent them from having children - two per woman, on average: the fertility rate amongst French women is the most pronounced in Europe.

All the Europeans envy this fine balance of identities. And yet, French women are fuming. That is because they are trapped by a dual social injunction - to be a good mother and to have a career - by the weight of the new archetypes and their own contradicitons. Because they have been led to believe that they could do anything, experience anything, have anything, reversal is often harsh.

Contradictory reality

For girls born in the seventies, surprise at the Women's Liberation Movement (WLM), is often expressed in artful ways. You have to lift the skirts of the statistics in order to get at these. Let us take this figure concerning working women, for example. It is true that 80% of French women between 25 and 49 years of age work, that they do not have children or have one child. But, from the time when they have two children, the proportion falls to 60%. Then to 35% when they have three or more. 90% of men work, however many children they have. Second surprise: for the same work, they are paid less, 18% less on average, and 11% if the effect of the interruptions in their career for having children are offset. Third surprise: they are often obliged to accept part-time work, which is not the case for men. Fourth surprise: they are still often excluded from real positions of power, even if Nicole Notat's accession to the top position in a trade union (CFDT ), then that of Laurence Parisot, in 2007, to the leadership of the employers' federation (MEDEF = Mouvement des Entreprises de France = French Business Movement) provided a spectacular demonstration of the old taboo of male supremacy being seriously dented.
But each victory makes sexist deception and injustice particularly unbearable for French women, especially young ones, who do not understand it. This is evident in the field of politics. In 1944, they were among the last in Europe to obtain the right to vote.

Politics: a men's sphere

Is this the reason why the male political class is still particularly conservative in this sphere? It much prefers to reproduce itself by fissiparity than to apply parity!
We saw this in 2007 with the legislative elections, during which the political parties perpetrated a mysogenistic attack. In many cases, this was for very pragmatic reasons. One more woman is one fewer men. And when the " baron " concerned believes that he is in a position to win in his fief, he has no desire to give up his seat.
The parties are very unequally motivated to make space for women, all the more because there, the great majority of the responsibilities are still concentrated in the hands of men. Incidentally, these political movements do not take any major financial risk when they bypass the law. In certain cases, at the legislative elections, for example, when the male candidate has a chance of being elected - and the UMP (L'Union pour un Mouvement Populaire = The Popular Movement Union), the main party of the right, in particular has understood this - it is more advantageous from a financial point of view to pay a fine for failing to offer a female candidate than it is to refuse the funding yielded by a member of parliament elected without fail.

Furthermore, men have two strong-points that women still do not have. They are much more often members of local networks, clubs, associations, and freemasonry in the broad sense of the word, which helps them be co-opted. And they do not have the worry about children fixed in their brains, or they less often have this worry than women. All enquiries show that, objectively speaking, women devote more time than men to household tasks and caring for the children. More subjectively, when they are not supervising homework or preparing babies' bottles, they tend still to be thinking about their children. Women often say that they are inundated by their maternal worries, an obsession that irritates feminists like Elisabeth Badinter or Marcela Iacub, who are grieved to see French women, as they themselves say, stowed in their " bellies ".

It is sharing those most intimate, most private roles, that weighs most heavily on women. " It is not easy to be a liberated woman ", said a famous song by a French pop group in the eighties. It is not so easy to leave your children to go and militate in a political party and to fight on platforms or in school courtyards, where public meetings are held. It is not easy to make men share parental responsibilities equitably in everyday life. Certain women lead this fight with the men or against them, but also against themselves, and sometimes they are afraid that they will lose power at home. The state cannot do much about this. It may be that the time for great collective movements is past.

40 years of history

French women only obtained the right to work in an occupation without officially asking their husband's permission in 1969. Since that time, in forty years, they have won the right to assume power over their own bodies, their bank account, their married life, their children and their occupational choices. Contraception was authorised on the French mainland in 1967. Being the head of the family has no longer gone hand in hand with being male since 1970, when " paternal " authority was superseded by " parental " authority. In 1980, it became illegal to dismiss a woman who was pregnant, and the most decisive laws concerning occupational equality date from 1982. In the nineties, the feminist fight moved to the area of the victim: while still continuing to fight for an increase in the number of nursery places for children, they wore themselves out trying to have rape, conjugal violence and sexual harassment taken seriously and heftily penalised.

In short, in forty years, French women have won the right to tread on all of what was previously male territory. But French men are apprehensive about treading on what was previously female territory: they are still stubborn when faced with what were traditionally women's tasks. Henceforth, everyone agrees: a woman is worth the same as a man. But a man is not yet worth the same as a woman.

Women of today and men of tomorrow

This is the resistance young French women are coming up against, nowadays. For example, women employed in businesses with at least 10 employees have less interesting jobs than men and are less well paid. Well, they more often have the " baccalauréat " (= school-leaving certificate) than the latter do. The new generations of girls were brighter than the boys in class and they have even more qualifications. They will certainly not accept forever not being promoted as much, not being permitted positions of leadership as much, and being kept from political and economic power. There is no doubt that they will not be satisfied with law concerning parity which, by reducing them to their gender, renders them an ambiguous service by presenting a cramped conception of equality.

This is because, in the eyes of young French women, true equality consists of no longer being considered in relation to their gender. The latter should neither be a barrier nor a trampoline. True equality will enable 60% of women to have seats at a meeting, should the occasion arise, if it is found that 60% of the competent people are women. True equality will force men to prove themselves, since their gender will not offer them particular natural legitimacy.

Meanwhile, they need to have considerable inventiveness and persuasion if they do not want to be bound by the rising dual discourse: to be a real woman in France, nowadays, you have to be successful everywhere, at work, academically, at home and in bed. It is as if the iron collar formerly attached to the female gender had been reduced to a series of iron collars. Well then, I dare say this will cause them to go grey more quickly than previously. It will certainly be more exhausting. They all dream of constructing, together with men, a genuine mixed grammar for a society where there is partnership, and where it really will be possible to merge roles.

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