Women in Contemporary Culture: Roles and identities in France and Spain
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Women in Contemporary Culture: Roles and identities in France and Spain
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| ISBN-13: | 9781841508603 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Intellect Books |
| Publication date: | 01/01/2000 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 186 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
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Women in Contemporary Culture
Roles and Identities in France and Spain
By Lesley Twomey
Intellect Ltd
Copyright © 2000 Intellect LtdAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84150-860-3
CHAPTER 1
Parity in French Politics
Sheila Perry and Sue Hart
As the French enter the new millennium, to what extent will they also be entering a totally new phase in politics, in which women will, at last, play a full and active role equal to that of men? The 1990s have seen a major campaign for legislative reform, destined to oblige political parties to ensure the equal access of men and women to electoral office by proposing an equal number of male and female candidates for election. A first major battle has been won, and in June 1999 the French Constitution was amended. Given that for half a century, women have had the same political rights as men, why has it been necessary to force the issue of parity by resorting to legislation? And what will be the effects of this move on women's participation and on French politics as a whole?
Positive Action
First of all, the necessity for some kind of positive action in favour of women was becoming glaringly obvious to all but the most traditional, misogynous elements of the extreme Right. The fact that theoretical equality in law had not translated itself into reality was evident from the shocking discrepancy between the number of women in the electorate, where they make up 53%, and their under-representation in the National Assembly, where they reached an all-time 'high' in 1997, at just over 10%. At best, at a rate of a 10% increase in fifty years, women could expect to achieve parity in another couple of centuries! In fact, however, this would be an optimistic estimate, as the past shows: in the intervening years, far from showing a slow but nevertheless sure progression, women's representation actually declined: from 6.7% in December 1946 to a mere 1.4% in September 1971, rising to 5.3% with the election of the Socialists in June 1981, to remain between 5 and 6% throughout the 1980s and early 1990s. If there was a 'surge' in 1997, it was directly as a result of the adoption of a 30% quota system by the Socialist Party, and the fact that the Left won a clear majority in Parliament. There is absolutely no evidence to suggest that waiting for women's representation to increase 'naturally', alongside their increasing financial and social independence, would ever produce results.
The counter-argument to this is that it is enough for the law to provide equality of access and it is up to women to avail themselves of the opportunity presented. There are a number of implications here: that women themselves choose not to go into politics, that there are insufficient female candidates on which to draw, and that the legal situation is therefore perfectly adequate. However, studies have shown that these assumptions are not true. Christine Bard has illustrated, with examples from the 1930s, that women's civil and legal status often meant that their political activity was unorthodox if not outright subversive, but that in spite of constraints on their behaviour they sought to play an active role which goes counter to the argument that women are not interested in politics. Françoise Gaspard has pointed out that there has been no shortage of female candidates when they have been free to stand: in the 1993 parliamentary elections, there were as many women as men who stood for election on an independent ticket, and the imbalance between the sexes only occurred when political parties determined the nomination of candidates; similarly, when in 1996 the Socialist Party designated a number of constituencies to be reserved for female candidates at the forthcoming parliamentary elections, in a number of cases there were several women competing for the same nomination. The fact that some of the most vociferous complaints regarding the imbalance between men and women came from women party militants – particularly on the Left – is also evidence of the fact that women who do want to enter politics are being obstructed and discouraged. More and more studies by women intellectuals, politicians and legal experts have gradually revealed the extent to which women's participation has been blocked by cultural, historical and institutional factors. Blaming women for their own lack of interest simply does not hold water.
Gradually, therefore, resistance to positive action has been eroded, not least because the situation was becoming embarrassing for a nation which prides itself on being the birthplace of human rights. Until 1997, France came last of the fifteen nations of the European Union, equal only to Greece in the paucity of women in Parliament (an association cited, with characteristic chauvinism, with some horror), and only crept into fourteenth place with the 1997 increase. It was in ninth position out of the nine EU states with a second chamber, and even after the increase in 1997, moved only from seventy-second place on the world stage, to seventy-first, trailing after countries such as Honduras, Uganda and Mongolia. The phenomenon was being examined as a specifically French problem (une exception française), and a source of shame for the nation. It was also highly unpopular among the French electorate, who in numerous opinion polls expressed the desire to see change, through legislation if necessary. Increasingly, political parties were finding that they needed to jump on the bandwagon of equality for women in politics, if they were not to lose massive support, not only from women (the majority of voters, let it not be forgotten) but also from men: the public at large was already disaffected with institutional politics, and abstention rates at elections had been hitting record levels since the 1980s, leading to a crisis in representation.
However, it is one thing to recognize that change is necessary; but it is quite another to go for obligatory equality (parity), imposed by law, and to modify the Constitution in order to do so – especially when the need for change has been conceded somewhat reluctantly and for short-term electoral advantage (this has been particularly true of the Right, where conviction on the subject is less solidly anchored in the political culture, but the Left has also been slow to respond to women's demands in this area, fearing its effects on party support). So why have the French adopted such a radical position? The answer lies, paradoxically perhaps, in the extent to which the obstacles were stacked against women gaining power. At every level, social, cultural, historical and institutional, women found their path blocked, unconsciously as well as deliberately, so that nothing short of radical reform was going to solve the problem; and in fact, as we shall see, it is the very arguments used against positive action (the introduction of quotas, notably) which made anything short of parity impossible to get through the male-dominated institutions (in particular the Constitutional Council) and onto the statute books. Had the odds stacked against women been lower, women's demands might have been more modest.
Parity: The Republic Threatened
As it was, the battle for parity has been long and hard. Witness the article published in Le Nouvel Observateur as late as 14 January 1999, entitled 'Parité, la révolution qui divise', implying that it was the debate on parity which was threatening political stability, and hence problematic, rather than the lack of representation of women, and in which the authors were questioning whether Republicanism was not under threat from the proparity lobby. For the truth is, positive action in favour of women has been perceived as hitting at the very heart of French politics, threatening its most precious values, all that it stands for, and so threatening the very foundation of the regime! The expression of such apocalyptic fear made it possible for politicians to sympathize with women's demands, but argue that, alas, nothing could be done ... The very life of the Republic was at stake – and women constituted the threat. Could there be any clearer diabolization of women, than this reworking of the myth of the Garden of Eden, whereby evil enters the world through a woman?
What could possibly justify such a view? Central to the notion of French Republicanism is that of 'universalism', that is, the theory that rights are universal, all citizens have equal rights, irrespective of social class, religion, education or gender. This was the major achievement of the French Revolution, to do away with a feudal system in which individuals were subjects of the monarch and possessed rights and privileges in accordance with the social class into which they were born. Now, it is clear that equal rights are a fundamental tenet of any modern democracy. But where the debate has taken a particular turn in France is in the belief advanced by certain legal experts and politicians, that this universalism could only be protected as long as citizens remained undifferentiated. Because they have rights regardless of gender, then it is dangerous, if those rights are not to be threatened, to lobby for women because they are women, as such action differentiates between citizens. Differentiation has been equated with division: the point of universalism is that it applies to everyone; once distinctions are made on the grounds of sex, then that indivisibility has been broken, and so there is no basis for universal human rights. Worse, what is there to stop other groups – ethnic or religious groups, for example – from also claiming representation in Parliament in proportion to their representation in the population as a whole? And with all different groups and communities vying for position (a phenomenon called 'communautarisme') the 'one and indivisible Republic', in which all French children are taught to believe, would no longer exist.
Such is the argument of the camp which became known as the 'Universalists'. Within this group figures Elisabeth Badinter, a writer who has been prominent in the debate as a woman arguing against parity in the name of feminism. She endorses all the arguments set out above, and also sees in the pro-parity movement a dangerous return to essentialism, i.e. the notion that women are different from men in essence, biologically, from birth – the very notion, she argues, which has been used over the centuries to constrain women to the private sphere and exclude them from the public, reserved for men. She sees it as retrogressive to argue that men and women are different; progress for women in society has been made, she says, by showing that so-called masculine characteristics are shared by women, and vice versa:
It's by recognizing that masculine and feminine virtues belong to both sexes that we progress towards equality. Humanity is not dual in nature. Each man and each woman is a repository for the whole of humanity.
In short, the universalists have argued that positive action in favour of women constitutes a threat to the Republic, and would be to the detriment of women themselves.
The pro-parity group has argued persuasively against all of these assertions. First of all, the Revolution and all subsequent regimes until after the Second World War gave civil and political rights only to men, and so universalism was not at all neutral towards gender, as the antiparity lobby has suggested. This was put succinctly by Gisèle Halimi, lawyer and former MP, when she wrote: 'The universal is, above all, masculine' (Halimi, p. 171). What is more, she claims, the sacrosanct Revolution and its Déclaration des droits de l'Homme et du citoyen fully intended it to be this way:
Some historians [...] argue that the Rights of Man = Rights of Men and of Women. That the citizen referred to in the masculine in all these sacred texts is also the female citizen, but that circumstances and lack of social progress have not allowed women to claim their equal rights. This is a load of rubbish. Reread the texts. The citizen is clearly a male citizen.
(Halimi, pp. 99-100)
and she goes on to cite examples from the texts in question, which clearly illustrate slippage from use of the term Homme (with a capital, to designate humankind), towards homme (lower case, to designate a male member of the species) – not least the fact that it is specified in Article 4 of the 1793 Constitution that citizenship is conferred on any man '[who] marries a Frenchwoman'. She points out what she calls the 'the savage irrationality' of an article which enables a French woman to confer on to someone else – a man, by definition – a right which she herself is denied! (Halimi, p. 100). Universalism is, therefore, a false myth: it claims that rights are universal while reserving them for men. Indeed, it is because it claims that these rights, designated for men, are shared by women, that women are unable to obtain them: 'The contradiction between the principle and its application is primarily a result of the denial that there is a difference between the sexes' (Halimi, p. 99). It is necessary to recognize that the human race is both masculine and feminine so that the rights accorded to men can also be extended to women. In other words, the introduction of parity is the only way to make universalism become reality. Universalism as it stands, without parity, claims to make no distinction between men and women but in fact assimilates women to men: 'Parity alone can take this unilateral identification of one sex with another and replace it with real equality between the sexes', writes the specialist in law, Francine Demichel. Far from threatening Republican ideals, therefore, parity is the means by which they can be properly realized, and France can become a true democracy, not a 'a one-legged democracy', as it has been so far. It is in this context that parity has become a viable proposition for legal reform, whereas quotas had been hotly contested: parity can be claimed in the name of equality; on what basis can one require 25% or 30% representation?
It is this distinction between quotas and parity which has also helped the pro-parity lobby to argue against the threat of communautarisme, the fear that the introduction of positive action in favour of women would open the floodgates to religious or ethnic groups likewise claiming proportional representation. 'Parity is not a 50% quota', wrote another jurist, Eliane Vogel Polsky, 'We're demanding parity on the grounds that we have equal status, and not on the grounds that we represent a minority.' Parity is not simply a large quota, designed to match women's (roughly) equal representation in the population to men, but a right, claimed because women have equal status. This makes a distinction between women and other groups, who may lay claim to representation on the basis of difference or in proportion to their (minority) status within society. Gender is not to be seen as a category like any other (ethnicity, religion, age, etc.) as it is the only distinction which exists in roughly equal proportions throughout the human race. It is interesting that the proponents of parity have had thus to separate themselves from the multiculturalists, a development which reveals a specifically French conception of the nation state. Arguing against parity, Robert Badinter (husband to Elisabeth, and former Justice Minister and President of the Constitutional Council) evoked two opposing conceptions of democracy:
One is a democracy in which citizens see themselves first as members of a community, and all the communities come together to build up the nation. The other concept, which to me seems more genuinely Republican, and in line with what the founding fathers intended, is that of the French nation, of all French citizens, whatever their origins, their sex, their cultural affinities, their religion or their race.
Other than the fact they have removed gender from the final list of attributes of the French citizen, the pro-parity campaigners have rallied round this second definition, seen as more specifically French.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Women in Contemporary Culture by Lesley Twomey. Copyright © 2000 Intellect Ltd. Excerpted by permission of Intellect Ltd.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Contributors,List of Tables,
Preface and Dedication,
Abbreviations,
Introduction Lesley K. Twomey,
Women and Politics,
1 Parity in French Politics Sheila Perry and Sue Hart,
2 Women and Political Participation Monica Threlfall,
Women, Religion and Politics,
3 The Image and Role of Women Promoted by the Extreme Right and Catholic Integrists in Contemporary France William B. Smith,
4 'Licencia más amplia para matar'? Changes to Spain's Abortion Law and the Traditionalist Catholic Response Lesley K. Twomey,
Women and Work,
5 'Still Working on it' Recent Steps towards Employment Equality in France Jean Burrell,
6 Gendered Structures in the City Management in Spain and Professional Identity in Etxebarría's Amor, curiosidad, prozac y dudas Lesley K. Twomey,
Women and Feminisms,
7 Feminism in Spain A History of Love and Hate Mercedes Carbayo-Abengózar,
8 Lesbian Identity in Contemporary Spain 'One of the Greatest Taboos Ever' Jacky Collins,
9 An Introduction to Julia Kristeva Sylvie Gambaudo,
Women and their Writing,
10 The Quest for Identity in the Later Fiction of Simone de Beauvoir Alison T. Holland,
11 Discursive Configurations of Identity in El cuarto de atrás and Crónica del desamor Vanessa Knights,