French feminists stake their claim in the presidential debate

By Sophie Courval

Earlier this week, a meeting was organised by 45 feminist groups to which candidates in the French presidential elections were invited to explain their plans for advancing the cause of equality for women.

The March 7th event by the collective féministes en mouvements (‘Feminists in movements’) attracted an audience of some 1,300 people and most of the candidates on the Left, including Socialist Party frontrunner François Hollande, the Green’s Eva Joly, the radical-left’s Jean-Luc Mélenchon and the far-left outsider Philippe Poutou. While Nicolas Sarkozy, running for re-election, declined to attend, centrist candidate François Bayrou sent a representative.

The feminist organizations are highly critical of the record of Sarkozy and his ruling UMP party (which is fielding less than a third of women candidates in the ensuing legislative elections in June). “We want to tell Nicolas Sarkozy this evening [that] your policies have been a catastrophe for equality and for all women, French, immigrants, those without legal papers, refugees,” proclaimed Marie-France Casalis, one of the collective’s leaders, who warned the French president: “If you come back to power in 2012, we will mobilize ourselves so that equality is imposed.”

But the  frustrations voiced by feminists are far from being certain to disappear if Sarkozy, as appears likely, loses his re-election bid. For when it comes to equal wages for equal work, fighting sexism and violence against women and promoting contraception, women’s access to positions of power and responsibility, parity in the political arena or on company boards, or the question of Muslim women wearing the veil, the commitments vary across the French political spectrum.  

There is the classic rift between Right and Left, well-illustrated in views on abortion. The far-right Front National is campaigning for "the right not to have an abortion" and alleges that some women have abortions for convenience. Candidate Marine Le Pen has even called for abortions to be taken out of the net of Social Security health cover, a stand that made her the only candidate not to be invited at Tuesday’s féministes en mouvementsgathering.

On the Left, the Socialist Party, the Front de Gauche (an alliance of the Radical Left and the Communist Party) and Green party Europe Écologie-Les Verts promise to re-open some closed abortion centres and boost Social Security cover for abortions.

The ruling conservative UMP party, meanwhile, does not mention abortion in its programme, although the title, "Protecting and preparing the future for the children of France", nevertheless carries a message.

Class divisions are reflected in positions on equality in the workplace, the top issue in parties’ programmes. The Front de Gauche campaigns against women being forced to accept part-time work while the UMP focuses most of its proposals on women gaining more access to positions of responsibility.

The rift is clear – the struggle of women whose employment contracts give them no job security versus the demands of professional or managerial women.Yet interestingly, beyond the many predictably contested areas, the various parties have common positions on some questions, and this reveals something about the brand of feminism that has been adopted across the French political spectrum.

The first of these, and the one that gets most public attention, involves a recent tendency to link women’s rights with secularism (1), an ideological pillar of the French Republic that is still highly emotive today. Secularism holds that religion must play no role in state institutions. Historically it aimed to free France from the grip of the Roman Catholic Church, but nowadays it is mainly directed at Islam.

The issues were first linked in public debate in 2003, when two sisters were expelled from a multi-ethnic school in the mixed northern Paris suburb of Aubervilliers for wearing veils. The move fuelled the political furore that led to France banning the wearing of a full-face veil, or niqab, in public (see here and here).

Now all the main parties, with the exception of the Greens, link women’s rights with secularism. The Front de Gauche’s programme states that "the secular school is critical because it is the only body that cares about instilling the ability to have a critical mind and a lucid understanding of the world, including questioning patriarchal and sexist stereotypes."

Hollande, speaking on March 2nd at a press conference organised by the Socialist Party’s gender equality branch, said something very similar. "Secularism is what guarantees respect for freedom and equality between men and women," he said.

But Sylvie Tissot, professor of political science at Paris 8 University, argues that this link is treacherous. "Associating the question of secularism with that of equality between men and women presupposes that a certain religion, that is, Islam, poses a particular threat to this principle of equality which would, by a mirror effect, be guaranteed by the Republic,” she said.

"Yet we know that the very way the French political and media classes function is highly sexist. We had plenty of illustrations of this during the DSK affair."(2).

Women’s commissions at both the Socialist Party and the Front de Gauche formally deny targeting any one religion, saying they condemn all religious fundamentalism. Perhaps to avoid any comparison with the Far Right, the Front de Gauche’s programme says this: "Concerning the religions, the French government will act so that none of them be singled out on the pretext of secularism, as the Front National does regularly for the Muslim religion."

Sarah Trichet-Allaire co-head of the Green party’s women’s commission, says the question of secularism and feminism is a loaded one. However, she declined to say whether the Greens would repeal the law on wearing a full-face veil in public.

The Socialist Party unambiguously backs the law, but Gaëlle Lenfant, the party’s deputy national secretary for women’s rights, declined to reply when asked about a recent bill that has received wide backing from Socialist Party senators, which would require pre-school assistants and child minders not to dress in a way that linked them with any particular religion.

Tissot, the professor, said she was pleased to hear there was unease on the Left over the issue. "But to end this sickening rhetoric, it [the Left] would need to revisit its own responsibility in the emergence of this question." She says the Left contributed to the ideology behind the law against wearing the veil, which she believes draws unconsciously on colonial attitudes that see Muslims as in need of emancipation.

There is a similar attitude in the UMP’s programme. "Just as a secular Europe had almost forgotten the question of religion, the development of Islam has put it back on the agenda, and this demands certain clarifications, because essential values of the Republic are coming into question on certain occasions – such as equality between men and women, the neutrality of the State and its representatives – and that weakens the entire national community," it says.

-------------------------

1: The separation of church and state in France was finalised in law in 1905 (see here). The concept of secularism, guaranteeing religious freedom but keeping religion out of the public sphere, evolved in the wake of the French Revolution from hostility to the Catholic Church’s influence in government, the legal system and schools.

2: For more on the debate on sexism triggered in France by accusations of sexual aggression against former IMF head Dominique Strauss-Kahn, see here.

A woman’s right to choose?

But there is another issue here, and it is at the very foundation of feminism. What about women’s right to choose and to control their own bodies? Politicians assume the veil is a symbol of male domination, even though women and girls may have chosen to wear it.

The same is true of the thorny issues of prostitution and surrogate motherhood. It seems the mainstream political parties cannot imagine that these, too, could be women’s choices.  

Such issues are controversial within the women’s movement but not among the main political parties. They all favour abolishing prostitution and oppose women being used as surrogate mothers, arguing that women’s bodies should not be used as merchandise.

"Socialists are not moralisers who want to outlaw sex," said Lenfant of the Socialist Party when asked about prostitution."But once there is an exchange of money, there is no more equality in the relationship, there is one who dominates and one who is dominated, one who pays and the other who is paid."

The Front de Gauche, the Socialist Party and the UMP have all backed this line, and a law criminalising clients was adopted last December. The two left-wing parties, however, reject an earlier law from 2003 – put forward by President Nicolas Sarkozy when he was interior minister – under which passive soliciting became a criminal offence (1).

But compared with the abolitionist position that emerged at the end of the 19th century, the current position is a caricature of women’s rights, says feminist philosopher Elsa Dorlin, author of Sexe, Genre et Sexualités (Sex, Gendre and Sexualities).

"The abolition of a system of inequality cannot be achieved through the law but through a struggle term by term, and through solidarity between all women," she said. "At that time people thought there was a continuum between married women and prostitutes and that the sexual-economic exchange permeated the whole of society."

Beauvois of the Front de Gauche recognises that some women may choose to become prostitutes. "But you can totally compare that situation with throwing dwarfs. Some of them also do it by choice, but what of human dignity?" she said.

However Dorlin, the philosopher, says there is a dark side to this. "Prostitution is seen as the ultimate violence, and this makes prostitutes into a separate group of women who are not allowed to speak out and who are never considered as subjects," she said.

Even so, two parties, the Greens and the centrist Modem, stand out as being against criminalisation even though they remain in favour of abolishing prostitution.

For the Greens this is because they say it could be detrimental to the prostitutes themselves. Modem candidate François Bayrou, speaking to weekly news magazine L’Express in April last year, had a different argument. "Let us not moralise about women who resort to prostitution or clients who often have no other way besides seeking out the world’s oldest profession," he said.

-------------------------

1: For more on these laws see here and here.

'Radical change has been abandoned'

Another thorny issue, surrogate motherhood, is never tackled head-on in the parties’ programmes but is often to be found catalogued under ‘Lesbian Gay Bi- and Trans- Questions’. The parties may be prepared to countenance homosexual marriages or civil partnerships, adoption for homosexuals and medically assisted procreation, but they never discuss surrogate motherhood as a potential reproductive technique.

"There is no such thing as the right to have a child," said Fadela Méhal, who is in charge of equality matters for the Modem. This argument is shared across the political spectrum, as is the opposition to commercialising women’s bodies. "I’d like to see a billionaire loaning his body to help a working class woman to have a child," said Beauvois, referring to comments by Front de Gauche candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon.

Dorlin, the philosopher, says the parties’ positions on surrogate motherhood and prostitution are incoherent. "On the one hand they have a materialist approach, but as soon as it is about sex they always revert to a sort of mystification of the force of women’s work."                                              

In other words, sexual work, whether as prostitution or surrogate motherhood, is not considered as work. This means that only male domination is taken into account, at the expense of considering the exploitation of workers or the relationship between the classes, she said.

"Once you talk about financial transactions you get rid of the question of work and the material conditions of women’s existence," she added. "This tends to prove that feminism, at least the sort that is practiced in the parties, has completely abandoned a materialist approach, even though it is a constituent part of French feminism."

This raises the question of who handles feminist issues in political organisations and how they work. Although the far-left parties recruit the heads of their women’s commissions from the women’s movement, and also take in militants from associations or researchers, the other parties prefer to put their own members in these positions.

All the parties consult associations actively involved in feminist issues, and often the same ones, such as the Collectif National pour les Droits des Femmes, Osez le Féminisme, l'Assemblée des Femmes, the Mouvement du Nid. The list of these is very similar to the line-up of féministes en mouvements, the alliance of45 associations who organised the encounter with presidential candidates on March 7th. Similarly, the list of 30 measures for equality published as a manifesto for the occasion are similar to the proposals from the parties on the Left and the Modem, in particular on the issues of secularism, prostitution and surrogate motherhood.

Dorlin has a philosophical analysis of all this. "We are in a period where the revolutionary and internationalist dimension of feminism, the radical nature of the questions it raises, the transversal nature of solidarity and its harsh critique of sexual issues have completely disappeared from the majority of groups.”

"For there to be such a consensus on the questions brought up by these 45 associations and the parties proves that the stakes have been levelled off and the idea that feminism aims to revolutionise lifestyles and radically change society has been abandoned," she concluded.

-------------------------

English version: Sue Landau

(Editing by Graham Tearse)