Times have changed. Vacation–the universal salve to French ills–has just put an end to the most dramatic student protests in a generation. In more than 30 cities, a half-million high-school students took to the streets. But these were not their father’s protests. The real drama didn’t come from the students’ demands–pragmatic requests for smaller classes, better equipment and better preparation for the job market. What was revolutionary was the sexual politics: this time around, France’s young protesters were overwhelmingly female.
You could call it grrrl power. The protesters marched clasping hands, their faces painted with bright colors and slogans. They elected female leaders. Their spokesperson, Loubna Meliane, is a 20-year-old beur, a French-born daughter of North African immigrants. But the banner-wavers weren’t feminists, exactly. ““I do the housework, I take care of my six brothers and sisters, I go to school, and I protest,’’ said the tousled-haired Meliane, dragging on a cigarette amid the chaos of the protest headquarters in Paris. The marchers were a sign of modern times: symbols of a new post-feminist era in which female activists can speak, not just for women, but for French society as a whole. ““Girls aren’t getting involved in politics today because they’re interested in feminist politics. They get into politics because they’re political,’’ says Eugenie Helene, a 15-year-old member of the Independent and Democratic Student Federation, the student group that led the protests.
The mood has changed palpably for women in France over the past few years. Traditionally, women’s issues took a back seat in the struggle for social justice. And in the past decade, feminism came to be seen as old hat, if not downright tacky. ““Young people think that there’s no point to fighting anymore, that everything has been won and feminism is passe,’’ says Valerie Laffont, a twentysomething feminist activist. All that started to change when the extreme right-wing National Front party began winning major elections in the mid-1990s. Its platform condemning abortion and celebrating women’s place in the home sent shock waves through a country that had grown complacent about liberte and egalite. Europe also raised troubling questions: France looked around and found that, with the exception of Greece, it had the lowest representation of women in government in the European Union.
In the 1997 parliamentary elections, the push for political parity became a major electoral issue. Polls showed that a wide majority of French people favored changing their Constitution to require a 50 percent representation of women in the National Assembly. Before becoming prime minister, Lionel Jospin pushed his Socialist Party into accepting a 30 percent quota of female candidates. Once in office, he named women to key ministries in his government, including Justice and Labor. Against the resistance of the grammarians at the Academie Francaise, Jospin also decreed that the government would feminize its official titles: female cabinet members, at long last, could be called Madame la ministre. Jospin’s woman-friendly politics have had trickle-down results. Chief among them: a new sense of confidence for France’s young women activists.
Last month’s marches point to the informal parity already at work in France’s lycees. The last bout of demonstrations, in the early 1990s, gave students rights to organize, protest and have a say in academic affairs. Girls have done well since. They are leaders in school government as well as academically; 80 percent of the Independent and Democratic Student Federation is female. ““In the lycees, young women have a strong sense of gender equality, even superiority,’’ says sociologist Robert Ballion, author of ““Democracy in High Schools.’’ ““They have a need to engage in collective life, whereas boys at that age tend to be more wrapped up in themselves.''
Meliane’s convinced that women don’t need special treatment–like quotas–to get ahead. They provide an artificial kind of equality–OK for her elders, but not for her peers. They’ve grown up expecting equality, not having to strive for it. ““It will be our generation who will change things,’’ she says. That’s what young people always think. But in this case, it’s already true.
