The Hidden Women of Paris

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/07/opinion/france-protests-68-women.html

Version 0 of 1.

PARIS — One of my biggest regrets is that I was born too late for the barricades of May 1968. I was only 4 years old, and so I missed this huge “happening,” the student and worker uprising that brought France to a standstill. My mother’s sister, who was then a 22-year-old elementary school teacher here, recalled with nostalgia the strange atmosphere in the city, where, she said, “the daily routine stopped and everyone went on a picnic.”

Thanks to Aunt Anne-Marie, who told me several times of “her” May ’68, I’ve always viewed the protests from a female perspective. At first glance, however, women are rarely visible. Histories devoted to May ’68 (I’m thinking particularly of the famous “Generations” by Hervé Hamon and Patrick Rotman) focus on the men, some of whom became prominent writers, architects and politicians. Photographs of the uprising by Gilles Caron, Marc Riboud, Bruno Barbey and Henri Cartier-Bresson also chiefly show men — many of them glamorous young rebels like Daniel Cohn-Bendit, portrayed with all the allure of rock stars.

William Klein’s documentary “Maydays,” filmed in Paris in 1968, is revealing: In all the meetings, debates, marches and street protests, you can see very few women. Sure, there is a woman working as part of a medical team, obviously a nurse; another woman answers the phone for a student coordinating committee; a third takes care of militants’ children at an impromptu nursery at the Sorbonne. Nurse, secretary, babysitter — all traditional roles.

So should May ’68 be considered a “guy thing”? Women certainly took part, but most of the time they were in the background. In the factories, they were among the mass of striking workers, or joined demonstrations as the wives of strikers. In Paris, it was uncommon for them to give speeches, and even rarer for them to lead a committee.

Instead, the most cited contributions by women to the uprising involve celebrities acting in a supporting role: The actress Marie-France Pisier smuggled Mr. Cohn-Bendit across the border in the trunk of her car so he could avoid arrest. Anne Wiazemsky, an actress and the wife of the filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, crisscrossed Paris in roller skates and joined the protest against the eviction of the film archivist Henri Langlois from the government-subsidized Cinémathèque. The novelist Françoise Sagan showed up in her luxury car at the barricades, prompting a protester to scoff, “You’ve come with your Ferrari, Comrade Sagan?” Without blinking an eye, she shot back, “It’s a Maserati, Comrade.”

At the protests, the most visible women were the ones hoisted onto the shoulders of men, like the celebrated “Marianne of ’68,” Caroline de Bendern. A model and daughter of an aristocratic family, she was photographed by Jean-Pierre Rey waving the Vietcong flag during a demonstration. The shot, published in Life magazine, became world famous.

So symbols, yes, leaders, no. “There were a lot of us at the protests, but not in front,” my aunt said. “In the beginning, I watched, I listened. It took me time to become really involved.”

Simone de Beauvoir’s “The Second Sex” had been published two decades earlier, and in the United States the women’s movement was sweeping universities, but single-sex high schools were still common and the reins of power were still all held by men. Young women’s sexuality was still monitored and controlled, and even though sales of the pill had recently been approved, obtaining it was difficult.

Not surprisingly, then, on the picket lines and at the occupied universities, women did not have an equal voice. For the sociologist Jean-Pierre Le Goff, the women of May ’68 were restricted to roles as secretaries and helpmeets to men, “consigned to tending to the Maoist and Trotskyite male warriors” of the uprising.

But it’s not as simple as that, for something was stirring among women, and May ’68 crystallized it. In the same year as the revolt, small groups of women sprang up to debate women’s liberation with visiting American feminists in Paris. Two of the pioneers of French feminism, Anne Zelensky and Jacqueline Feldman, organized a meeting in the occupied Sorbonne to discuss the status of women. Feminist manifestoes led to the birth a few years later of France’s Mouvement de Libération des Femmes, the Women’s Liberation Movement.

May ’68 was also “the first time women spoke out,” Aunt Anne-Marie said, the first time they had the courage to say no, as in the case of the female worker at the Wonder battery factory in St.-Ouen, just north of Paris, who refused to go back on the job at the end of the strike there in June. A short movie beloved by film scholars shows the woman protesting the settlement of the strike as her male colleagues stream obediently back into the factory.

And in the years after the uprising, some women transformed their lives. Caroline de Bendern moved to Africa to make a movie and an album and live the sort of wild existence that anticipated the ’70s. Ewa Rudling, a former model married to the grandson of the painter Matisse, abandoned her comfortable life to become a photographer — she took her first shots at the protests, and got them published in The Observer.

As for Aunt Anne-Marie, she quit her teaching job, moved out of her parents’ home and went to live in a commune in the countryside with an activist she met at a protest. “I left the house with a single suitcase, slammed the door and felt free, free, free,” she said. “For the first time, I dared.”