French Still Engender Chauvinist Tendencies

ST. PIERRE DES CORPS, France — For six grueling weeks, Marisol Touraine crisscrossed working-class neighborhoods by the railroad tracks, farm hamlets and village markets, tramping in her black pumps, rain or shine, across a 60-mile stretch of central France in quest of votes.

Aghast at the thought that a woman, and a Socialist, might represent in Parliament this district south of the Loire River, somebody put up posters hinting that the 38-year-old mother of three small children was operating one of France’s many telephone sex services. Her right-wing opponent dismissed the chic, green-eyed Parisian as “charming.”

“On the television, he said that, with the eyes I have, I should be doing something other than politics,” Touraine recalled.

But a funny thing happened in France this month: A nation that has a buxom, mythical female (Marianne) as symbol of the Republic but where national politics has been so macho that there were proportionately fewer women in France’s Parliament than in Zambia’s or Kazakhstan’s elected more women to the National Assembly than ever.

Touraine was one of the fortunate 63. And the rookie deputy from the district near the city of Tours believes that for her country and gender, there is no turning back.

“I think the election of women in legislative elections, plus women ministers in important posts, it’s something that’s here for good,” said Touraine, a member of the Council of State, France’s highest body of government functionaries and a former researcher on strategic defense at the Rand Corp. think tank in Santa Monica.

If she is correct, then one of the most persistent peculiarities of French society--the striking rarity of women in national politics, but also in many other leadership roles--may be coming to an end.

In his first speech to Parliament on Thursday, Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, as one of his proposals to “modernize democracy” in France, said he would lobby for an amendment to enshrine the “objective of parity” in the constitution.

The bond between gender and power has deep historical roots as old as France itself.

When Queen Blanche of Castille, mother of St. Louis, assumed the regency in 1226 after her husband, Louis VIII, died, feudal barons protested that “it is not for a woman to govern such a grand thing as the Kingdom of France.”

Fast forward more than seven centuries, and many women trying to make their way in the political world of the Fifth Republic judge the reality to be more or less identical.

“In France, women are excluded from political life,” Elisabeth Guigou, a former European affairs minister and a prominent member of the Socialist Party, flatly asserts in her book “Etre Femme en Politique” (“To Be a Woman in Politics”), published in February.

This tradition is even mirrored by the French language, whose common term for “politician” has long been homme politique--a political man.

By this month, though, the tableau had changed so dramatically that Guigou, 50, was named minister of justice in Jospin’s government, becoming the first woman to hold the prestigious post.

Among fellow ministers, she is outranked only by another female Socialist, Martine Aubry, 46, a former labor minister whose father, Jacques Delors, was European Commission president. Aubry’s daunting task is cutting France’s 12.8% unemployment rate and enacting Jospin’s campaign promise to create 700,000 jobs for young people.

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France’s gender record is poor, even when compared with its neighbors in the European Union. Among those 15 countries, France until this month was dead last in terms of the percentage of its lawmakers who are women.

As a result of the May 25 and June 1 elections, the proportion of female lawmakers in the 577-seat National Assembly nearly doubled, to 10.9%. This new share isn’t much different than the U.S. Congress, which is 11.6% female. But by the standards of contemporary Europe, it isn’t much.

On the EU list, France has climbed to 14th position, ahead only of Greece.

“With the elections, we have finished a stage, an important stage but one that is not enough,” said Simone Veil, 69, one of the few French women granted the title of minister of state and one of the most respected public figures.

If French women have entered Parliament in unprecedented numbers, Veil contended in an interview, it is chiefly by “whim of the prince”--Jospin’s decision last year that 30% of his party’s candidacies would be reserved for women. Of the women in the new Parliament, 42 are Socialists, five are Communists and three are Greens. Only a dozen are from parties to the right.

The paradoxical status of women is one of the great riddles of French society, and one that sociologists explain variously by referring to the heritage of the French Revolution, the doctrine of the medieval church that viewed woman as the devil’s tool, and the Salic law adopted in 508 by the Franks that excluded females from succession to the throne.

It was only in 1945, after all, that French women got the right to vote, almost a quarter of a century after American women did and later than did women in Britain, Germany and most other European countries.

And it was only in 1965 that the Civil Code written under Napoleon, who once said “nature has made women our slaves,” was amended to allow married women to open a bank account without their husbands’ assent.

Yet in percentage terms, no country has more educated females than France. Women make up 44% of the labor force. More girls than boys pass the grueling examination for the baccalaureate degree at the end of secondary school. Since 1971, more women than men have gone to college, and many important civil servants and half of the country’s magistrates are now women.

But unlike in much of Europe, equality in education and in employment opportunities have not made leadership a two-gender affair.

Even today, not one of France’s 200 largest companies is headed by a woman. They may have the same prestigious diplomas, but women earn an average of 15% less than men, studies have shown.

In government, the few Francaises who have reached high office have often had to combat widespread rumors that they made it by sleeping with somebody important, like latter-day Madame de Pompadours.

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When Socialist Edith Cresson was named France’s first and only woman prime minister in 1991, it was said--without proof--that she had been one of the late President Francois Mitterrand’s many mistresses.

Cresson lasted 323 days, victim of a cabal in her own party, her own gaffes and what Guigou termed a “sexist lynching” in the media. She may have hindered, rather than helped, the cause of women in politics.

Jospin’s predecessor, Alain Juppe, appointed a record 12 women to his center-right government in 1995.

All but four of the women, who were quickly dubbed the “Juppettes” (“mini-skirts”), were gone in less than six months, fired for alleged incompetence.

They had been put in their mostly minor posts, it seems, more as a decoration to seize the attention of the public than as valued officials.

“In France, political power is the real power, and it belongs to men,” Veil said. “It’s a closed club, like hunting, you know, where one is free, free to say what one wants, and if there are women, it’s bothersome.”

France’s intense centralization of state power since the days of the Jacobins has also stymied the rise of female leaders.

The old-boy networks of elite schools, including the National School of Administration and the Polytechnic, ensure that many plum jobs go to fellow graduates, where women, unlike in the universities, are still in the minority.

The long-standing practice of holding several elective offices at once, which Jospin wants to eliminate, has also blocked the ascent of female politicians from the grass-roots, where many hold local office.

But Janine Mossuz-Lavau, a director of research at the Research Center on French Political Life in Paris, believes that political parties bear the bulk of the responsibility.

“In a general way, they barred the way to women, refusing to give them responsibilities,” she said. For a long time, that included the non-Communist parties on the left.

In 1936, for example, Socialist Leon Blum named three women to his Popular Front government. Although he was in favor of female suffrage, he did nothing to grant them or other Frenchwomen the vote.

“There are not 10,000 women in France who are interested in politics,” he said.

Blum may have had a point. Though some of the most notable feminists have been French--including Simone de Beauvoir, author of the path-breaking work “The Second Sex”--French women on the whole have been slower to demand equal political representation than their peers in the United States or other countries in Europe.

The suffragette movement came late in France and never reached the passionate scale seen in Anglo-Saxon countries because of French women’s ability to work within the system and the social power they wielded despite their legal impotence.

Even French feminism, born of the 1968 social upheaval that rocked the presidency of Charles de Gaulle, was not about politics. It focused on issues such as legalization of abortion, which Veil spearheaded in 1975 in the face of intense parliamentary opposition, and a more equitable sharing of household chores.

Political parity became a popular cause only in this decade.

A book written by three women in 1992 suggested the motto of the French Republic be amended to “Liberty, Equality, Parity.”

Four years later, in June 1996, 10 women who had held ministerial posts from the left and right, Veil among them, issued a widely discussed manifesto calling for step-by-step establishment of gender parity in politics.

In France’s present-day climate, where people have grown suspicious of their leaders and of the “political class” as a whole, women have been welcomed by many voters as fresh, honest faces more interested in solving society’s problems than in holding power for its own sake.

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Touraine, who is married to a banker and served as counselor to former Socialist Prime Minister Michel Rocard on international and strategic affairs in 1988-91, agreed that being a woman helped her.

“We want to get into politics to solve a certain number of problems and make things go forward, and not to call people names,” she said, deploring the hectoring style of many French male politicians.

Like many of the Socialist Party’s female candidates, Touraine, whose father is one of France’s most prominent sociologists, was “parachuted” into her district to run for office and now must work to put down roots and prove to the electorate that she can be of use.

Much ground has been covered by French female politicians since a popular television show represented Cresson as an obedient sexual pet kept on a leash by Mitterrand. But veterans like Veil say much remains to be done.

Even in their first visit to the National Assembly on the Left Bank of the Seine, deputies received a reminder that in France, femmes politiques are still the exception. Like the 576 other members of the chamber, Touraine was handed a leather case. Inside were the accouterments of the French lawmaker: a diary, a tricolor sash--and a man’s wallet.