Abstract
This article sheds new light on the history of French feminism during the crucial period between the 1960s and 1980s, and it does by so opening up the range of actors as well as the geography and chronology considered. More specifically, it reconsiders the battles for reproductive rights: the liberalisation of contraception in 1967 and of abortion in 1975. Focusing on the perspective of those sitting on the margins of reproductive citizenship and of the standard narratives of the feminist movement – immigrant women and their organisations in France, and civil society groups in the Overseas Departments (Départements d’Outre-Mer, DOMs) – as well as addressing the distinct reproductive regimes in the DOMs, allows for a reconsideration of French post-war pronatalism, and breaks away from what has long been the standard narrative of Western ‘second-wave feminism’, globalising and de-centring its history.
Preamble
This article takes inspiration from Bridget Fowler as a scholar and a friend. I met her nearly 20 years ago when I started working at the University of Glasgow. I benefited from her contributions to the Centre for the Study of Socialist Theory and Movements, and from her generosity in gathering friends over food, wine and laughter. In this piece I converse with her consistent exploration and denunciation of social injustice, weaving together threads of the personal, political and professional. I draw on many conversations with Bridget over the years about the politics of family and feminism – moments usually laced with unsuccessful attempts at keeping children or grandchildren out of trouble.
Intellectually, I draw on Bridget’s insights on the interrelatedness of gender and class oppression and inequality. As a framework for social and historical enquiry, gender–class intersectionality was developed primarily in the context of intersectional feminist thought, represented in the Anglophone world by scholars such as Kimberlé Crenshaw and Patricia Hill Collins, and specifically in the realm of the politics of reproduction, by Angela Davis. As others in this collection have noted, as a Marxist feminist Bridget explored such intersectionality, without always terming it as such, from numerous angles, most explicitly in her critical engagement with Pierre Bourdieu’s Masculine Domination (1998). While Bourdieu’s emphasis on the longevity of gender oppression, across different socio-economic and governance systems, has led some scholars to note his pessimistic view on the potential for radical cultural transformation, Bridget’s critique is a different one. In ‘Reading Bourdieu’s Masculine Domination’, she contributes to a research agenda for a more thorough exploration of gender oppression as connected to the reproduction of class distinctions, and she calls for detailed historical analyses of social transformation in this regard (Fowler, 2003, p. 478). While here her interests are primarily centred on women’s work, education and culture, the present article shares Bridget’s concerns to approach liberal feminism critically. Exploring reproductive rights struggles in France in the 1960s–1980s, it points at the situated, rather than universal, claims and aspirations of the activists, in the majority white, who were perceived as the leading figures of the Western women’s liberation movements of the late twentieth century. As Bridget is in her engagement with Bourdieu, the analysis that follows is attentive to the power of discursive disruptions and the role played herein by social actors, while also pointing at the persistence of social processes of hierarchisation – along the lines of gender, race and class, among other categories of difference – also in times of apparent liberalisation, such as the era of contraception and abortion law reform which forms the focus of this article.
Historical setting
The social upheaval of the late 1960s in France gave way to new, radicalised discourses and practices of feminism. The women’s liberation movement, or Mouvement pour la Libération des Femmes (MLF), was to develop into France’s most impactful social movement of the 1970s. In 1970, a year referred to by a generation of young activists as ‘année zero’, small groups of feminists engaged in a number of highly visible public actions, drawing attention to the multiple forms of inequality and exploitation experienced by women in society and presenting fresh, radical critiques of patriarchy. Widely noted actions, including the first large women-only meeting at Vincennes University and the laying of a wreath ‘to the unknown soldier’s wife’ at the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, reflected the coming together of small collectives into the MLF, a movement that was to attract thousands of activists and sympathisers around the country over the years to come. Beyond the different approaches within the movement, on the whole it was marked by a commitment to social and sexual revolutions aimed at liberating women, and by practices of sex-based separatism and autonomy vis-a-vis other organisations (Pavard et al., 2020, pp. 276–278). In this article, I shed new light on the history of French feminism during this period, by opening up the range of actors as well as the geography and chronology. I aim to break away from what has long been the standard narrative of Western ‘second-wave feminism’, globalising and de-centring its history. Specifically, this article reconsiders the battles for reproductive rights: the liberalisation of contraception in 1967 and of abortion in 1975. It focuses on the perspective of those sitting on the margins of reproductive citizenship and of the standard narratives of the feminist movement: immigrant women and their organisations in France, and civil society groups in the Overseas Departments (Départements d’Outre-Mer, DOMs) of Martinique, Guadeloupe, Guiana and Réunion. In order to do so, the article starts with a reinterpretation of post-war French pronatalism and the distinct reproductive regime in the DOMs, to then discuss the legalisation of contraception, the emergence of the MLF, and the decriminalisation of abortion.
The article intends to contribute to a critical, complex history of French feminism. Situating it as a movement that was made up in the majority of white French nationals, and was contested by immigrant women, women of colour and women in the DOMs, allows us to interrogate the celebratory account that has marked some of the scholarship on twentieth-century Western feminism. Influenced by global-history approaches, historians and feminist scholars have since the 1990s started to de-centre the Western women’s liberation movements of the long 1970s – once held as paradigmatic to the very definition of feminism (Delap, 2020; Ferree & Tripp, 2006; Grewal, 1998; Smith & Robinson, 2022). The history of Western feminism is being connected to processes of decolonisation and immigration, and the category of race is being foregrounded alongside class, revealing tensions within and the plurality of the feminist agenda (e.g. Tomlinson, 2016; see also Elena, 2011). Reconsidering actors also provokes a reassessment of periodisation. Moving away from a narrow focus on the 1970s, recent global interpretations of twentieth-century feminism have highlighted the significance of women’s transnational networks and gendered anti-imperialism during the heyday of decolonisation (1945–1970), as well as thriving feminist activism centred in and between Latin America, Africa and Asia in the 1980s–1990s, including a transnational reproductive health and rights movement (Alvarez, 1998; Grewal, 1998; Mohanty et al., 1991). Looking at France specifically, there is a need to de-centre the MLF, part of which considered itself the only legitimate feminist actor, in order to consider women’s rights and equality activism in, for instance, trade unions, and to trace origins and continuities that were long obscured by the discourse of ‘année zero’ (Chaperon, 2000). The present article, thus, expands the actors of late-twentieth-century French feminism to include not only the MLF but also the family planning movements Maternité Heureuse and Mouvement Français pour le Planning Familial (MFPF), which since the late 1950s had campaigned for legal contraception; gender-mixed collectives practising illegal abortion in the 1970s; Black and immigrant women’s groups in mainland France in the 1970s–1980s; and women’s rights advocates in Réunion, Martinique and Guadeloupe.
Historical scholarship on French post-war feminism is rich, and the ways in which this historiography has developed over time resembles the situation in other Western countries. The first historical accounts of the 1980s–1990s were written mostly by scholars who had been part of or close to the movement, offering privileged insights which, however, were often marked by a lack of critical distance. Francoise Picq’s Libération des femmes (1993) marked a breakthrough as it incorporated a plurality of source material and perspectives. While especially English-language scholarship on the MLF has long foregounded ‘feminism of difference’ to the neglect of other theoretical and practical frameworks (Delphy, 1995), recent scholars have noted the diversity of theoretical frameworks at play within the movement. Moreover, scholarship has started globalising the history of French feminism. Bibia Pavard has focused on North American influence, notably in the practices of reclaiming the body (Pavard et al., 2020, pp. 271–276; see also, for a rare comparative account, Schulz, 2002). Fundamental questions are asked by work that aims to decolonise French feminism, notably by Françoise Vergès (2017) and Myriam Paris (2020). Exploring the racist reproductive governance by the French authorities on the island of Réunion between the 1950s and 1970s, these authors have uncovered the extreme forms of reproductive violence undergone by women of colour there, who are French citizens, and the mobilisation against it by local feminist and left-wing organisations. Critically, they have noted the deafening silence among white feminists in mainland France – bar a few exceptions – on reproductive violence perpetrated by the French state overseas.
In analysing reproductive politics, the article employs an intersectional approach: experiences of reproductive injustice, and what it means to exercise reproductive autonomy, varied significantly between women in France depending on social class, perceived ability, immigration status and ethnicity, and between women in the mainland and the DOMs. The standard historical narrative is that reproductive governance in France was transformed during this period through the legalisation of contraception in 1967 (the Loi Neuwirth, named after member of the Assembly Lucien Neuwirth, who introduced the bill), and the liberalisation of abortion in 1975 (the Loi Veil, named after Minister for Health Simone Veil). While both laws and the institutional and cultural changes accompanying them fundamentally reframed the reproductive liberty of women in mainland France, more research needs to be conducted on the differentiated impacts on women positioned differently in society. Both sets of reform reveal the determining impact of the feminist movement, defined broadly. The family planning movement was key in pressuring politicians and experts towards the legalisation of contraception in the 1960s, as well as creating a situation where growing numbers of women – those with financial means and connections – were illegally using intra-uterine devices (IUDs) and the pill (Pavard, 2012b). The 1967 law legalised the advertising of contraceptives as well as their sale on demand to adult women, although the amount of contraceptives a woman could purchase was limited, and they were not free of cost in mainland France (as discussed below, this was different in the DOMs). Through these legal reforms and related public debates, a new normativity was established in the reponsibilisation of individuals and specifically women, urged to make the ‘right’ choices in family formation, family size and parenting practices. The popularisation of the notion of responsible reproduction, first introduced by the family planning movement in the late 1950s, was what made the legality of contraception acceptable to (some) conservatives in 1967. It allowed medical practitioners, policy-makers and social commentators to establish distinctions between those deemed capable or incapable of adopting ‘modern’, rational birth-control practices. Access to contraception was granted on the expectation that one would make the ‘right’ choices for the wellbeing not only of one’s family but of the nation at large, reflecting its modernity and a ‘stable’ gender order, and contributing to its prosperity and demographic stability. As Neuwirth argued before the Assembly while his bill was discussed, his aim was ‘to impose a new ethics’ in sexual and family life; it could be achieved only if couples assumed their ‘social responsibility’ in upholding sexual norms and parental obligations. 1
Amidst increasingly explicit discussion of the continued high numbers of illegal abortions in the early 1970s, feminists introduced a new discourse on reproductive liberty. The MLF, MLAC (Mouvement pour la Libéralisation de l’Avortement et la Contraception) and other groups campaigning for abortion on demand in the early 1970s played a crucial role in pressuring a part of public opinion and politicians, and in particular Simone Veil, towards legal reform (Pavard et al., 2012). They did this by breaking the taboo on the hundreds of thousands of unsafe, sometimes fatal abortions occurring every year; by creating a language with which to speak of abortion; by claiming the right to guilt-free sex for women; and by developing safe self-managed abortion practices. The feminist movement’s political and societal impact was clearly reflected in the adoption of the Veil Law of 1975 and its re-approval with minor amendments in 1979. The 1975 reform decriminalised abortion for all adult French women up to 10 weeks of gestation, if they could invoke ‘a situation of distress’ – a broad category which included health risks, psychological stress and socio-economic difficulties. A physician had to sign off on the request, after a compulsory ‘reflection time’ of eight days for the woman and a one-to-one conversation (colloque singulier). Unless the former was a declared conscientious objector, he or she was not allowed to refuse the abortion request if protocol had been followed. The intervention was not free of cost, and regulations in the DOMs were identical. The feminist movement in its entirety condemned the law for falling short of allowing abortion on demand, rightly anticipating a degree of obstruction by physicians due to a combination of conscientious objection and lack of training (Pavard, 2012b, pp. 255–273).
At the same time, the MLF’s approach to contraception and abortion needs to be understood as framed by the life-experiences of its activists. While Western feminism often presented its politics of bodily liberation as bearing universal relevance, it was during this period focused specifically on the right not to be a mother. In France, this can be historicised as a response to the particularly strong pro-natalist governance of the post-war years, which feminists in the 1970s came to refer to as forced motherhood. By contrast, in the emerging global women’s health movement centred on Latin America, Africa and Asia, and in the critiques of immigrant women in France, women of colour denounced the universalist claim of such a reproductive rights agenda, pointing at the distinct forms of reproductive violence inflicted on non-white women in the long history of slavery, colonialism and neo-colonial global constellations (on the emergence of a transnational movement for women’s and reproductive health in the 1970s, see e.g. Correa, 1994; Russo, 2020). They argued that for non-white women and globally, reproductive injustices had involved the forced denial of motherhood as well as forced motherhood, and critiqued the MLF for its blind spots in this regard. In France, as detailed in the final section of this article, it was crucially the Coordination des Femmes Noires which articulated such a distinct vision of reproductive rights and justice, and a critique of majority-white feminism. The history of Francophone Black feminism remains partly to be written. Black feminism has most often been historicised as a movement originating in the USA, in the conditions of (post-)slavery and mid-twentieth-century racial segregation (Hill Collins, 1990; Springer, 2005). Recently, French academia has gained an interest in Black feminisms in the Francophone world, as reflected in a milestone conference at Campus Condorcet in 2020, and in notable work by Annette Joseph-Gabriel (2019), and Félix Germain and Silyane Larcher (2018). In a similar transnational vein, the present article aims to contribute elements to these novel perspectives on the thought and praxis of Francophone Black feminism, specifically drawing out its originality vis-a-vis majority-white feminism.
The following analysis is based on archival and published texts by feminist groups and writers in France and the DOMs, found in the Archives du Féminisme at Angers University and the Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand in Paris. In addition, it draws on correspondence between the French government and the Prefects of Martinique and Guadeloupe, all consulted at the Archives Nationales de France. Further research, involving archival material in the DOMs and oral history interviews, will need to be conducted in order to more fully reconstruct reproductive rights struggles and the impact of legal reform in the DOMs.
Stratified reproductive governance in post-war France and the Antilles: Contraception
Post-war pronatalism in France is well-documented. As a result of the demographic losses of World War II but also inscribed in the long-standing ‘denatality complex’ of France’s political leaders (De Luca Barrusse, 2020), couples were strongly encouraged to create large families. This occurred through a combination of economic incentives (the prestations familiales, a package of welfare support for families, among the most generous in the world at the time), and an insistent cultural message that reified the heteronormative, patriarchal, nuclear family and within it women’s domestic role, now modernised through technology and consumer goods (Fishman, 2017; Pulju, 2011). The powerful Institut National d’Etudes Démographiques (INED) provided the scientific rationale underpinning the pro-natalist consensus. INED argued that the average family size required to maintain the population level at economically necessary levels was 3.2 children per family – although as early as the 1950s it started to qualify this position and point at population ‘quality’ as well as ‘quantity’ (Drouard, 1992; see also Rosenthal, 2003). 2 Most historical accounts pay limited attention to the limits of pro-natalism: that is to say, the fact that not all citizens were equally encouraged to have children and that such distinctions were primarily based on social class and ethnicity. In the DOMs, whose inhabitants were French citizens, the state developed an anti-natalist policy framework, contrasting with pro-natalism on the mainland. Post-war France can be considered a schoolbook example of racialised, stratified reproductive governance. Drawing on Shellee Colen (1986) and Lynn Morgan and Elizabeth Roberts (2012), I use the notion of stratified reproductive governance to explore the mechanisms – including legislation, coercion, hegemonic moral discourse and economic and welfare arrangements – used by a variety of state and non-state actors to monitor, influence and police people’s reproductive behaviour in unequal and socially differentiated ways. These mechanisms produce the distinct conditions in which reproductive choice is exercised and reproductive health experienced, according to social class, ethnicity, nationality status and perceived ability.
Constitutionally, the status of these islands was in 1946 transformed from colonies to Départements d’Outre-Mer, administrative units governed like other French departments but with the possibility of distinct laws. This occurred as part of the reconfiguration of the French Empire into a ‘French Union’ in 1945 (Childers, 2016; on the French Union, see Cooper, 2014). From the 1950s, the French government and the local Prefects representing it, alongside the INED, were alarmed by what they saw as ‘galloping fertility’ and ‘overpopulation’ in the DOMs and the Global South generally. They were influenced by globally circulating discourses, rapidly gaining ground after 1960, and propagated by internationally operating US- and UK-based organisations such as the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) and the Population Council. The ‘global family planning revolution’ of the 1950s–1970s has in recent years been analysed critically as a movement of experts and philanthropists in the Global North aiming to ‘flood the third world with contraceptives’. They were primarily motivated not by a women’s rights agenda but by population control objectives (Connelly, 2008; Eager, 2017). As posited by Betsy Hartmann (1995, pp. 89–106), the perception among Western experts and politicians regarding overpopulation in the Global South was accompanied with the construction of race categories and discourses on problematic sexual and reproductive behaviour by non-white and previously colonised peoples. French authorities and experts by and large shared such views, despite INED’s stated opposition to US demographic science. 3 In France, the mantra of overpopulation was based, furthermore, on entrenched colonial stereotypes of hyper-sexual black men and hyper-fertile black women. This was enmeshed with the exploitative colonial image of the sexually available and submissive Antillean woman that had pervaded French culture and political discourse since the nineteenth century, and with the long-standing and misguided cliché of a high women-to-men ratio on the Antillean islands (Childers, 2016, ch. 6; Louilot & Crusol-Baillard, 1989). French officials employed a discourse of lack of ‘hygiene’ and of ‘familial (by which they meant sexual) morality’ in the Antilles. 4 As pointed out by Myriam Paris (2020, p. 15), the analysis of the demographic situation in the DOMs – be it by INED, the Prefects, or government departments in Paris – was structured along race categories, otherwise not used in French official statistics.
Socio-economic problems in the Antilles were considerable following departmentalisation, with low standards of living and rising unemployment specifically among young people. The French authorities and experts framed demographics as largely causing these problems, rather than economic underdevelopment. The corresponding anti-natalist policies consisted of two pillars, the first of which was weaker family support compared to mainland France. The prestations familiales were introduced only partly in the DOMs: benefits were lower overall; they were lower for third and later children; and they were dependent on at least one parent being in employment. These distinctions were accentuated in the 1960s, as a result of the government and INED coming more strongly under the influence of global overpopulation discourse and only in the mid-1970s did family benefits in the DOMs come close to French levels (Gautier, 1988, 2000). The second pillar of anti-natalism consisted in the early dissemination of contraception in the DOMs, and a distinct legal framework once contraception was legalised. In mainland France, contraception in the 1960s came to be associated with women’s liberation. The MFPF had long referred to contraception as ‘a new liberty for women’. 5 However, the simple equation of contraception with women’s liberty masked a range of realities for marginalised, disabled, immigrant and poor women as well as women in the overseas territories. Not all women or men were considered equal in their capability to practise ‘responsible procreation’. As noted, the notion of ‘responsible procreation’ was central to the discourses of the family planning movement and of reform-minded politicians such as Neuwirth. It was a discourse distinguishing between heterosexual and single-parent families; affluent and poor families; white and non-white immigrant couples; and families in the hexagon (as mainland France is called) and the overseas departments. In its underground provision of contraception from the early 1960s onwards, the MFPF only reached the educated middle classes as the cost of contraceptives was considerable (Bracke, 2022, p. 689).
Moreover, the MFPF’s engagement with immigrant families reveals that the construction of race categories played a role in its understanding of ‘responsible procreation’. An MFPF research project of 1962, which was used by the IPPF as a basis for future research among immigrant groups in Europe, investigated family-size choice and use of birth control among immigrant couples in the Paris region. It was primarily driven by anti-natalism rather than the aim to expand the choice, education and agency of these women and men as reproductive subjects. Cécile Goldet, a gynaecologist active in the MFPF and future senator, conducted a survey of around 1000 married couples in the Paris region from Southern Italy, Portugal and Algeria. The latter formed the largest group of the sample, encompassing 80 families with some 400 children. Goldet found that the average family size among the Algerian community studied was about 25% higher than in the French population as a whole, a situation she labelled as ‘dramatic’. Crucially, she did not describe this as a problem because actual family size was larger than ‘desired family size’ – a category used in this investigation and habitually invoked by the MFPF to centre its research and activism on individual and couple choice. The project in fact revealed that actual and desired family size were very close across all immigrant groups studied. Yet, Goldet framed actual family size as a ‘demographic problem’ to France. 6 Further, the research, which was published shortly after the end of the Algerian War, did not seek to distinguish between Algerian immigrants with French or Algerian citizenship, instead stressing both groups’ position as cultural outsiders. Goldet noted that if Algerians maintained the wish for large families after migration to France, it would present a social problem to the country regardless of their citizenship status. 7 Both French-ness and responsible reproductive behaviour were here aligned with European-ness and implicitly framed as white. The MFPF’s approaches were thus informed by societal and political discourses at the time, which constructed the reproductive practices of immigrant couples in France as a societal problem. As argued by Amelie Lyons (2013), the reproductive and family-making practices of Algerians, both in Algeria and among immigrants in France, were in the years during and after the Algerian War discussed by French politicians and experts as a key cultural and socio-economic problem. Transforming such practices among the growing African and Arab immigrant communities in France came in this context to be seen as a vehicle for cultural assimilation, and women came to be seen as key vectors of such modernisation.
If in France the discourses of modern, rational procreative behaviour were based on race and class hierarchies, this was also the case in interventions in the DOMs. The French government pressured the Prefects and family planning organisations in the DOMs to start disseminating contraception as early as 1962, thus violating state law. Between 1963 and 1967, the Ministers (Louis Jacquinot [1961–1966] and Pierre Billotte [1966–1968]) exercised insistent pressure on the Prefects of Guadeloupe and Martinique to organise the dissemination of IUDs to local women (Sanseigne, 2020). Given the legal obstacles and their awareness of strong opposition in the Catholic Church and anti-imperialist left, Paris insisted on an approach that was ‘discreet’ – contraceptives would be provided by private organisations covertly supported by the state. 8 In 1966, the Guadeloupe organisation La Maternité Consciente, funded by the French authorities, started implanting IUDs to women visiting its clinic in Basse-Terre. These contraceptives were provided free of cost. 9 In Martinique, however, the main family planning association, Centre d’Education, Documentation et Information sur la Famille (CEDIF), refused to disseminate contraception before legalisation in France more widely. 10 The CEDIF, a not-for-profit organisation independent from the state, was established in 1965 by a group of physicians, educators and social workers of different ethnicities. Active until 2000, its overarching aim was to disseminate, among professionals and the population at large, information regarding birth control, psychology and sexology. Over the following two decades, it established several training programmes for teachers, nurses and midwives. In 1968 it created the first ambulatory clinic in Martinique, which visited women in their homes across the island (Yoyo & Maxime, 2014, p. 17). While not opposing cooperation with the French authorities the CEDIF was guided by a critical anti-imperialism, openly discussing the failures of post-war departmentalisation. Michel Yoyo, its Director until 1980, envisaged healthcare, including sexual and reproductive health, as a privileged terrain to make a positive impact on people’s lives and a key instrument of the island’s socio-economic development. As he later put it: ‘we started with the main problem of the day, contraception, and soon discovered a whole array of social problems’ (Yoyo & Maxime, 2014, p. 18). In response to the Prefect’s request to ‘discreetly’ start disseminating contraception in 1965, Yoyo reportedly replied that while he was in favour of legal contraception for all French citizens, his organisation could not support a distinct framework for the DOMs. The CEDIF repeatedly critiqued the anti-natalist policy framework that governed the DOMs for being based on ethnicity and establishing inequality between French citizens. It chose to use the term ‘regulation’ rather than ‘limitation of births’, and challenged the idea of a ‘demographic explosion’ in the Antilles (Yoyo & Maxime, 2014, pp. 23–24).
The birthrate in the Antilles dropped considerably after legalisation: from 34.9% in 1965 to 20.89% in 1975 for Martinique (Gautier, 1988). We can hypothesise that it resulted at least partly from the fact that contraceptives were free of cost in the DOMs, different to the situation in the mainland. The legalisation of contraception in 1967 immediately prompted a discussion on the need for free-of-cost provision in the Antilles. The Minister for the DOMs pushed for a regime allowing easier access to contraception than in France, always arguing for this in demographic terms and only occasionally mentioning widespread poverty as necessitating such an arrangement. 11 The French Assembly in 1972 approved three specific arrangements for the DOMs, which in fact had already been practised by medical institutions in the DOMs since 1967: minors could obtain the pill without parental consent from the age of 16; all legally obtained contraception was free of charge; and non-state family planning centres as well as hospitals and pharmacies would be allowed to disseminate contraception. The MFPF as well as the Antillean family planning associations supported the 1972 law, although the latter had been reluctant to bring these measures into practice before 1972. 12 In Martinique, the CEDIF was allowed to disseminate contraception alongside state clinics. By 1970, its ambulatory clinic had visited over 4000 women in their homes, making it the driving force behind the quite high uptake of contraception by Martinican women. CEDIF workers were sharply aware of the distinct history of reproductive governance in the DOMs, and of the lingering suspicions regarding population control among the population. They engaged with such positions rather than a priori rejecting them as traditionalist. In response, they integrated their family planning activity into wider economic, educational and infrastructural support for families – and this regardless of family form, given the high numbers of single mothers (Yoyo & Maxime, 2014, pp. 52–55).
It was in Réunion that the racialised anti-natalism of the French authorities and physicians took the most violent forms (Paris, 2020, p. 314). In 1965, the French authorities created Centres d’Orientation Familiale, where women received contraception and abortions were practised in broad daylight. This was accompanied with radio advertisements and posters in hospitals, promoting contraception, and aimed at women of colour and the poor (Vergès, 2016, pp. 174–175). The Association Réunionnaise pour l’Orientation Familiale (AROF) was created by the French state to coordinate the clinics. Its detailed records, sent to Paris, structured users on the basis of race categories, income, age and marital status. Moreover, in 1970 a scandal erupted in the French press as hundreds of women accused a hospital directed by Dr David Moreau in the town of Saint-Benoit of having performed unconsented abortions and sterilisations. The Prefect, Jean Vaudeville, denied any knowledge or state involvement; yet the AROF had been referring pregnant women to Moreau’s clinic. Police investigations revealed close to 8000 cases of unconsented abortion and sterilisation, and the trail and appeal trial, in 1971, found six medical practitioners at the clinics guilty. The sentences, however, were mild, and Moreau was not among the accused, although he was found ‘civilly responsible’. The women bringing these charges did not receive damages (Vergès, 2016). 13 The only political party to denounce the systemic reproductive violence was the Communist Party of Réunion. It favoured the creation of family planning clinics, but warned that policies and health infrastructure ought to be centred on individual self-determination and couples’ informed choice. Moreover, it called for the legalisation of abortion based on the woman’s choice. In 1971, its widely-read periodical Témoignages published a series of articles in favour of legal abortion, and it reproduced a tract by the MLF on abortion (Paris, 2020, pp. 326–327). Its positions, therefore, revealed a complex understanding of stratified reproductive governance: more so than actors in mainland France, it displayed an awareness that the dissemination of contraception or the practising of abortion did not automatically liberate women, and that, in choosing whether or not to have children, individual agency was paramount.
The Union des Femmes Réunionnaises (UFR) teased out more clearly a position favouring reproductive choice for women, while cognisant of stratified governance and distinct contexts. The UFR grew out of the Organisation Féminine Réunionnaise (OFR) created in 1945, aligned with the Communist Party of Réunion and a member of the Soviet-dominated Women’s International Democratic Federation. Reformed into the UFR in 1958, it turned into a feminist organisation, employing a language of anti-imperialism, and calling not for independence but for equal citizenship rights and a new constitutional status for the DOMs. It was key in denouncing the French authorities’ aggressive anti-natalism on the island. The UFR campaigned for what we now refer to as reproductive justice, based on an awareness of intersecting oppressions under a system of racialised and gendered citizenship. 14 It refused to respond to violent anti-natalism with a blanket rejection of contraception, abortion or sterilisation. The UFR in the 1960s–1970s unambiguously advocated for the ‘complete liberty for women to be free in their destiny’ (Paris, 2020, pp. 317–349), framing this as part of wider demands for full citizenship rights for women in the DOMs. The UFR’s awareness of the connections between colonial domination and reproductive violence was rooted in woman-centred everyday medical practice, as many activists were nurses and midwives. They drew attention to the conditions of poverty in which black women in Réunion were forced to raise their children, as well as high maternal and infant mortality rates specific to this population group – incorporating these issues in their campaigning alongside access to contraception, safe abortion and sexual education (Pavard et al., 2020, pp. 326–327). It was an original perspective which, as far as the sources reveal, was barely noticed by feminists in mainland France, as we will see in the next section.
Abortion and the feminist politics of the body
In the preface to a 1960 book by leading family planning advocate Marie-Andrée Lagroua Weill-Hallé, La Grand’peur d’aimer, Simone de Beauvoir posited that ‘for women, freedom begins in the belly’. 15 Ahead of her time, de Beauvoir here captured the centrality of bodily and sexual autonomy to women’s lives, to their liberation, and to the articulation of a novel, embodied citizenship. For the MLF, too, women’s liberation hinged on the exercise of bodily and reproductive autonomy, since patriarchy crucially relied on removing it from women. The MLF, as did feminist movements around the Western world at the time, politicised the body, sexuality, the private sphere and procreation in order to reveal the deep mechanisms of patriarchy, and offer women a new and fully embodied sense of self (Bracke, 2014, pp. 79–91). In France, abortion on demand was a key focus of the politics of the body from 1973 onwards, with numerous major street protests, conferences and media interventions by feminists. The strength of the feminist mobilisation lay in a creative tension between those sections of the movement acting for legal change, and others prioritising cultural change and specifically the creation and dissemination of feminist knowledge and practices of the body. Particularly influential within the first dimension was Tunisian- French barrister Gisèle Halimi and the organisation she co-founded in 1972, Choisir. Halimi was known as an anti-colonial lawyer and women’s rights campaigner. In 1960 she had acted as defence lawyer for Djamila Boupacha, an Algerian woman and FLN militant tortured and raped by French soldiers. It was a case that did much to shift French public opinion against the army’s actions in Algeria, and the book Halimi co-authored with de Beauvoir on the case, Djamila Boupacha, had significant political impact. 16 At the later Bobigny trial of 1972, Halimi took on the defence of Marie-Claire Chevalier, a 17-year-old whose pregnancy had resulted from rape, and who stood accused of abortion alongside her mother and three other women who had helped her. A socialist, she presented Chevalier’s fate as universal rather than particular, while foregrounding the class dimension of illegal abortion (‘it is always poor women that are condemned’). 17 Bobigny became a political event and a major moment in shifting French public and political opinion in favour of part-legal abortion. Halimi grasped it as an opportunity to argue for legal reform, and the MLF made a significant impact on public opinion by foregrounding discourses of women’s self-determination. While the verdict was ambiguous, Halimi’s closing plea is arguably one of the most significant political texts of post-war France – one which presented a new vision for a gendered, embodied citizenship based on bodily autonomy, yet linking this with established republican traditions of liberté (Perini, 2014, pp. 25–27).
The movement for abortion was influenced by globally circulating texts and ideas. French feminists, and above all the MLAC, played a key role in early attempts to internationalise the struggle for legal abortion and reproductive rights. MLAC activists in the early 1970s learned the ‘Karman’ or vacuum aspiration method from US activists visiting Paris. Alongside family planning activists and left-wing physicians, MLAC activists illegally performed safe, free abortions, championing a culture of self-management and self-education (Pavard, 2012a). The MLAC demonstrated the Karman method to activists in Portugal and West Germany, and in 1975 it organised a conference entitled ‘International Study Days’ for West European groups. Here, a shared ‘politics of the body’ took shape, resulting also from intense circulation of texts between Western Europe and North America, not least Our Bodies, Ourselves, the revolutionary self-help manual published by the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective (Davis, 2007). Yet a number of groups, foremost the Swiss Dispensaire des Femmes, wished to go beyond the Western world. It organised the first International Woman and Health Meeting in Geneva in 1981, which was followed by a second such meeting held in Amsterdam in 1984 and attended by around 500 women from 40 countries. A ‘global women’s health movement’ grew out these encounters, increasingly centred on militants from Africa, Asia and Latin America, and transforming by 1990 into a number of influential NGOs with consultative status at the United Nations (Bracke, 2023, p. 813). At Amsterdam, the North–South tension which had characterised these encounters from the outset fully came to the fore. While the West European organisers claimed to champion global solidarity, women from Latin America, Africa and Asia critiqued them for a Western-based universalist understanding of feminism and naïve approach to ‘global sisterhood’ which, they argued, effaced local experiences. It was on the terrain of reproductive politics that conflicts were most pronounced. As women from postcolonial states argued, Western women ought to critically question their own agenda based solely on the right not to be a mother, as important as the struggles for legal abortion were. They challenged Western feminist movements to acknowledge that reproductive autonomy struggles in countries which had seen slavery, colonialism, and more recently coercive family planning programmes, involved also the right to be a mother. Delegates from the Global South suggested ‘women’s control, not population control’ as the main slogan for a new organisation that came into being here, the Women’s Global Network for Reproductive Rights (Cottingham, 1988).
From France, only the MLAC attended the Amsterdam conference. French groups were increasingly absent from the global women’s health movement, partly as a result of their unwillingness to engage with the UN (Topini, 2023). French feminism’s ‘geography of solidarity’ was thus centred largely on the Western world. As argued by Vergès, much of French feminism uncritically reproduced the geography of the French Republic based on the topography of ‘centre’ (France, Europe) and ‘periphery’. It implicitly situated French woman as white, European and located in the mainland, as notions of gendered citizenship since the nineteenth century had done (Vergès, 2017, p. 212). MLF publications, including widely-read periodicals such as Le Torchon Brûle, rarely featured images of or articles by non-white women. An exception was Choisir – La cause des femmes, the fortnightly periodical of the homonymous organisation. It featured diverse women on its covers and early on, in April 1973, dedicated a themed issue to female genital mutilation, an issue later taken up by the CFN (Laroche & Larrouy, 2009). According to Gerty Dambury, a leading Black feminist in France, the MLF as a whole never broached questions of colonisation, including the history and legacies of the French Empire, or the gendered dimensions of colonial rule. As she claims, there were at most 40 non-European immigrant women across the MLF organisations in Paris at any time in the 1970s (Laroche & Larrouy, 2009, p. 49).
By and large, the feminist and leftist press failed to analyse in depth the reproductive violence in Réunion and the Antilles. To be sure, the MLF in its tracts did reference the forced sterilisations and abortions in Réunion, but this seems to have remained marginal to the wider narrative and campaigning in France. An editorial in the December 1972 edition of Le Torchon Brule is indicative: ‘In the DOMs, you practise forced sterilisation and promote free use of contraception from the age of fifteen. In France, you refuse it under twenty-one. Why? Because the colonial administrators for the moment are more invested in white procreation than in black procreation.’ 18 Unique among the French feminist groups, the MLAC explicitly included the right to motherhood as well as the right to reject it, and called on the state to provide the conditions which would make a free choice in reproduction possible – childcare, housing and income. Far from uncritically supporting the opening of family planning clinics in the Antilles and Réunion, as most of the MLF and the MFPF did, the MLAC spoke out against what it saw as ‘racist neo-Malthusianism and anti-natalism’ in these territories, relating it to the longer history of colonial population management. 19 By and large, however, feminists in mainland France seem not to have grasped the wider significance of reproductive struggles in the ‘periphery’ and nor did they incorporate these issues in their campaigning. Herewith, they revealed their mental map, and missed the opportunity to understand reproductive injustice in more complex ways, as embedded in unequal relations between citizens and social groups according to ethnicity, class and ability.
The MLF started to engage with women’s situation in the DOMs more fully in the 1980s. In 1985, the influential periodical co-founded by Delphy, Nouvelles Questions Féministes, published a special issue entitled Antillaises, with articles on women’s social conditions in Guadeloupe and Martinique. The issue included historical analyses of slavery and the contemporary legacies. In the introduction, feminist sociologist Ariette Gautier stated the publication was driven by ‘a feeling of urgency’ and the ‘will to remedy a shortcoming’. She acknowledged that French feminism had remained ‘mostly white’, whereas ‘France is multi-ethnic’. The lack of engagement with Black feminism (which was termed here as such) was noted particularly in comparison with British and US feminism: ‘the voices of Black feminism have not made themselves heard here – or at least we have not heard them – while in the US and Britain they have put into question a certain monolithic vision’ (Gautier, 1985, pp. 4–8). Such an acknowledgement was prompted by the growing visibility of immigrant and Black feminism in mainland France, discussed in the next section.
Black and immigrant feminism: The Coordination des Femmes Noires
The Coordination des Femmes Noires (CFN) pioneered Black feminism in the Francophone world. Active in Paris between 1976 and 1982, it counted around 50 active militants of different, mostly African nationalities. In 1982 it was reconstituted as Mouvement des Femmes Noires. Three leading figures of CFN, Gerty Dambury, Maria Kala Lobe and Awa Thiam, had in the 1960s migrated to France from Guadeloupe, Cameroun and Senegal respectively. Dambury had a background in student protest at Vincennes and in the MLF, and had links with a radical organisation of African immigrants, Révo Afrique. The CFN held its first major public event, the Journées des Femmes Noires, in October 1977, attended by an estimated 300 activists. 20 The CFN came into being partly in response to the passing of the Loi Veil, which made legal abortion conditional on holding French citizenship. It aimed to speak for the thousands of immigrant women in France for whom backstreet abortion was still the only option. The CFN called for abortion on demand in all circumstances (‘nous voulons disposer de notre corps librement’), and to all women with legal residency. Nonetheless, the CFN was supportive of the Veil law, seeing it as a step in ‘the unfinished political process towards bodily self-determination’. 21 The CFN pointed at the limits in the MLF’s approaches, specifically the slogan, used routinely in the years before legalisation, ‘avortement legal y compris pour les mineures et les immigrées’. The CFN pointed out that this implied framing non-French women as immature reproductive subjects and incomplete reproductive citizens. Later, Dambury recalled that they ‘hated this slogan’. 22
Thiam, a writer and academic working between Senegal and France, went on to become a globally leading activist against female genital mutilation and served as minister for Health and Social Action in Senegal. Her 1978 book, La Parole aux négresses, which collected oral testimony by women from various African countries on themes such as genital mutilation, sexual violence, forced sterilisation, skin-whitening and contraception, had a significant impact in France, Africa, and internationally. 23 Thiam concluded the book with a reflection on what African women’s lives meant as part of a global feminist revolution, hereby harshly critiquing French feminists. In an insight articulated around the same time also by Black feminists in the US, she rubbished the ‘woman/slave’ analogy so commonplace in white-feminist discourse (Mianda, 2014). She urged them to avoid ghettoising African women’s life-stories in terms of ‘the racial problem’ only, seeing these rather as central to the wider story of women’s humanity, women’s rights and women’s revolution. She attacked Western experts and politicians who while denouncing cultural practices in Africa such as FGM failed to reckon with the responsibility of colonial rule in sustaining these. And she denounced the global anti-imperialist left and the politics of Négritude which ‘has never known women’ and their oppression (Thiam, 1978, p. 12). However, a recontextualisation of her views occurred in the introduction to the book by renowned feminist author Benoîte Groult. Groult turned the book’s witnesses, and all African women by extension, into ‘naïve’, not-yet-political subjects (‘their naivety, their clumsiness sometimes’), unable to autonomously transform their social conditions into action (‘these women have not yet initiated their struggle . . . they do not have a consciousness of injustice’) (Groult in Thiam, 1978, pp. 3–6). While Thiam in her own introduction stressed ‘the determined consciousness’ of the women she interviewed, Groult saw only the ‘women’s misfortune’ (malheur féminin) that characterised their lives.
The CFN stimulated the creation of several women’s immigrant activist groups in the late 1970 and early 1980s, among them the Association Femmes Marocaines de France (active in 1972–1978), the Groupe Femmes Marocaines (1979–1982) and Algériennes en Lutte (1978–1982), which campaigned against the introduction of a new Family Code in Algeria. Uniquely, the CFN refused to base itself on country of origin or ethnicity, instead articulating an all-immigrant and politically Black position. Another distinct feature of the CFN, which rendered its discourses particularly powerful, was that it systematically linked campaigning against gender oppression in the African countries of origin to advocacy for immigrant women’s rights in France. Referencing Black US feminism and Francophone anti-imperialist thinkers such as Aimé Césaire, the CFN positioned itself as anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist and feminist. Well ahead of its time, it articulated a position which we now call intersectional, consistently pointing at the triple oppression experienced by non-white women in France and globally, due to their gender, ethnicity and class. CFN activists typically opened their interventions stating that they spoke ‘as women and black (en tant que femmes et noires)’. 24 Herewith they proposed an intersectional identity, unique in France at the time, which challenged the sex-based universalism of the women’s liberation movement, as well as the male-dominated discourses of the anti-imperialist left and the immigrant advocacy groups such as Révo Afrique. As later recollected by Dambury, the group was attacked by both the male-dominated leftist immigrant movements, and by white-majority French feminists. Such critiques were rebutted in a tract of 1978: ‘No sector of society which is subject to oppression, be this an ethnic minority or women, can delegate leadership of its battle for liberation to other groups, even if they are allied’ (in Laroche & Larrouy, 2009, p. 49).
In asserting its distinct perspective and independence vis-a-vis both the white-majority feminist movement and the emerging, male-based immigrant activism, the CFN articulated a wholly original politics of the body. It politicised bodily control, alienation and violence as daily experiences for non-white women in France, framed by race, class and gender. The CFN developed a critical reflection on the cultural representations of black women’s bodies, linking this with everyday experiences of intimacy and exchange in the private realm, from sex to marriage and motherhood. In 1978, at the Paris UNESCO headquarters which held an exhibition on African women’s lives, the CFN distributed leaflets denouncing the exotic and ‘ethnographic’ gaze of Western society, including experts, international institutions and human rights campaigners, upon non-white women (see CFN newsletter from 1979, reprinted in Laroche & Larrouy, 2009, p. 48). The CFN also critiqued white-majority feminism for its silence on the reproductive injustices in the DOMs, both past and present. Discussing the situation in Réunion at length, it seems to have been the only group in France to tease out the centrality of race and relate the events in the DOMs to the long history of race-based reproductive injustice and violence in the United States. Referencing Angela Davis’s ground-breaking essay Women, Race and Class, the CFN situated the reproductive struggles of non-white women – including postcolonial immigrants in Europe, descendants of slaves in the US and women across the Global South – as distinct from those of white women. As stated in a newsletter from 1978, women’s alienation from their own bodies – including their lack of knowledge of their sexuality and their reproductive organs and their internalised taboo around sexual pleasure – was understood as a key problem of Western feminist discourse. It was, the CFN argued, situated differently for women of colour, whom European societies and states had always hyper-sexualised on the one hand and infantilised on the other. This amounted to a situation where for women of colour specifically it was difficult to claim bodily autonomy: ‘we are reprimanded by French society . . . when we take control of our body which does not belong to us’. 25
The CFN noted that specific problems existed within the immigrant families and communities of which they formed part. It argued that also in this sense the Veil law had not universally made a difference to women in France, as in some immigrant communities the moral condemnation was such that it prevented women from accessing abortion. 26 The CFN noted that black women in France were more likely to suffer health complications or death resulting from backstreet abortion, and also that suicide among young pregnant women was a real, almost entirely silenced problem in immigrant communities. The group called for the feminist movement to discuss these issues, noting that for some, ‘death was preferable to having an unwanted child’. 27
Concluding points
Academic and popular accounts of the liberalisation of contraception and abortion in post-1945 Western Europe have long been inflected with a teleological narrative towards ever-growing individual liberty. An intersectional reading offers a different picture, revealing the stratified dimensions of reproductive governance also during phases of liberalisation. Those in 1960s–1970s France who either remained absent from debates on reproductive rights or were invoked as problematic reproductive subjects – non-white immigrants, overseas citizens, the very poor, the disabled – tell a different story of the impacts of medical progress and legal reform. They compel us to interpret the new reproductive citizenship, as it was constructed through the Neuwirth and Veil laws, in a complex way. It was a citizenship that was gendered (i.e. focused on women) and embodied, that is to say, it was based on rights residing in the body and its protection from harm. Halimi and Veil both, although in slightly different ways, understood this notion of citizenship as continuing the republican tradition of individual liberté, now reframed in a feminist sense to recognise the specific terrain of women’s reproductive liberty and control over their bodies.
Despite the MLAC’s noting of the distinct, extreme reproductive violence in the DOMs, and Halimi’s focus on class in her defence of Chevalier, the majority-white feminist movement of the 1970s, by and large, did little to question the universalist understanding of individual choice underpinning this new citizenship. Similarly, 10 years earlier the family planning movement had done little to question the social hierarchies implicit in the concept of ‘responsible’, ‘conscious’ procreation that underpinned the legalisation of contraception. The notion of responsibility continued to pervade public debate and legal discourse in the context of abortion law reform, making clear that the new rights accorded to women were contingent on morally and socially acceptable behaviour (with, for instance, continued stigmatisation of ‘repeat abortion’ and abortion among very poor and marginalised women). Women in the overseas territories, long sexualised in French culture as both ‘hyperfertile’ and sexually ignorant, were situated at the sharp edge of these two sets of legal reform. While these reflected cultural liberalisation, they also embedded a new normativity on procreation as a social duty, requiring reproductive subjects to reflect France’s modernity and their own rationality and responsibility as citizens. Whiteness was inscribed into this. In the 1970s–1980s, social actors responding to the experiences of non-white women – notably, the Coordination des Femmes Noires in mainland France and the CEDIF in Martinique – articulated a distinct politics of the body. Arguing against the women’s liberation movement that there was no simple equation between the availability of contraception technology and abortion on the one hand and women’s liberty on the other, they advocated for a notion of ‘choice’ that involved both the right to motherhood and its refusal, and was cognisant of socio-economic context. These claims prefigured what came to be known in the 1990s as reproductive justice.
Footnotes
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.