To speak of the power of women in France, where their presence in positions of political power is so negligible, would almost be a joke. The statistics are quite damning; France very clearly brings up the rear in this particular area. Moreover, just as a single swallow does not make a summer, the presence of a woman as French prime minister, despite the indisputable symbolic effect of this presidential initiative, does not represent a rapid transformation of reality. In fact, there are no more women in Edith Cresson’s government now than there were in that of her predecessor, Michel Rocard. More important, the current French government has made no real attempt to strengthen its policy toward women, except for reintroducing a ministry solely dedicated to women, as we had in 1981.
Today almost a quarter of a century after the democratic revolution of 1968 and the organization of the Women’s Movement, women’s access to the ranks of political, economic, and symbolic power remains difficult, not to say impossible. This is the case, despite women’s partially acquired access to knowledge, at least in the West, which does not represent a concomitant access to “worth.”
1Don’t women like power? Or is it power that doesn’t like them? Women are segregated, more often than not, with their special problems, and when it comes to considering major options for the future the powers that be act as though women have no opinions on such matters. No one remembers to ask. The newspaper
Vu de gauche (Seen from the left), edited by Jean Poperen, is noteworthy in this respect, but an infinite number of examples could be found in the media. Do women actually like power? It’s like asking whether poor people like money…. No, because they don’t have any; yes, because they don’t have any.
In this rather dreary political summer, two news events or issues that concern women have stirred up a few waves in the murky backwaters of the media, the trade unions, and French politics. A third, the most serious, is not an issue but a tragedy: I refer to the rape of seventy-one young women and the murder of nineteen of these women by their own male classmates in a high school in Kenya, an event that seems to have received virtually no press coverage. Here in France the only media attention given to everyday rapes and violence against women has taken the customary form of shining a spotlight on their murderers.
2The first current event, then, was the publication of Horizon 2000, a study conducted by INSEE (National Institute of Economic and Statistical Information) in 1991; this study predicts a shortage of manpower in 2005. According to INSEE, if the fertility rate remains at its current level, the segment of population known as “active” will diminish. To remedy this situation, the authors propose four solutions: increasing the productivity of the working population, extending the retirement age, increasing employment opportunities for women, or once again encouraging immigration. Virtually everyone seized upon the fourth solution: the political left predicted increased immigration in 2000, while the right and the far right expressed support for what was the aim of the study—to promote a pronatalist policy. The right’s solution came down to two competing and convergent exclusions: the exclusion of immigrants, so threatening today and tomorrow that we must rush to lock down the borders again, and the exclusion of women, who, while destined to reproduce the French workforce, are considered “inactive.” In the future, these women will not even hold the lead they have today in the category of the active but long-term unemployed population. Women constitute 57 percent of the long-term unemployed, and young women 76 percent of the young long-term unemployed; they are thereby marginalized economically, politically, and socially.
The mobilization of society’s resources for a policy that would recognize women as triply productive members of society should be a priority for the political left. In reality the left has neglected women and made them the most excluded category in this competitive and production-oriented society. And this has occurred despite the fact that women are indeed triply productive in human society—as reproducers who have the exclusive task of perpetuating the species; as productive housewives responsible for the family, the private sphere; and finally, and in large numbers, as working professionals whose activities are now indispensable for the maintenance of a barely decent standard of living. But as a result of their multiple duties, women find themselves the majority among the large numbers of the long-term unemployed; in other words, they find themselves the most excluded of the excluded in this competitive society.
Moreover, the “inactive” and “active” categories that demographers apply to us not only make the female population a divided one, arbitrarily separated by social affiliations and diverse cultures, but also make of each one of us, each individual woman, a person torn between her need for private achievements and her legitimate social ambitions.
The fertility rate is the blind spot around which this type of demography is organized, this pseudo-human science, so surreal in its attempt to saw off the very branch on which it sits that it forecloses women—the very life source of its legitimacy—from its analyses. In fact, if demography does not consider women of reproductive age part of the active population, how can an active workforce be produced by such an inactive source? And how will future generations renew themselves except through the reproductive capacity of the female population, which, while counted as “inactive,” makes up the very core of the active population, generation after generation. In other words, humanity, as Lacan once put it, would be a woman who makes a woman who makes a woman, one after the other, inactive according to the demographers but always present as a factory for the production of the active population. When we speak of electricity or atomic energy, we include power plants in figuring the cost of production. Human procreation, however, is left out of the calculation of human productivity and the resources that this productivity creates. Human procreation remains the ultimate—but formidable—site of slavery.
The capacity to procreate, the specific power of women, instead of engendering power (some speak of demographic power), has shackled us to a very real powerlessness, precisely because reproduction is so negatively inscribed in democratic thinking—which, while rightly concerned with principles of equality, is oblivious to the reality that there are two sexes and the dissymmetry between them where this primary difference is concerned. And, as we know from psychoanalysis, what is foreclosed from the symbolic returns in the real; what democratic thinking refuses to think consciously will resurface as a symptom at every step along the path toward democratization. In virtually all their activities women are penalized for their reproductive power, for an activity that is qualified as inactive.
Even to speak of procreation, of maternity, often appears to reflect a regressive and reactionary stance in and of itself—mainly because, up to now, only the political right wing has discussed it, and when representatives of the right discuss it in the context of their program for a pronatalist policy, they exacerbate this penalization. In fact, the Women’s Movement has always stood on the political left, has always put nurture before nature (the reverse of the environmental movement), and has always viewed reproduction as a choice, a culturally rather than naturally determined fact of life, which a woman’s control over fertility would humanize even further. Not the least of the advances made by the Women’s Movement lies in its proposal that there be greater articulation between the private and the public spheres, between the subject and history. In addition to the Women’s Movement’s rethinking of the body as capable of both suffering and joy, as more than a mere bearer of a work force, it has also brought to the fore a topic forgotten by Marx: the political nature of the subject, whether embryonic or already born. Once qualified as a social movement, the Women’s Movement has always defined itself as a cultural and civilizing movement with a universal mission.
As producers or creators of living-speaking beings, women are the source of the principal human resource: humanity itself. The demographers should not refer to them only as members of the “active population” but also as endowed with ingenious brains and creative intelligences. Reproduction remains foreclosed, as I have said before, from the productivity-oriented thought that it feeds and that defines it as powerlessness.
The second current event confirms this analysis. The European Court of Justice recently lifted the ban on night work for women in the name of equality between the sexes. From the workers, those archaic dreamers, we heard charges of regression: we must eliminate night work for both sexes. From the managers we heard claims of progress: women are achieving and being promoted as fast as their male counterparts, except in the “special case of maternity” (these were the terms used in the declaration by the CGC).
3 Affirmative action for women is inscribed in French labor law and is a protection against sexual abuse and the financial burden of raising a family. But, as far as I know, rapes and violent acts against women have not diminished in our country. Moreover, if one is to believe INSEE, the fertility rate per woman is 1.8 (or 2.1 according to INED [National Institute of Demographic Studies]), which means that every nonpubescent and nonmenopausal woman in this country is potentially responsible for producing two children, and this is true for 53 percent of the population. Is maternity then a “special case” or a more general one, the case of the majority of women?
We cannot simultaneously credit each woman with a fertility rate—thus holding her responsible for the renewal or the aging of the species and blaming her for any demographic imbalances—and continue to consider pregnancy or maternity a “special case.” The concepts of fertility rate and demographic equilibrium turn an innate capacity into a universal socioeconomic competence; thus imposing a requirement of solidarity among women—whether childbearing, adoptive mothers, or child free—so that this “production,” “service,” “competence,” “gift,” or “creation,” as one prefers, will be integrated into the very core of democratic ideals.
No doubt it will be argued that we now have very sophisticated machines that work nonstop, day and night. But at least three eight-hour shifts have been organized around these new automatons. In contrast, a qualified woman technician (there are many such, these days, and there will be even more tomorrow) who has a three-year-old child and is pregnant with another could not under any circumstances manage to cope with three eight-hour shifts during pregnancy, which mobilizes huge amounts of her energy around the clock. Still, in the name of equality, we will make her work a supplementary night shift and in the name of protective discrimination, or affirmative action, we will then proceed to penalize her when she seeks a promotion. This is a scandal: the egalitarian and production-obsessed ideology that excludes the urgent issue of reproduction from its dynamic excludes women from the very outset. In other words, obtuse and nondifferentiating egalitarianism generates a blatant injustice.
In Honduras three thousand young girls between the ages of fifteen and twenty were forcibly sterilized to satisfy employers who wanted to abolish maternity leave, claiming it disrupted the organization of their work.
4 All over the world women are slaves and martyrs to reproduction, whether it is forbidden or obligatory. Totalitarian and egalitarian societies alike are opportunistic and sadistic in their obsession with productivity; women are invisible slaves to a kind of production that has never even been considered by any economic theory as such. Women have been martyrs since the earliest days of human history, and even today they die in childbirth by the millions; they were martyrs owing to their exclusive knowledge of the flesh, deemed diabolical, when they were subject to
gynocide by an Inquisition that burned them by the hundreds of thousands.
Today, misogyny takes the form of a fanatical antifeminism, which means that even a women’s elementary right to knowledge carries the risk of death. Do we need to recall the Quebec tragedy, replayed in an even more horrific version in the Kenya tragedy? In Canada, in December 1989, a young man assassinated fourteen students at the Montreal Polytechnic in an attack against women who were seeking higher education. In Nairobi, on July 13, 1991, a horde of three hundred boys, aged fourteen to nineteen, students in a mixed-sex Catholic school, engaged in a collective massacre of their female counterparts. Drunk and drugged out, armed with iron bars, these boys stormed the girls’ dormitory, wounded seventy-five of the girl students, raped seventy-one of them and killed nineteen. These girls had preferred to continue studying during an examination period rather than join a strike against the leadership of the school, which they felt did not concern them. “Murderous insanity,” read the headlines in the newspapers, which only gave a few lines of coverage to the tragedy. Insanity should under no circumstances ever be considered an attenuating factor to justify misogynist and antifeminist crimes and violence, any more than it should ever be used to justify racial violence or crimes of a racist nature. However, while racism is now considered an offense, misogyny remains an opinion, and sexist murders are written off as the work of madmen whose madness renders them irresponsible and thus utterly unaccountable.
The task of democratic men and women can be defined on three levels. First, the struggle to eradicate a deep-seated misogyny that either maintains women in a state of powerlessness or plots
gynocide. The decline of Marxism threatens to bring about a renaissance of a metaphysical philosophy that would make women its primary victims. Considered reflection on the issue of reproduction is probably the first condition for elaborating a system of thought that is not metaphysical. By taking human reproduction into consideration, this way of thinking, far from being regressive, would eliminate more than one type of deranged logic; it would also finally recognize the social dimension of reproduction, one of the most vital activities of our species—for its genealogy, for its memory, for its transmission and its history.
Second, we must struggle through our involvement in counterpower structures, taking the side of those who have been excluded from and disinherited by the competitive international production-obsessed system.
Third, and finally, we must struggle to pave the way for women’s access to all existing power structures according to democratic principles: equality with respect for difference and not the inverse. From now on, the process of democratization must inscribe the existence of the two sexes and their dissymmetry in an egalitarian framework, and it must put women in control of their fertility not only on the biological level but on the civic and symbolic levels as well.