International Women’s Day takes on its full historical meaning today if we recall that it was proposed and instituted by Clara Zetkin in this very place in 1910.
From the beginning of the century, this celebration has punctuated critical and often tragic moments of our history: in 1914 and 1915 in France, in Germany, in Oslo women demonstrated against the war; in 1917, in Petrograd, against czarism; starting in 1937, in Spain, in Italy, and in Ravensbrück in 1945 against fascism; in 1974, in Saigon, against the American occupation. During the 1970s, taking advantage of the women’s liberation movements in the West, International Women’s Day established a tradition of affirming our rights, and it became, de facto, as much a day of protest against the inequalities that remain as a day of ever stronger determination to advance our cause. Exactly twenty years ago, I celebrated this day in Beijing with some ten comrades from the MLF and my daughter,
1 who had just turned eleven. We knew nothing of the barbarity of the so-called cultural revolution that was devastating the country, all the less so given that, for an entire day, we had been able to engage in dialogue with Chinese women who had already turned, with all their needs and all their intelligence, toward democracy.
I could evoke every March 8, year after year. They were not all equally flamboyant. But each one has marked a stage of consciousness, of strategies and struggles for thousands of women, showing solidarity with millions of others in the world. Our primordial rights to freedom over our bodies, equality in the familial, socioeconomic, and political spheres—rights that are questioned, even endangered, every day—have often been put forward in the streets on March 8, proclaimed in assemblies, so they could be won and then written into law.
On March 8, 1979, we were in Tehran, demonstrating with fifty thousand women against the wearing of the headscarf imposed by Khomeini. The documentary film we made there,
The Liberation Movement of Iranian Women, Year Zero, attests that, even if our Iranian sisters have since failed to gain their freedom, the forces of regression may still be unable to eradicate this embryo of liberation and permanently block women’s birth to the sexual, economic, social, political, and symbolic independence for which they clamored with us in 1979. On March 8, 1980, we expressed our solidarity with the Irish women imprisoned at Armagh and we issued the Leningrad appeal in support of Tatiana Mamonova and the Russian women persecuted by the KGB.
2 On March 8, 1981, in a double gesture of protest and commitment, a twofold gesture that always conveys the urgency to denounce, to deconstruct, as well as the will to go forward and to create—on March 8, 1981, then, we issued “Cahiers de doléances contre la misogynie” (Registers of grievances against misogyny), as was done during the French Revolution, and we launched an appeal to vote for François Mitterrand, candidate for the French presidency, on the first ballot, even though we were not members of his party. In support of making March 8 a national holiday, starting in 1982, I had written a letter to the French president on December 3, 1981, saying in part:
The acknowledgment by nation-states of March 8 as a symbol of women’s struggles has so far been too narrowly restricted to popular democracies, although the day is celebrated throughout the world. It would be right and proper for the French government to make March 8 a legal paid holiday, thus becoming the first in Europe to connect the initiative and action of a majority of citizens—women, viewed as a minority because they are female citizens—with a decision on the part of the state.
In this way the Socialist government would honor the women who have made a major contribution this year to the victory of the left, just as, in 1947, a left-wing government honored the workers’ struggle by acknowledging May I as a day for demonstrations and a holiday for workers.
Three days later, François Mitterrand’s answer, “nice, but difficult,” had the effect of granting the easiest part of my proposal: March 8 was declared a “national day,” although not a “paid holiday.” And while I declined the overly selective invitation to attend an event at the Élysée Palace along with three hundred other women, all very officially chosen, we expressed ourselves in full force: on March 6, in the main amphitheater of the Sorbonne, we held the first Estates General of Women from All Nations Against Misogyny, with Nawal El Saadawi from Egypt, Eva Forest from Spain, Maria de Lourdes Pintasilgo, a former prime minister of Portugal, Domitilia Banios de Chungara from Bolivia, Fetouma Ouzegane from Algeria, Kate Millett from the United States, Kumari Gawardena from Sri Lanka, Alla Sariban from Russia, Cheryl Bernard and Edith Schlafer, representing Amnesty for Women, from Austria, and many others. On March 7, at the Cirque d’Hiver in Paris, first-rate women athletes and singers gathered for a splendid party. And on Monday, March 8, there were twelve thousand of us from all parts of France in the streets in Paris, twelve thousand of us who had gone on strike in order to demonstrate. Our weekly newspaper, Des femmes en mouvements hebdo, bears witness to this event, opposing the obdurate censorship and systematic misinformation by the media, which preferred to cover March 8 in countries other than our own and to focus on oppressive situations for women elsewhere rather than mention the strength of determined women who came from everywhere to gather here in a land of freedom.
On March 8, 1989, in the spirit of the bicentennial of the French Revolution, we organized other Estates General of Women after reissuing the
Cahiers de doléances des femmes en 1789. For several years I served as international president of the San Diego Women’s International Center, which granted a Living Legacy Award every year. Consequently, I wanted to make March 8, 1990, a day to express collective gratitude by celebrating women who had been exceptional, each in her own field. Coming from virtually all over the globe, they embodied the now indelible existence of women who are at the forefront of progress in the democratic, legal, and humanistic as well as the humanitarian, artistic, and athletic domains. Pioneers in the advances of humankind in their countries—that is, in the world—included Doïna Cornea from Romania, Ela Bhatt from India, Charlotte Perriand from France, Elena Bonner from what was then the U.S.S.R., Yvonne Choquet-Bruhat from France, Khunying Kanitha Wichiencharoen from Thailand, Jeannie Longo from France, Albertina Sisulu from South Africa, and so many others stood as so many beacons casting light on a planet still very dark in the eyes of young girls and women.
This survey, too long yet incomplete, is a way of indicating that each March 8 we faithfully observe this historical occasion, one in which we shall certainly never stop participating; furthermore, we are now convinced that its future depends to a great extent on our determination to transform it so that it can finally take on a human face, a just and worthy direction and meaning.
Today, March 8, 1995, it is particularly meaningful to me to be in Copenhagen as a French woman, a European democrat, and a world citizen, as well as a militant in our movement and a deputy in the European parliament, serving as vice chair of the Committee on Women’s Rights.
In 1992, the last time France held the presidency of the European Union during his term of office, François Mitterrand proposed that a world summit on social development be held to “renew our reflection” and “emphasize the human dimension of reality,” thus expressing his attachment to a European model of development as theorized by President Delors in his white paper.
3 Mitterrand was no doubt aware that the clause spelling out the right of all employees and workers to social welfare and respect for their status could exert a democratizing influence on the many countries in transition.
But once this summit set out its three primary goals, fighting poverty, building solidarity, and creating jobs, something that was clearly expressed in the fifth of the ten commitments of the draft common statement against poverty that will be submitted to the heads of states and governments in three days quickly became self-evident: what was at stake was “respect for human dignity and improvement of the status of women in society.”
Indeed, as soon as we mobilize ourselves to fight poverty at the global level, we again discover, as we did at the Rio World Conference on the Environment in 1992, at the Vienna Conference on Human Rights in 1993, at the Cairo Conference on Population and Development in 1994, that, regretfully, women are the bruised heart of the human species, but that also, through an amazing reversal of the present disorder, they are on their way to becoming the pulsing heart of a just and sustainable development everywhere in the world.
If we look at the major international texts, we can say that the condition of women in the world has changed considerably in the course of the last few decades.
The Charter of the United Nations, drawn up in 1945 just after World War II in order to promote and defend human rights, “the dignity and worth of the human person,” is the first international text to proclaim equality between men and women. The UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted December 10, 1948, came next to declare that “all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and in rights,” and this “without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.”
4 International agreements concerning civil and political rights, as well as economic, social and cultural rights, strengthen these principles of nondiscrimination and equality for all in the eyes of the law. The Geneva Conventions and their additional protocols provide for the protection of the civilian population in war time and stipulate that “women shall be especially protected against any attack on their honour, in particular against rape, enforced prostitution, or any form of indecent assault.”
5In 1975, under pressure from international women’s liberation movements, the UN General Assembly decided to focus attention on obstacles to equality. It declared the International Women’s Year, highlighted in June by the 1975 World Conference held in Mexico City, the first conference on women ever organized on a worldwide scale. A plan of action was adopted proposing that the “United Nations Decade for Women: Equality, Development and Peace” be proclaimed in all countries; this was followed in 1980 by a conference in Copenhagen, and five years later by a conference in Nairobi that set forth “Forward-Looking Strategies” for action between 1985 and 2000. The resolution on future prospects and equality of opportunity emphasized not only the need for legal measures to ensure equality of treatment between men and women but also the importance of dealing with existing inequalities. The Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), designed to finance new types of activities in the interest of women, and the International Research and Training Institute for the Advancement of Women (UN-INSTRAW) were created in 1976.
Another important step took place in 1979 when the UN adopted the “Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women,” signed in March 1980 and effective as of September 1981. This major text reminds us that “discrimination against women violates the principles of equality of rights and respect for human dignity, is an obstacle to the participation of women, on equal terms with men, in the political, social, economic and cultural life of their countries,” and that it “makes more difficult the full development of the potentialities of women in the service of their countries and of humanity.” Recognizing “the social significance of maternity,” the convention states that “the role of women in procreation should not be a basis for discrimination.”
6Active throughout the world, nongovernmental organizations continue to spur the reflection of the United Nations, urging the organization to take action in favor of women. At each conference NGOs show their fighting spirit and appear as the creative forces driving these international summits. Thus, in June 1992, during the Conference on Environment and Development held in Rio,
7 more than four hundred NGOs led a
Planeta femea (a women’s tent in the alternative Global Forum); they made it clear that the dominant model of development constituted a threat not only to the planet but also to the human species, for which women feel responsible, through procreation and child rearing. This gave me the opportunity to develop a theme to which I am deeply attached, the idea that the first environment of the human species is the maternal body, and we all know to what extent physical or psychic aggression toward the child bearer can be harmful to the child-to-be.
In 1993 the rights of human beings were more than ever under threat. In February, to address the systematic rapes, tortures, and practices of “ethnic purification” carried out in the former Yugoslavia, the UN Security Council voted to create a special court to rule on war crimes and crimes against humanity. This was the first time the council was led to create a jurisdiction similar to the Nuremberg and Tokyo courts set up to judge World War II criminals. In June the World Conference on Human Rights supported measures taken “to ensure the effective protection and promotion of human rights of the girl child” and urged the states “to remove customs and practices which discriminate against and cause harm to the girl child” (II, 49). In an earlier declaration the conference asserted that “the human rights of women and girls are an inalienable, integral and indivisible part of universal human rights” (I, 18).
8In December 1993 the General Assembly adopted a Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women, asking for “the universal application to women of the rights and principles with regard to equality, security, liberty, integrity and dignity of all human beings.”
9 On the occasion of the Day of Human Rights, Mr. Ibrahima Fall,
10 then UN under-secretary general for human rights, appealed for a five-point plan of action that would support the various conventions that had been ratified, in particular the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, and that would integrate women’s rights “in all activities related to human rights.” The plan was adopted in March 1994. The Commission on Human Rights then decided to appoint Mrs. Radhika Coomaraswamy from Sri Lanka for a three-year period as a “special spokesperson to report on the question of violence against women, including its causes and consequences.”
In May 1994 the World Health Organization (WHO), which has condemned the practice of female genital mutilation since 1982, “urge[d] all member states to establish national policies and programmes level that will effectively, and with legal instruments, abolish female genital mutilation.”
11 The High Committee for Refugees considers that women who risk persecution for opposing the practice of such mutilations upon themselves or their daughters are entitled to the provisions of the 1951 convention regarding the status of refugees if they are not protected by their governments.
In September 1994 the International Conference on Population and Development held in Cairo made it possible not only to speak openly about the condition of women in the world but also to assert that their liberation has taken on a universal dimension. The twenty-year Programme of Action aims at “advancing gender equality and equity
12 and the empowerment of women, and the elimination of all kinds of violence against women, and ensuring women’s ability to control their own fertility.”
13 The determining role of women in development was unanimously and clearly emphasized for the first time. Summing up the overall consensus, Nafis Sadik of Pakistan, general secretary of the conference and executive director of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), suggested that the twenty-year program might well change the world.
EUROPE, A SOCIAL MODEL
Today, March 8, 1995, we are here both to prepare the World Conference on Women in Beijing and to celebrate Europe, since Denmark is now part of the European Union. This is why I would like also to speak to you about the European model of equality between men and women, which is still poorly implemented, no doubt, but can help us to progress.
From the moment of its creation in 1949, the Council of Europe has expressed its interest in “safeguarding and realizing the ideals and principles which are [the] common heritage” of the member states, in order to lay down the basis for a “genuine democracy.”
14 The Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, drafted in 1950, expressly guarantees to women, equal to men, the use of rights and liberties “without discrimination on any ground such as sex, race, colour, language, religion, political or other opinion” (article 14).
15 Since then numerous recommendations, declarations, and conferences have aimed at or resulted in removing obstacles to equality between the sexes and finding solutions for cases of inequality. This commitment on the part of the Council of Europe has been reinforced by the United Nations Decade for Women. Thus, in 1981, equality became a guiding principle for intergovernmental action. In a symbolic and entirely political way, the Steering Committee for Equality Between Women and Men (CDEG) has become part of the section of the council devoted to democracy, freedom, and fundamental human rights.
The European Union proposes a social model benefiting women globally. The few pages on this topic in Jacques Delors’s white paper offer a synthesis of the policy in favor of equal salaries for men and women, a policy initiated as early as 1957 by the Treaty of Rome, twenty-two years before the UN Convention. This model is the common foundation for the various nation-states that make up the Union. Since then the construction of Europe has kept pushing this principle of equality forward by means of directives on equal pay for men and women (1975), equal treatment of men and women in employment (1976), and equal treatment of men and women in statutory schemes of social security (1979). In 1992 we adopted a code of practice on measures to combat sexual harassment (followed in France, for instance, by a law against sexual harassment at work). In 1992 the social protocol of the Maastricht Treaty made it possible to implement “measures providing for specific advantages in order to make it easier for women to pursue a vocational activity or to prevent or compensate for disadvantages in their professional careers.”
16Contraception is legal everywhere, although information remains insufficient, but the right to abortion is not granted in all European countries. It is still prohibited in Ireland and in Germany, and it remains precarious everywhere. Rape is called a crime in almost all European Union countries, except in Germany and Great Britain. Divorce through mutual consent is authorized everywhere, except in Greece and Ireland. In all European countries women are granted maternity leaves (but in Great Britain, in Belgium, and in Spain, they do not receive their full salaries). In New York, during the last preparatory conference for this summit, Europe led the way in matters in defending social gains and equality of treatment. And, above all, Europe is the birthplace of parity, which I shall define provisionally as the political will to ensure equality at all decision-making levels. I shall say more about this shortly.
FRANCE, A LAND OF PARADOXES
Ever since the 1789 Revolution, France has declared itself the country of human rights, yet it is paradoxically the country that has shown the greatest resistance to the progress of women’s rights. At this historical moment, when the issue of inequality between men and women is being raised, in our country too, in terms of parity, it may be helpful to recall briefly how—but also how slowly—our victories were won.
The right to knowledge had for a long time been denied girls. It was finally granted to them under the Third Republic, with Jules Ferry’s legislation on elementary schools. And in 1924 girls were allowed to take the baccalaureate examination and thus have access to university-level studies.
17 Entrance to the
grandes écoles was even more difficult to obtain.
18 The École Centrale was the first one to open its doors to women, in 1930,
19 and the École de l’Air the last one in 1978. Probably under the influence of the International Woman’s Year in 1975, the law on education instituted compulsory coeducation in all state schools and, in 1989, the law on governing higher education asserted its mission of equality.
Work outside the home was virtually forbidden to women, for it had long been linked with prostitution. However, with the demand for labor produced by the industrial revolution in the nineteenth century, nearly half of all French women took on professional activities. Only since 1965 has a married woman been able to work without her husband’s consent, and the requirement of equal pay for equal work did not appear in French law before 1970. In 1983 a law on professional equality attempted to improve a de facto situation of glaring inequality.
In politics the paths to equality for women have been particularly obstructed, even more in France than elsewhere. The Revolution of 1789 did not give women access to citizenship. Despite the enlightened proclamations of Condorcet and the courageous and genuinely revolutionary stance of Olympe de Gouges, the 1793 Constitution confirmed the exclusion of women, just as it maintained slavery. The Revolution of 1848 abolished the poll tax as a basis for suffrage, but did not grant any more political rights to women than it did to the insane; however, this new suffrage was—and sometimes still is—called universal. The Constitution of the Third Republic confirmed this exclusion of women from “universal” rights. Nevertheless, in every generation since the I789 revolution women have come together and organized to claim the right to vote. Exemplary women, Olympe Rodrigues, Hubertine Auclert, Marthe Bray, Louise Weiss, and many others: six generations, 150 years of struggle. They showed tenacity, those women called suffragettes. In 1936, with the Popular Front, the French Parliament unanimously endorsed giving women the right to vote. We had to wait almost ten years more for the decree signed by General de Gaulle on April 21, 1944, just after World War II, which finally declared the right of women to vote and to be elected on the same terms as men.
Kept until 1938 in a state of “civil incapacity” by the Napoleonic Code, women obtained the right to freedom very late: their incipient legal emancipation has progressed more rapidly since 1970. Beginning that year, women shared parental authority; starting in 1973 a mother could transmit her nationality to her child. In 1975 divorce by mutual consent was granted, and in 1985 husband and wife became equals in matters of property management and child care.
Laws have progressed as a result of women’s struggle for the right to control their own bodies. As early as 1968–1968, in the Women’s Movement, at the earliest meetings of the group Psychanalyse et Politique that I was leading,
20 the focus was on sexuality, and the question of rape as a specific form of violence appeared simultaneously with the question of the procreative independence of women and their control of their own fertility.
21 The work of the movement, as a whole and in its diversity, led to a wide mobilization, to numerous publications, to the first major women’s demonstration when we demanded freedom to procreate (“No laws over our bodies,” “Free and available abortion and contraception”), in 1971, and to the first day devoted to denouncing crimes against women, with a demonstration at the Mutualité in Paris in 1972.
22 The decriminalization of abortion, won in principle in 1975, was not passed definitively until 1979, after another powerful protest movement, and reimbursement of the cost of abortion by Social Security was granted only in 1982. In 1980, two years after the start of feminist struggles in the legal field,
23 the penal code registered women’s demands and made rape a crime: on the same basis as homicide, it became a crime against the individual. The new 1992 code increased the penalty for rapists.
In 1989, echoing organizations that had been combating family violence for more than ten years, the secrétariat d’État chargé des droits des femmes (secretary of state in charge of women’s rights) introduced a television campaign to this end. The following year, organizations were authorized to bring civil suits. The same year, following the adoption of European legislation on the subject, a law was passed punishing sexual harassment at work.
REALITY
Measured against international principles, egalitarian proclamations, and laws, the reality is quite different and quite bleak: women are the excluded among the excluded, the poor among the poor of the planet. Everywhere, no matter how poverty is assessed, the figures provided by experts reveal a tragic reality. 1,300,000,000 human beings are in a state of absolute poverty
24 (that means 1 human being out of 5); they lack resources to get adequate food or to meet basic needs in housing, health, and education. And of this 1,300,000,000 poor people, 70 percent, or nearly a billion, are women.
25 Two-thirds of the 990 million of those who are deprived of the right to education, and who will never have access to it, are women: a total of 660 million.
26 The latest report on human development has shown that, in developing countries, discrimination is found not only in education but in nutritional support and health care; according to the same report, statistics in forty-three countries reveal that the mortality rate of female children, from a few months old to age four, is clearly higher than the mortality rate of male children in the same age group.
27However, poverty and exclusion are still signs of women’s survival, compared to the ongoing
gynocide perpetrated against them. According to studies by Amartya Sen, a brilliant Harvard economist, women are being denied the very right to exist and to live. Sen’s research led him to estimate that at least 100 million women are missing from the census of world populations.
28 One hundred million women have disappeared because they were women: 38 million in China, 30 million in India, and the other millions in the rest of Asia and Africa. These disappearances, referred to as a “demographic deficit,” are mostly attributable to abortions, infanticides, malnutrition, selective health care, sexual mutilations, and pregnancies or deliveries performed under poor conditions.
The number of abortions of female embryos has increased quite markedly in China, in India, and in South Korea over the last fifteen years. In India today, there are only 927 women for every 1,000 men, in contrast to the developed countries, where there are more women than men.
29 Malnutrition and lack of proper care are the primary causes of death for young girls in India. UNICEF estimates at more than a million the number of very young girls who die every year, worldwide, because they are born female.
Every year 2 million young girls, that is five thousand a day, three every minute, are subjected to the torture of excision and infibulation. The operation takes about twenty minutes, which means that at this very moment, sixty young girls are being mutilated somewhere in Africa, in Asia, in the Middle East, and probably in Europe as well. In Sudan one out of three girls dies from infibulation. As for those who survive, 110 million of them suffer all their lives from severe injuries caused by these mutilations.
During the Cairo Conference on Population and Development in September 1994, the minister of family life in Egypt committed himself to prohibiting sexual mutilations, which concerns 80 to 90 percent of Egyptian women.
30 But I have just learned that in October, one month later, the Egyptian minister of health had a decree passed, not to prohibit these mutilations, as he had announced, but to have them performed in hospitals; he even listed the qualifying hospitals. This medical treatment may save human lives, but it will not stop the mutilation of women.
UN reports indicate that in India the dowry system is the cause of death for five thousand to nine thousand women a year; that one married woman out of three in developing countries reports that she has been beaten; and that one woman out of every two thousand, worldwide, has filed a complaint for rape.
31 Human trafficking, whether it concerns women, young girls, or young boys, takes place with impunity: slavery is rationalized as a form of international and domestic sex trade. Amnesty International reported that there were fifteen thousand cases of sale of a woman or a child in China in 1993,
32 but China is obviously not the only country at issue. It is no wonder that, in such a barbaric situation, surviving women are in an extreme state of destitution, while also in charge of procreation, of transmitting life through generations, even at the cost of their own lives.
In the armed conflicts that are devastating the world, specific acts of violence against women compound the horrors of war. The denunciation by feminist militants
33 and by many international missions of massive rapes and forced pregnancies in the former Yugoslavia did not prevent the programmatic use of such torture against women in Rwanda the following year.
34In Algeria, as in Iran and in Bangladesh, fundamentalist religions make women a privileged target. A particularly barbaric form of religious fundamentalism is devastating Algeria.
35 Subjected to intimidation, kidnapping, sequestration, rape, torture, exorcism, and murder, Algerian women are caught in a veritable misogynist delirium, a deadly madness. Bound to the Family Code,
36 which imposes upon them the status of minors and abandons them to forced marriages and brutal repudiations, they have been exposed since 1989 to assaults from armed groups. In January 1994 the Algerian Union of Democratic Women (RAFD), which brings together several organizations of women democrats, published a manifesto denouncing the situation:
We speak of women who are subjected to persecution in daily life, powerless victims of barbaric attacks ranging from acid to fire, as well as whipping or sexual abuse, when it is not simply murder…. We speak, too, of the terrorized women living in villages or suburbs close to Algiers, who have been forced into seclusion by recent openly circulated propaganda leaflets to hide themselves away; they have no choice but to hide themselves away or wear the hijab, for fear of having their throats slit.
A more and more widespread Shiite practice known as a “marriage of pleasure” entails a “marriage” that lasts a few hours or a few months, according to the needs of the “madmen of God.” In November 1994 Algerian television showed two young girls murdered and beheaded by alleged members of Islamist armed groups for refusing to submit to this violence. In February 1995 Laila Aslaoui, who came to the European Parliament to denounce the fate suffered by Algerian women, reported that 267 women had been murdered in this way. The association of Armed Islamist Groups (AIG) is multiplying threats against women whom its members deem “impious.” In the name of sexual purification, religious barbarians are exorcizing imaginary devils, to the point of death. In
The Female Devil, Hafsa Zinai Koudil,
37 an Algerian woman filmmaker, denounces an event that took place in the north of France one day in July: a nineteen-year-old woman died, victim of an exorcism session led by her brother along with the imam and the president of the Roubaix mosque.
38Nevertheless, women are also in the forefront of the battle. This very day, March 8, a “Tribunal Against Fundamentalism” is being held in Algiers, organized by the RAFD, which women from several countries are expected to attend. I take this opportunity to assure them once again of our complete solidarity and to warmly salute their courage and their determination.
When minute after minute, day after day, universally, the right to be born, the right to live, the right of very young girls, of girls and of women to exist in dignity is being violated, how can we still speak of freedom? When 500,000,000 women under Islamic law lack the right to inherit, how can we make equality a universal model? No wonder that under these conditions the perverse notion of equity tends to replace the principle of equality: it allows the nation-states that make up the group of 134 developing countries to try to avoid any reference to equality between the sexes—as the Muslim states do—along with all references to human rights, thus to the rights of women—as is the case for China and the other Asian countries that maintain traditional moral standards. The notion of equity constitutes a serious regression with respect to the principle of equality. Notwithstanding the decisions made at the Vienna Conference, the pressures exercised by these countries and the need for consensus have produced a dangerous coexistence between the notion of equity and the principle of equality in the preparatory texts for Copenhagen.
39 Under these conditions, it is almost impossible to insert even watered-down social provisions in commercial agreements.
The political representation of women in the world decreased from 15 percent in 1988 to 10 percent in June 1994. Many countries in Africa and Western Asia (for example, Djibouti, Mauritania, Kuwait) have no women in their parliaments. The Seychelles Islands and Europe have the highest percentages, for example Denmark (33 percent), Finland, Norway (39 percent), and—since September 1994—Sweden (41 percent), the first country to have a parity-based government, with an equal number of male and female ministers. France and Greece, where less than 6 percent of the members of parliament are women, bring up the rear among European countries on the road to political equality. The Parliament of South Africa that emerged from the first multiracial elections includes 25 percent women in the National Assembly, while women’s representation in the United States comes to 11 percent. Very few of the 178 parliaments throughout the world are headed by women: only eighteen, or slightly over 10 percent.
In the economic realm, the same situation prevails everywhere. Where there is not apartheid, there is always powerful discrimination. In other words, where freedom and equality, as well as solidarity, are concerned, the condition of women in the world is closer to that of slaves or subhumans than it is to that of citizens. To demand that this change is a priority, not to say an urgency.
IN EUROPE
Europe, which tends to associate women to the model it proposes, as we have seen, nevertheless hardly protects against poverty. A recent report from the European Parliament
40 demonstrates the feminization of poverty in Europe. Women comprise the immense majority of the 55 million Europeans who are poor. They constitute 55 percent of chronically unemployed workers, 90 percent of single parents, and 80 percent of the elderly living on welfare. In the European Union they receive salaries that are inferior to men’s by 30 percent and they are subjected to persisting discrimination in the areas of training, specialization, and promotion. They constitute 80 percent of the part-time work force.
The EU is torn apart by the imbalance between North and South and between East and West. The situation is getting worse in the South. Handicaps accumulate—being from the South, being young, being a woman—and multiply. In Spain, for example, the unemployment rate for both sexes is the highest in the Union; the rate for women under twenty-five comes to 42 percent, the European record: a sign of future poverty and exclusion. In the East as in the West, the same logic of profits requires that women from the former DDR obtain a certificate of sterilization to get a job,
41 while in France a pronatalist policy is promoted so that women will have more children and give up their jobs. And much more could be said about European countries still not part of the Union, where women who are traditionally vulnerable are literally devastated by the cataclysmic effects of the end of Communism.
Still, according to all observers, despite the widespread unemployment that is their fate and despite their crushing poverty, women are organizing so that democracy may come into being.
IN FRANCE
I ought to list here the countless facts recorded by the Observatory of Misogyny concerning the mistreatment inflicted upon women by the media, pornography, television, advertising: in short, by daily life. Let us not forget that France’s ratification, in 1983, of the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women has not been followed by the adoption of any antisexist laws, on the model of the antiracist law voted after the ratification of the UN Convention Against Racism.
42 And misogyny, still not considered an offense, remains an opinion like any other in the name of freedom of expression.
In France, then, a few figures are sufficient proof that the war against women is not a pure fiction. Every day a woman is murdered because she is a woman; every day one woman out of seven is a victim of violence at the hands of her spouse.
43 Each year four million women are beaten; each year, thirty thousand are raped—this means one every fifteen minutes—because they are women and girls, even very young girls. Only fifty-five hundred women have pressed charges, which have led to condemnations in only 17 percent of the cases. So we can say that rape is the least punished crime in France.
As for incest, it is impossible to make a plausible estimate, for crime is most often kept secret within families where it functions as the basis, the bond, and the major symptom of familial madness. It seems that after two decades of denunciation by women—whether they are victims, militants, mothers, or health care providers—this training of young girls for a totalitarian patriarchy remains the most resistant pillar of our culture. It has often occurred to me that the mystery of the Virgin Mary and the cult around her might be a foundational idealization of incest at the heart of the Catholic Church. Just before coming to Copenhagen, I heard a militant ecologist who claims to be a feminist declare in a television broadcast, when her opinion on the subject was not even requested, that incest in France was of secondary importance.
44 A candidate for the presidential elections, she probably had in mind her potential supporters, who are mostly farmers. In fact, we know that incest is most common and least denounced in rural areas. Psychologists and psychiatrists have shown us that when a young girl is the victim ofincest she tends to fall into silence, anorexia, and/or depression. It impedes her studies, if it does not interrupt them for good. The devastating effects of incest are incalculable: the vast majority of women prostitutes have been victims of incest.
Abortion rights, obtained by women after a hard struggle, are being called into question once again. Illegal actions against centers where abortion is practiced are multiplying in spite of the 1993 law punishing such actions. The commandos that carry out these actions are endorsed by the highest Church authorities. A truly conservative reform movement is trying to question the rights women have gained in the last twenty years.
If we examine the advances made in education, employment, and citizenship, we have to admit that equality between men and women is not always respected. What about higher education, for instance, since it has been women’s first step to autonomy? Where are we, seventy years after granting girls access to the baccalaureate degree, that is, access to university-level study? Too often, they must choose between so-called feminine career paths, which means they remain victims of discrimination, or so-called masculine fields, where their specificity is denied. However, girls have not only caught up with boys at the level of the baccalaureate, but they have pulled ahead. In 1988, 33 percent more girls than boys earned this diploma.
45 During the first two years at university they tend to get better results; however, by the end of this period, their number has diminished. Their long-delayed entrance to the
grandes écoles still remains impeded.
The goal of equality in education had just been set forth by the 1989 law on governing higher education when it was put to the test with the appearance of the Islamic headscarf in schools. The council of state, supreme judge of schools, chose to reassert freedom of conscience and to disregard the enslavement of women, though it is clearly manifested by the veil; and secularism (laïcité),
46 refusing to consider the political message, totally ignores discrimination against women. To my regret, I can only touch on this question superficially. It would require not only careful review but a theoretical elaboration that has yet to be undertaken, for want of precise
feminological instruments. This question has most often been dealt with in a partisan, ideological way or by nonpertinent social sciences, such as political science, sociology, or anthropology, which always reduce the priority of sex to a secondary consideration. But, in any case, we know that immigrant Muslim young women often do much better in school than their brothers. Might not the issue of the headscarf have arisen to slow down the successful integration of these young women? If our institutions do not support their efforts, what will happen to their desire to learn and thereby to free themselves from the constraints religion imposes on them?
France is still among the leading European countries in terms of women’s professional activity. In 1991 71 percent of adult females are employed.
47 But working conditions are difficult, for the majority of working women continue to be responsible for a
triple production—childbearing (for those who choose to have children), domestic work, and professional work—that still remains largely unacknowledged as such. Practical help to women who bear and rear children is still not offered by the state; it remains difficult, costly, and unorganized. As a result, women continue to be penalized in their professional lives by virtue of the gift of life they make to the world.
Besides, their right to work is being challenged yet again. Right-wing technocrats are proposing the return of women to the home as one of the solutions to unemployment, and our conservative government has reinstated a parental allowance for education, with the hidden aims of removing women from the workforce and increasing the birthrate. This ridiculous subsidy, proposed for the third, then the second, and soon the first child, is called a parental allowance, but 95 percent of those who receive it are women. Thus, in 1993, fifty-five thousand women gave up their professional lives, but, in spite of guarantees of reemployment, six out of ten failed to find work again the following year.
48 In short our government chose to stem unemployment by using the oldest and most reactionary methods of all—undermining the rights of the least privileged women, sending them back to dependency on family and procreation, secretly reinstating an old family code.
49 When the members of our government boast that they reduced the number of unemployed workers by sixteen thousand in January 1995, and when they plan a yearly reduction of two hundred thousand unemployed workers, they seem to be unaware that they are also planning the exclusion of several hundred thousand women, who will become dependent on the community in the years to come. Stay-at-home mothers already rank among the poorest in the country.
50As with many European countries, unemployment figures attest to discrimination against women, who constitute the majority of unemployed workers, everywhere and in all categories.
51 In 1994 the number of unemployed men aged twenty-five to forty increased by 2 percent; the number of unemployed women in the same age group grew by 7 percent. Considering these figures, the minister of labor had to acknowledge that the growth of unemployment concerned women exclusively, while the situation remained stable for men.
52 Women represent 58 percent of long-term unemployed workers and 80 percent of part-time employed workers. The 1983 law on professional equality, for want of the political will to control its application, failed to reduce wage inequalities between men and women. The gaps between men’s and women’s salaries are 12 percent for unskilled workers and 20 percent to 35 percent for executives; the latter gap can be as high as 40 percent in Île-de-France.
53 Women are also subjected to persistent discrimination in regard to education, specialization, and promotion.
In consequence, we can say that in France there is still a threshold of tolerance for women where their right to fair remuneration and to promotion is concerned. Obviously, equal career opportunities for women and men will remain a pious hope as long as women do not have access to decision-making positions. Perhaps only real politicosymbolic equality will make the laws and measures taken at the socioeconomic level truly effective.
France, which was late in granting women the right to vote, remains in the rear guard when it comes to electability. In 1945, one year after women received the right to vote, 6.05 percent of the deputies in the National Assembly were women; in 1995 the proportion is only 5.6 percent.
54 In the last fifty years we have advanced by moving backwards in history! France comes last in Europe, notwithstanding the multiple, steady, and repeated proofs we women have given of our will to attain freedom, of our competence as equals, and of the fight we have carried on together for the democratization of our country.
LIBERTY, PARITY, SOLIDARITY
Everywhere in the world, gaps like these between great principles and reality indicate not only that democracy has not been achieved but that we need to devise new means to make it happen.
A country like Denmark, where the memory of March 8 has its roots and where this summit conference is taking place, can be taken as exemplary and paradigmatic: it has a ratio of 33 percent women in Parliament and can be proud of having a professional activity rate of 76 percent (as opposed to 51 percent in the European Union as a whole).
THE PATHS TO PARITY IN FRANCE
Mao Tse-Tung’s famous line, “women hold up the other half of the sky,”
55 is unquestionably one of the sources, the most poetical one, of the Women’s Liberation Movement in France. As early as 1968, a few of us became aware that we represented more than half of humankind. Becoming political partners and then full-fledged citizens: this was the dynamic impulse that motivated us.
In order to bring balance to a universal history, allegedly neutral, but in reality
hommosexed and entirely built on a system of apartheid for women,
56 and in order to assert our existence in the face of religious, cultural, political, and symbolic monism, we had no choice but to come together in a women’s movement. This partitioning impelled us to highlight the fact that there are indeed two sexes and to find a notion that would work better than the principle of equality to ensure a fair distribution of responsibilities and power between men and women. Beyond equality and the dead ends to which it can lead, the term parity—still too vaguely defined to claim the status of concept—confirms the failure of the feminist ideology of sexual nondifference.
Paradoxically, it is because of the slow and circuitous development of our political identity and the complex and even contradictory strategies implemented that, in the 1970s—when we were also victims of the prevailing anti-parliamentarianism—we chose not to use our right to vote.
57 The candidates were not sufficiently aware of our demands and of our project. On March 8, 1981, I called on women to vote for François Mitterrand in the first round of the presidential elections and then to support the candidates of the left in the legislative elections that followed.
58In 1989, the year of the Bicentennial of the Revolution, I founded the Alliance des Femmes pour la Démocratie (Women’s Alliance for Democracy) to help women obtain the full exercise of a citizenship based on their specific identity. That year we launched into the battle for equality in politics. We decided to present electoral lists mostly composed of women, first in the 1989 municipal elections in Paris, in the sixth district, and in Marseille, in the fourth district, then in the 1992 regional elections in the Bouches-du-Rhône.
59 Actions such as these gradually implemented the initial project of the movement, and their concrete results made way for the notion of parity. Finally, in May 1992, I created the Club Parité 2000, setting a historical deadline for this desire for parity.
Meanwhile, an amendment to the electoral law instituting the first quota was adopted by the Parliament almost unanimously,
60 then invalidated by the Constitutional Council, based primarily on a reference to the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, which is the fundamental text of our Constitution. Let us not forget that, when this declaration was conceived, it totally excluded women from citizenship. And since then nobody has felt the need, while keeping it as an ultimate reference in the successive preambles to our Cconstitutions, to specify that, from now on, it would apply to both men and women.
Contrary to international texts, such as the United Nations Charter or the 1948 Declaration of Rights, the preamble to the 1946 Constitution, to which our current Constitution refers, fails to mention the category of sex when it declares that every human being has “sacred and inalienable rights,” “without distinction of race, religion or creed.”
61 I have been asking since 1989 that this preamble be modified so that the human person, regardless of her or his sex, may obtain these sacred and inalienable rights and fundamental liberties. The preamble to our Constitution is at the core of the legal inscription of the symbolic exclusion of women, with all the consequences, political and otherwise, with which we are familiar. In the founding texts, we are still not citizens equal to men. In this respect, we can speak of constitutional misogyny. Without a strong symbolic inscription of women at the legal level, equality between men and women remains fragmentary, subsidiary, and scattered throughout the legislative field. This is why, for a long time, I have been pointing out the importance of modifying this preamble, and on the occasion of the revision of the Constitution, at the beginning of 1993, I wrote to the president of the republic to propose a new version.
PARITY IN EUROPE
The question of parity appeared at the European level in 1989. That year, at the Council of Europe, the philosophical foundations of democracy were questioned, the difference between the sexes was rehabilitated, and “parity-based democracy” was discussed,
62 coming into harmony with my own long-standing critique of universalism, of the notion “one as all and all as one.”
In November 1992 the European Council organized a European summit in Athens titled “Women in Power,” followed by a charter demanding equal participation of women and men in public and political decision making. The Athens declaration, signed by top-level women politicians, was widely distributed and helped the idea of parity to have a noticeable impact on mentalities in France.
In November 1993 the “Manifesto of the 577 for a Parity-Based Democracy,”
63 published in
Le Monde, was the turning point that made sure the lists established by the principal or secondary parties on the left would include parity in their electoral strategy for the June 1994 European elections. The Socialist Party observed quantitative parity,
64 with the appropriate masculine bonus: a man at top of the list, which led to the election of eight men and seven women; a parity observed by the Communist Party and by ecologists, already familiar with this practice. The Énergie radicale list proposed that I appear at a threshold rank, the thirteenth, perceiving me as symbolically conveying a project for women; it ultimately and quite unexpectedly got five women elected out of thirteen candidates.
The distinction that I had made between quantitative parity and qualitative parity seemed to be confirmed at the time of the European elections, and even more so later on. Quantitative parity means an alternation between men and women—women running for office without a specific project for women. Ecologists have observed this form of parity since their first electoral list, but we have not seen any positive results for women, except for those who have been elected. As for the seven women elected to the European Parliament on the Socialist Party list, none of them chose to sit on the Committee on Women’s Rights or to intervene in the interest of women on any other committee. Each of these women has remained simply a Socialist among others. I shall come back to this distinction between qualitative and quantitative parity.
In late 1994, in Vienna, during the preparation for the Women’s Conference in Beijing, European women appeared as promoters of the idea of parity, even if this idea could also be found in the United States. The initiatives of the Council of Europe and the extension of the Union to the Nordic countries, where the number of women present in parliaments exceeds 30 percent everywhere, support the strategy of women’s empowerment.
AN ETIOLOGICAL DIAGNOSIS
As history demonstrates, the right to equality was built up in a slow, difficult, and fragmentary manner. In the name of an abstract and neutral equality, affirmative action based on sex has been forbidden, making true equality difficult to achieve. But, above all, legal logic has not registered the fact that there are two sexes and that neither one can be reduced to the other.
The many explanations for the impasses of equality are relevant, but they remain caught in the trap they denounce, for they do not take into account the infrastructure and the superstructure that border, upstream and downstream, the egalitarian imaginary—a philosophical phantasm of the social contract. In media res logic goes around in circles in the social and sociological fields, where the democratic government of the Republic is still being thought through, at levels that are not only subsidiary but secondary and relative, compared with the political level, which is both real and symbolic.
The scandalous political underrepresentation of women, in the country that boasts of having invented universal human rights, seems mysterious, as long as one doesn’t try to understand the situation as the product of a French-style misogyny, somehow inscribed as much in the tables of the republican law as in a perversion based on a denial of reality: I know there really are two sexes, but let’s pretend that we need only one.
This denial of the fact that there are both men and women has unquestionably led to abuses of a logic of equality that has almost become a dogma by now, with very obvious inegalitarian effects. For nearly twenty-five years, I have kept on presenting the perverse results of this logic of sameness as evidence that leads from women’s invisibility, their powerlessness, their inexistence, to their total disappearance. This logic is still advocated today by many feminists, however, whereas the concept of parity, provided it is conceived rigorously, may well provide a way out of the impasse.
The passion for the sovereign One—God, almighty Father, only Son, Emperor or Phallus—that has inspired the absolute monarchy has been turned into a universal republic, one and indivisible, by the philosophers of the Enlightenment: so many metamorphoses of the One with a complete disregard of the at-least-two, or more, that should be the source of the modern democratic spirit. In its inspiration, both monarchic and republican, our Constitution remains in keeping with this passion for the One, when it fails to specify that a human being is not neuter, and when it construes the fact that there are two sexes as a secondary difference and at the same time considers differences that are indeed secondary—since they are reducible in the course of life or in the course of history—as fundamental. This is the symptom showing that what is really major must remain foreclosed, that is, definitively abandoned, exhausted, unthought: the irreducible real, the fact that there must be two sexes in the destiny of the human species, considered as “a citizen species.” Once more, the mechanism of foreclosure is set up to penalize women for their specific contribution to the real by ignoring them in the politicosymbolic era.
By omitting to express unequivocally that a human being is born male or female, that he or she is male or female for all his or her life, the preamble to the Constitution repeats the denial, reiterates the foreclosure, and refuses to acknowledge the nonidentity between the two sexes, whereas it is precisely this nonidentity that enables the species within which they are similar to be fertile not only on the biological level—as is the case for all living sexed species, animal or vegetable—but also, because it is the human species, on the anthropological, cultural, historical, and political levels.
The well-known universalism to which Western man has remained bound like Ulysses to his mast, for fear of the regression the sirens of his elementary drives might bring about, is just the premature stage of an adolescent consciousness. The existence of a two can be considered only according to the logic of the One, with no other, or with another reduced to the same, so as not to alter the narcissistic power of the Whole. The economy of the One-Whole seeks to exclude difference or, under constraint, tolerates its corollary: the carefully planned, quantified, controlled, homeopathic or vaccinelike inclusion, the foreclosed internment of difference. With such a logical basis, abstract, neutralizing, undifferentiated equality can only lead—as long as there is a two—to the opposite extreme of the direction it has claimed for itself: to ever more inequality, ever more discrimination.
No wonder the road to equality has required a long forced march, a paradoxical agonizing struggle, both in contradiction and in agreement with the reappearance of the Declaration of Human Rights in our Constitution. The preamble to the Constitution purports to serve two masters at once: on the one hand, the republic and the monarchy, that is, the One, and, on the other hand, the democratic concessions of contemporary governments (womens’ right to vote for one, professional equality for another; and so on), all against a background of monophallic tyranny.
QUALITATIVE PARITY
Since “the people” actually comprises two sexes, each of the two should logically represent the whole on an equal basis. The fact that only men have had access to linguistic representation of humanity—the expression “rights of man” is still being used—and to political representation, always and everywhere, is the major symptom indicating that
homo universalis is indeed a male and not a female individual. Humanity may be heterosexed, but the church and the state require either a male representation or a representation of men and women subjected to a unique referent, still and always male. In this perspective, if, today, one citizen out of two is a woman citizen, tomorrow, in the one, indivisible, and universal republic, two citizens out of two will be men citizens. For if France, the eldest daughter of the Church, recoils—as the Catholic Church does—at being represented in any way other than by sons in the image of the Father, in the near future it will be able to tolerate a more democratic representation—as the Protestant Church does—by its “girl-sons” (filses),
65 without giving an inch with regard to the all-powerful symbolic referent. Filiarchal parity will certainly include daughters or girl-sons (as if they were sons) in a philosophical “as if” that, according to Freud, has nothing to do with the real, yet it can fulfill the religious or ideological illusion of an obsessional type enslaved to a phobic ego.
What an odd citizen species, which, having recorded the existence of two sexes, would have committed itself to parity and would ultimately find itself reproduced in an identical clonelike way, entirely “hommosexed”; a citizen species in which the self would forever be protected from an inner division, from the existence of an unconscious, from contamination by those who at last would have been eliminated; a citizen species without women—in a word, a citizen species purified.
If this notion of parity is only a sort of compromise between a heterogenous real and an abstract principle, we can expect that its use will produce more discrimination than it reduces. If ideological neuroses are opposed to a rigorous theorization of the notion and its development as a concept, the word parity itself will soon begin to function as a sterile fetish, and any strategy for its implementation will necessarily lead to the same dead ends as those the principle of equality has reached and will continue to reach.
However, the logic of parity has the means to organize its own way out of the egalitarian logic. It can instrumentalize it, in order to plan, prepare, and proclaim the way out of an infernal circle where our species alienates itself in endless self-destruction. The real logic of parity not only appears irrepressible but inherently dialogical: it can impose itself on the consciousness of both sexes as the invention of an enlightened diversality. Instead of a now totally static universalism, the diversality engendered by the coupling of the two sexes representing it might lead to a heterogeneous republic, exceeding rather than falling short of the One. Here, freed from the quantitative model of a radical quota (50/50) in the terrorist politically correct version offered by an unchanged ideology, a concept of parity could unfold.
What has actually been happening since this notion imposed itself in the Women’s Movement and is now being imposed, at least as a question, in political parties? Parity has different lines of logic and goals according to the libidinal investments and psychic types of its actresses and actors much more than according to their political affiliations. Thus we can say that this notion goes beyond right-left divisions.
In fact, there exists a conservative parity, conservative inasmuch as it preserves the absolute primacy of the One and sets reformed neutralism as its ultimate goal: it is the quantitative parity of ecologists or that of the Socialist Party in the European elections. In a very similar category we have to include the quantitative parity of many feminist projects, which tend to keep the One,
gendered neuter (masculine-feminine) on the Protestant rather than the Catholic model.
66 This parity has to be distinguished from truly
qualitative parity, determined from a field worked mainly by the difference between the sexes. In this respect, some consider that parity means giving up equality. For my part, I prefer to consider the notion from a perspective of (Revolutionary maturation: to find a way out of the logic of equality, we have to have gone through it and gone beyond it for fear of finding ourselves within it, just as in libidinal evolution we can find ourselves beneath the One, divided up, discriminated against.
Beyond, and only beyond, a well-integrated equality, however, parity will go on gaining strength with phallic proclamations and provocations before it brings the ethical values borne by women to fruition. Indeed, to go from quantitative to qualitative parity , it is not enough for women representatives of the people to have—in addition—a project for women; this project must consider them as women, not as men-to-be, which means that their political project must take into account the reality of their experience as women who are sexed human beings—with regard to the work of procreation, the adventure of gestation as the specific time and place for welcoming the other—and as women who are persons in charge of the world.
The issue that is really at stake in parity today, then, is whether the passion for the One is going to pervert it into a One-Whole or whether the generous, genital wisdom of the two will lead it into a risky, genial adventure; whether parity is going to be a warlike strategy of hegemonic domination in the guise of sharing or the promise of a multiplication of chances for the species; whether it is going to be used as an inclusion of sisters, next to their brothers, in a republic of sons, without any structural change or whether, beyond all isms—socialism, feminism, universalism, and other outdated notions, all based on denial and on the resulting suicidal perversions—it will allow the expression of the foreclosed knowledge belonging to the only living species capable of creation. Beyond equality and to achieve equality as a matter of justice, yes, parity: but a parity that is heterosexed in its historical destiny as in the premises on which it is based, even including those men and women who deny it and distort it at the very moment when they are forced to acknowledge it. Parity is equality plus fertile heterogeneity.
I could also describe our coming together today at this roundtable as parity based, we female representatives of NGOs and members of the Parliament, each one perhaps, like myself, both a militant and a representative. By parity-based, where I myself am concerned, I mean that I feel as much a militant as a member of Parliament, just as I was convinced, when I was simply a militant, that I was playing an active role in politics.
There is no doubt about the impact of NGO representation in official UN conferences on women. Such representation demonstrates that, at this level, a well-conceived parity between governments and civil populations could balance and at the same time accelerate development and peace in the world. Needless to say, society, made up mostly of women, and governing powers, made up mostly of men, illustrate a kind of sexing which has everything to gain by conjugating the two terms. Parity tomorrow would mark the end of the refeudalization of civil society, and it would mean multiplying, rather than sharing, democratic power in the polity. Through a fair distribution, each citizen, eligible to run for office as well as to vote, would have a share of power at his or her own level and would hold hegemony in check. This is the democratic revolution that can be brought about by the arrival of women in public life.
We have often been told that our women’s movements were made up of intellectuals cut off from the reality of the world. But what do we see today? The model of liberty, equality, parity, and solidarity, adapted to each culture, is bringing us heroines of democracy from the far corners of the earth. I shall mention only three of them as examples: Taslima Nasrin, exiled today in Sweden, is fighting for equality between men and women in Bangladesh. Aung San Suu Kyi from Burma founded the National League for Democracy, which won a resounding victory in the May 1990 elections. She received the Nobel Peace Prize for her political work in 1991. Under house arrest for almost six years, she is still engaged in democratic progress. Leyla Zana, a Turkish member of parliament, the first Kurd woman to be elected, imprisoned after a rigged trial, proclaimed: “Our only crime is our firm and determined commitment to our democratic and pacific demands.”
67 A few heroines who are the tip an iceberg made up of millions of women, messengers of hope, who everywhere in the world are awakening, listening to one another, coming together, organizing, starting movements: this is the pioneer front of democracy.