ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the struggles over the symbolic significance of '1968' that have simultaneously been struggles around the 'why' and the 'how' of feminist activism. If a cultural feminist strategy tended to promote retreat and the exchange of personal experience in encounter groups, a social feminist strategy rather opted to encourage political campaigning and the willingness to march through the existing institutions. Focusing on the sources that underpinned the women's liberation movement, the chapter explores how judgements on and memories of 1968 structured feminist debates and feminist politics in France and West Germany, including the discussion of violence against women. In France, the women's liberation movement grew into an important social movement during the early 1970s. It was initially linked to the struggle over reproductive rights and to the decriminalisation of abortion specifically. Both in France and in the Federal Republic, the issue of violence against women began to enter the public arena in the 1970s.
