ABSTRACT
In the complex situation of the 1970s one of the items on the agenda of both the CGT and the Confedération Française Démocratique du Travail was the “problem” of women. In fact, as this chapter shows, it was the strategic response of each confederation to the changes in electoral fortunes of the left which was most important in determining the evolution of their positions on women workers. The Parti Communiste Français was, by the middle of the 1970s, engaged in a process of partial Eurocommunization which privileged struggles for democracy and it went so far as to argue that efforts to extend democracy were anti-capitalist in the current conditions of state monopoly capitalism. The chapter traces the effects of the new conditions of the 1970s on the two French labor confederations, which forced them to rethink their understanding of women's situation in capitalism, in socialism, and in the unions.
