ABSTRACT
The ‘new’ women’s movement arose out of the pervading climate of dissatisfaction and anti-authoritarianism of May 1968, but was also largely due to conflict with, and protest against the masculine revolutionary ethic. In fact, many women who at first expressed solidarity with the common revolutionary cause felt increasingly ignored and despondent about the secondary role they were expected to play to men. They felt increasingly marginalized and exploited, as those who were expected to do the mundane, menial jobs for a revolution that did not seem to further their own cause. Indeed, it created the awareness that women had a cause to fight for that was separate from that of men, and that they would have to organize themselves outside the common, male-dominated revolutionary framework. Thus, in 1968, groups of women began to form, at first informally, at the universities of the Sorbonne and Vincennes to discuss the specific role of women in the revolutionary movement. However, it was not until 1970 that a separate women’s movement, known as the MLF (Mouvement de la Libération de la Femme) manifested itself openly in the first publication of Le Torchon brûle and a special issue of the journal Partisans, called ‘Libération des Femmes: Année Zéro’. In August 1970 a women’s demonstration took place which was to mark the beginning of numerous MLF protests throughout the 1970s: the laying of flowers on the tomb of the unknown soldier at the Arc de Triomphe accompanied
by the words: ‘Il y a toujours plus inconnu que le soldat-sa femme’.
