Introduction

This book traces the experience of women in France from the end of the Second World War to the events of May ’68. Women are remarkably absent from historical accounts of the Fourth Republic (1946-58) and even from accounts of the early years of the Fifth, founded in 1958. The general histories dealing with the postwar period concentrate on the international issues that dominated French political life (wars of decolonisation, the Cold War, the construction of Europe); on postwar reconstruction and the economic modernisation of the ‘Thirty glorious years’;1 on the unstable political system of the Fourth Republic; and on de Gaulle and the Gaullist Fifth Republic. Women’s lives remained essentially offstage, both because they were excluded from power and because commentators, analysts and historians simply did not notice gender or think it was important as a social category.