WHEN the late Francois Mitterrand made Cresson France's first woman prime minister in 1991; the move was greeted with immense enthusiasm. But she didn't have a chance. "The whole political establishment was against her," recalls Janine Mossuz Lavau, director of research at the CEVIPOF centre for political studies. "The men of her own party would not support her. It was very below the belt - they called her la favorite and `the redhead with the ample bosom'." Even were she the president's mistress, she says, they never would have treated a man that way. "In French political mores, respect for a politician's private life is total - unless the politician is a woman." Cresson spent less than a year in office.
Women seemed to make another breakthrough in May 1995, when the centre right prime minister, Alain Juppe, appointed 12 women cabinet ministers. The "Juppettes", as the women were known, were photographed on the steps of the Elysees presidential palace. Glossy colour magazines published stories on their clothes and make up, on their marriages and child care arrangements. But their careers too were short lived. After a mere six months, Juppe reshuffled his cabinet and fired eight of the "Juppettes". "He threw them away like Kleenex," Sylvie Guillaume, the Socialist party's national secretary for women, says bitterly.
France, the country of human rights and the enlightenment, has an abysmal record on the political advancement of women. "We're 72nd in the world, behind Uganda," says Guillaume. The country of Voltaire and Rousseau ranks last of 15 EU nations in the number of women in parliament. The assembly dissolved by President Jacques Chirac on April 21st was only 5.6 per cent female - less than in 1946. By comparison women comprise 12.1 per cent of Dail Eireann. In Sweden, 40.4 per cent of parliamentarians are female, as are half of the cabinet ministers.
According to Sylvie Guillaume the absence of women in French politics is the result of history. "The 1789 revolution excluded women from the universal declaration of the rights of man," she says. Most Western democracies gave women the right to vote long before France did in 1944, and we haven't caught up." Catherine Trautmann, the Socialist mayor of Strasbourg, says France has been "macho in its political culture". Although women are well represented in civil society and the economy, politics remains a bastion of sexism.
Now that may be changing. The opposition Socialist Parts announced in February that 30 per cent of its candidates in the next legislative elections would be women. President Chirac caught the Socialists off guard by calling the election 10 months early (it will take place in two rounds, on May 25th and June 1st), and some of the women candidates decided not to stand because the campaign was too short to make themselves known. But a record number of women are participating: 28 per cent of Socialist candidates are female, as are 22 per cent of Communist parliamentary hopefuls. Although President Chirac and Alain Juppe pay lipservice to the need to promote women, only 7.87 per cent of the centre right RPR-UDF coalition's candidates are female.
The victory of the Labour party in Britain and the election of 119 women to the House of Commons was a tremendous boost to French women candidates.
"I was very, very happy, and very proud when I heard the news," says Catherine Trautmann, who is favoured to win the parliamentary seat for the lower Rhine. "It was great encouragement, a source of satisfaction." But the custodians of the Paris National Assembly won't be in for an avalanche of women. At best, Sylvie Guillaume says, the percentage of women in the French legislature will rise to 10 per cent.
Socialists say they have adopted the 30 per cent quota out of concern for "equality, justice and democracy", but it is also popular with voters. An opinion poll published in the Nouvel Observateur shows that 90 per cent of French voters would like to have a woman prime minister, and 84 per cent say they would be favourably disposed to a female president. Those surveyed said that women politicians are closer to people and more combative.
Some Socialists are uneasy with the quota system because it contradicts the premise that men and women are equal. "We won't get there without restrictions and incitements," says Catherine Trautmann, who is the only female mayor of a city larger than 100,000. "When French people get used to electing women, it will be different. I started out as the beneficiary of a quota, the first time I was elected a city councillor. There were smiles and gibes ... I wanted to prove I could win an election on my own."
When Trautmann first stood for mayor in 1989, her rightwing opponent said she was "more talented at baking pies than playing politics". She won national fame in March by organising a 60,000 strong protest march against Jean Marie Le Pen and the extreme rightwing National Front. She nonetheless believes that women politicians are less inclined to conflict, less pi one to brutal shows of strength's. They are, she says, more consistent, tenacious and reliable. Perhaps women have a greater capacity to adapt. It's not in our genes, but our culture has forced us to manage in all kinds of situations, to find solutions to problems."
She won widespread praise for solving Strasbourg's transport problems with a new tramway system, completed in just five years.
Catherine Trautmann and Martine, Aubry, the former Socialist Minister of Labour, also 46 years old, are emerging stars in a Socialist party that nearly self destructed through male power struggles in the early 1990s. Aubry is the deputy mayor of Lille and a parliamentary candidate. She is the daughter of the former president of the European Commission Jacques Delors. Socialist officials insist that she is a politician in her own right, regardless of her father's fame. They credit her with formulating the party's plans to rehabilitate rundown banlieues where crime and drug abuse thrive, and with job creation schemes for young people.
When asked about the policy of the extreme right National Front (FN), Sylvie Guillaume of the Socialist party responds forcefully: "They are completely reactionary, backward. They want to put women back in the home. You saw what happened in Vitrolles. Catherine Megret stood in place of her husband and now she's his marionette - a puppet who says monstrous things." (In an interview with a German newspaper, Catherine Megret said that she, like National Front leader Jean Marie Le Pen, believes in the "inequality of races".)
The FN scores slightly better than the mainstream centre right in its treatment of women: 8 per cent of its candidates are female. But, says Sophie Brissaud, Le Pen's spokeswoman: "They are not standing in districts where they risk being elected. They're not trying to win - they just want to express their political commitment.
The group's proposed "parental income" of £777 per month would be paid mostly to women. You can't reverse what nature has done," Brissaud explains. "We never said we would force women to stay at home and scrub pots, like the Socialists claim. We're giving them the choice . . . if women wanted to go into politics there would be more women elected. Political power in France is masculine; ambition for power is masculine."
Marie France Stirbois is a deputy in the European Parliament for the National Front and a candidate in the French legislative election. She took over her husband's political career when he died in 1988 and has reached the Le Pen inner circle. As a member of the French National Assembly from 1989 to 1993, she says: I never saw such macho men - on the left and the right. They were totally contemptuous of women - when I went to defence debates, they treated me like a Martian And they have the nerve to preach at the National Front about equality for women!"
Sometimes feminine solidarity bridges the great ideological gap between left and right. MarieFrance Stirbois recalls a particularly stormy session of parliament, when Edith Cresson was prime minister. "She wasn't well prepared, but that happens to male prime ministers too. They went in for the kill just because she was a woman. Years later I saw her in Brussels and I told her how sorry I felt for her."
