Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (98 page)

The anti-tax parties, like the agrarian protest parties of inter-war Europe, were primarily reactive and negative—they were against unwelcome change and asked of the state above all that it remove what they saw as unreasonable fiscal burdens. Other single-issue movements had more positive demands to make of the state, or the law, or institutions. Their concerns ranged from prison reform and psychiatric hospitals through access to education and medical services and into the provision of safe food, community services, the amelioration of urban environments and access to cultural resources. All were ‘anti-consensus’ in their reluctance to confine their support to any one traditional political constituency and their willingness—of necessity—to consider alternative ways of publicizing their concerns.

Three of the new political groupings—the women’s movement, environmentalism, and peace activism—are of particular significance, for their scale and their lasting impact. For obvious reasons, the women’s movement was the most diverse and far-reaching. In addition to the interests they shared with men, women had distinctive concerns that were only just then beginning to enter the European legislative arena: childcare, wage equality, divorce, abortion, contraception, domestic violence.

To these should be added the attention paid by the more radical women’s groups to homosexual (lesbian) rights, and the growing feminist concern with pornography. The latter illustrates rather well the new moral geography of politics: sexually explicit literature and film had only recently and partially been liberated from the control of the censors, thanks to the concerted efforts of old liberals and new Left. Yet within a decade it was again under fire, this time from networks of women’s groups, often led by coalitions of radical feminists and traditional conservatives who united around this one issue.

The women’s movement in Europe was from the outset a variable mix of intersecting objectives. In 1950, one quarter of West German married women were in paid employment outside the home, by 1970 the number had risen to one married woman in two; of one and a half million new entrants to the labour force in Italy between 1972 and 1980, one and a quarter million were women. By the mid- 1990s women constituted over 40 percent of the total (official) labour force in every European country except Portugal and Italy. Many of the new women workers were employed part-time, or in entry-level clerical jobs where they were not entitled to full benefits. The flexibility of part-time jobs suited many working mothers, but in the straitened economic circumstances of the Seventies this did not compensate for poor wages and job insecurity. Equal pay and the workplace provision of childcare facilities thus emerged early as the main demands of most working women in the West and have remained at the forefront ever since.

Working (and non-working) women increasingly sought assistance in caring for their children; but they did not necessarily wish for more children of their own. Indeed, with increased prosperity and more time spent working outside the home, they wanted fewer—or at least more say in the matter. The demand for access to contraceptive information, and contraceptives, dates to the early years of the twentieth century, but it gathered speed within a decade of the peak of the baby boom. The French
Association Maternité
was formed in 1956 to press for contraceptive rights; four years later it was succeeded by the
Mouvement Français pour le Planning Familial
, the change in name a clear indication of a shift in mood.

As pressure grew through the liberalizing Sixties for sexual freedoms of all kinds, laws regulating contraception were everywhere relaxed (except in certain countries of Eastern Europe like Romania, where national ‘reproduction strategies’ continued to forbid it). By the early seventies contraception was widely available throughout Western Europe, though not in remote rural districts or regions where Catholic authorities held moral sway over the local population. Even in towns and cities, however, it was middle class women who benefited most from the new freedom; for many working-class married women, and the overwhelming majority of unmarried ones, the leading form of birth control remained what it had long been: abortion.

It is thus not surprising that the demand for reform of abortion laws became a
leitmotif
of the new women’s politics—a rare point of intersection where the politics of radical feminism encountered the needs of apolitical everywoman. In Britain abortion had been decriminalized in 1967, as we have seen. But in many other places it was still a crime: in Italy it carried a five-year prison sentence. But legal or otherwise, abortions were part of the life experience of millions of women—in tiny Latvia, in 1973, there were 60,000 abortions for 34,000 live births. And where abortion was illegal the risks it entailed, both legal and medical, united women across class, age and political affiliation.

On April 5th 1971, the French weekly magazine
Le Nouvel Observateur
published a petition signed by 343 women declaring that they had all had abortions, and thus broken the law, and demanding revision of the penal code. The signatories were all well known, some of them—the writers Simone de Beauvoir and Françoise Sagan, the actresses Catherine Deneuve, Jeanne Moreau and Marie-France Pisier, the lawyers and political activists Yvette Roudy and Gisèle Halimi—very well known indeed. And they were joined by obscure but militant activists from the feminist movements that had sprung up in the wake of 1968. Although over three hundred women had been found guilty of the crime of abortion in the previous year, the government prudently forbore to prosecute the signatories of the open letter.

The petition had been organized by the
Mouvement de Libération des Femmes
(MLF), founded the previous year; the political stir aroused by their action prompted Halimi and de Beauvoir to form
Choisir
, a political organization dedicated to ending the ban on abortion. In January 1973, at a press conference, French President Georges Pompidou conceded that French law had fallen behind the evolution of public opinion. He could hardly do otherwise: in the course of 1972-73, over 35,000 French women made their way to Britain to undergo legal abortions. Pompidou’s successor, Valéry Giscard D’Estaing, instructed his health minister, Simone Weil, to present parliament with a revision of the law and on January 17th 1975, the
Assemblée Nationale
legalized abortion (during the first ten weeks of pregnancy) in France.

The French example was studied closely by women throughout Western Europe. In Italy the newly-formed
Movimento della Liberazione delle Donne Italiane
(Italian Women’s Liberation Movement) joined forces with the small Radical Party to raise 800,000 signatures on a petition to change the law on abortion, supported by a march on Rome of 50,000 women in April 1976. Three years after the belated introduction in 1975 of a new ‘family code’ to replace that of the Fascists, the Italian parliament voted—on May 29th 1978, three weeks after the discovery of Aldo Moro’s corpse—to legalise abortion.

The decision was indirectly confirmed at a national referendum in May 1981, when Italian voters rejected
both
a proposal to loosen further the existing restrictions on legal abortion
and
a move to re-criminalize it, proposed by a newly formed Pro-Life Movement. If the pace of reform in Italy lagged somewhat behind Britain or France, it was less through the opposition of the Catholic Church than because so many Italian feminists had cut their teeth in the movements of the extra-parliamentary ‘autonomous’ Left (revealingly, the first
Lotta Femminista
manifesto of 1971 had focused upon the demand for salaries for housework—a ritual extension to the domestic realm of an older, ‘workerist’ vision of modern society as one huge factory). They were thus slow to exploit established political institutions in pursuit of their goals.

In Spain, the French strategy was followed more closely still, accelerated by the energies released by the collapse of the old regime. The first feminist demonstration in Spain was organized in January 1976, within two months of Franco’s death. Two years later adultery was de-criminalized and contraception legalized. In 1979 one thousand women, including prominent public figures, signed a public statement declaring themselves to have broken the law by undergoing an abortion—a reminder that Spain under Franco’s rule had one of Europe’s highest rates of illegal abortion, comparable to those of Eastern Europe and driven by the same authoritarian, pro-natalist disapproval of all forms of birth control. But even in post-Franco Spain the cultural pressures working against abortion-law reform remained strong; when the Cortes finally approved a law permitting abortion in May 1985, it restricted permission to cases of rape, a deformed foetus, or where the mother’s life was at risk.

Together with the right to divorce, the successful battle over abortion rights was the main achievement of women’s political groups in these years. As a consequence, the personal circumstances of millions of women were inestimably improved. The availability of abortion, in conjunction with effective and available contraception, not only improved the life chances of many, especially the poor, but also offered working women the option of postponing their first child to a historically late point in their childbearing years.

The result was a steady fall in the number of children born. The Spanish birth rate per woman fell by nearly 60 percent between 1960 and 1996; Italy, West Germany and the Netherlands were close behind. Within a few years of the reforms of the Seventies,
no
west European country except Ireland had a birthrate sufficient to replace the previous generation. In Britain the annual birthrate fell in the three decades after 1960 from 2.71 children per woman to 1.84; in France from 2.73 to 1.73. Married women were increasingly choosing to have one child or none at all—were it not for extra-marital births the rates would have been lower still: by the end of the 1980s, extra-marital births as a percentage of the annual total were at 24 percent in Austria, 28 percent in the UK, 29 percent in France and 52 percent in Sweden.

As the economy slowed and the emancipation of women gathered pace, the demography of Europe was changing—with ominous implications for the welfare state in years to come. The social changes wrought by the women’s movement were not, however, mirrored in politics itself. No ‘women’s party’ emerged, capable of si-phoning off votes and getting its representatives elected. Women remained a minority in national legislatures and governments.

The Left proved generally more open to electing women than the Right (but not everywhere—in both Belgium and France, Christian parties of the Center-Right were for many years more likely than their Socialist opponents to nominate women to safe constituencies), but the best predictor of women’s prospects in public life was not ideology but geography. Between 1975 and 1990 the number of women in Finland’s parliament rose from 23 percent to 39 percent; in Sweden from 21 percent to 38 percent; in Norway from 16 percent to 36 percent; and in Denmark from 16 percent to 33 percent. Farther south, in the parliaments of Italy and Portugal, women constituted just one in twelve of parliamentary deputies in 1990. In the UK House of Commons they were just 7 percent of the total; in France’s
Assemblée Nationale
, a mere 6 percent.

Environmentalists, men and women alike, had considerably more success in translating their sentiments into electoral politics. At one level ‘environmentalism’ (a neologism dating from the Thirties) was indeed a new departure: the collective expression of middle-class fears about nuclear power stations and galloping urbanization, motorways and pollution. But the Green Movement in Europe would never have been so effective had it been just a footnote to the Sixties: well-heeled weekend Luddites in stone-washed natural fibres triangulating between their instincts and their interests. The longing for a more ‘natural’ world and the search for a personal politics of ‘authenticity’ had deep roots on both sides of the ideological divide, traceable to the Romantics and their horror at the depredations of early industrialism. By the early twentieth century both Left and Right had their cycling clubs, vegetarian restaurants,
Wandervogel
movements and ramblers, affiliated variously to socialist or nationalist dreams of emancipation and return.

The German nostalgia for uniquely
German
landscapes, for the mountains and rivers of the Harz and the Pfalz, for
Heimat
; the French nationalist dream of peasant harmony in
la France profonde
, unsullied by cities and cosmopolitanism; the English reverie of a once and future country harmony, Blake’s lost Jerusalem: these had more in common than any of their followers might have felt comfortable admitting. And whereas the Left had for many decades watched in admiration as Communist ‘output’ strove to outstrip that of the West, by the Seventies voices on Right and Left alike were starting to express some unease at the collateral costs of progress, productivity and ‘modernity’.
²⁰⁷

The modern environmentalist revolution thus benefited twice over: it was a break from the callous nostrums of the recent past—and it had roots in a more distant history, unremembered but atavistically reassuring. Environmentalism (like pacifism) often aroused in its wake a revival of nationalism—or regionalism—but with a human face. The ‘
Alternativen
’ of West Berlin, or the anti-nuclear protesters of Austria who won a 1978 referendum forbidding their government from activating the nuclear power station at Zwentendorf, would never have identified themselves as nationalists or even patriots. But their anger against the pollution of the
local
environment above all (and their relative indifference to similar havoc being wreaked elsewhere) suggests otherwise. The ‘not in my backyard’ quality of the incipient Green Movement harked back to an earlier model.