Postwar

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 Maternite was formed in 1956 to press for contraceptive rights; four years later it was succeeded by the Mouvement Francais 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 Francoise Sagan, the actresses Catherine Deneuve, Jeanne Moreau and Marie-France Pisier, the lawyers and political activists Yvette Roudy and Gisele 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 Liberation 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, Valery Giscard D’Estaing, instructed his health minister, Simone Weil, to present parliament with a revision of the law and on January 17th 1975, the Assemblee 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.