Feminism and the Tunisian Revolution · CHAPTER 3 ·
The personal is political
Chapter 3 of Protest and Change: Second-Wave Feminism and Tunisia, 1945–2015: “The Personal Is Political”
Second-wave feminists argued that problems women experienced as private, in marriage, housework and pregnancy, were produced by social power. Consciousness-raising groups spread through the United States, Britain and France between 1968 and 1972, and the campaign to repeal abortion laws led to Roe v. Wade on 22 January 1973.
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The map above is the world of Women’s rights, January 1972 — Abortion law before Roe v. Wade.
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BRIEF EXPLANATION — THE ESSENTIAL ARGUMENT
The slogan “the personal is political” sums up the most original idea of second-wave feminism, the movement of the 1960s and 1970s for equality beyond the vote. Its central claim was that problems women experienced as private, in marriage, housework, sex and pregnancy, were produced by social power and could therefore be changed by political action. Women discovered this in “consciousness-raising” groups, small circles of perhaps ten women who met weekly to compare their experiences, much as a modern support group shares stories, except that the purpose was to find the common cause behind them. The method spread through the United States, Britain and France between 1968 and 1972, and its most important political result was a campaign to repeal the laws that made abortion a crime.
Abortion shows how the slogan created change, because the issue moved from secret shame to open protest in about five years. Women held public “speak-outs” about their own illegal abortions in New York in 1969, and 343 French women signed a manifesto in 1971 admitting to theirs. The map shows the American patchwork of January 1972. Four states in blue allowed abortion on request, thirteen in grey-tan had passed reform laws allowing it on limited grounds such as rape or a threat to the woman’s health, and the rest, in parchment, banned it in almost all circumstances. Women therefore travelled to New York or to London, as the arrows show, and the unfairness of a right that depended on money and distance made the case for national change. In 1973 the Supreme Court’s ruling in Roe v. Wade swept the patchwork away, and in 1975 France legalised abortion too, which shows how quickly a law can fall once the people it punishes stop hiding.
The full story
Consciousness-raising, in which small groups of women compared their lives much as a support group does, turned complaint into analysis because it treated each woman’s experience as evidence. In 1968 Kathie Sarachild of New York Radical Women described the method: members answered one question at a time, about their mothers, jobs or first sexual experiences, and looked for the pattern. Carol Hanisch defended the practice in a 1969 paper that her editors titled “The Personal Is Political”, arguing that these groups were political action because they traced women’s unhappiness to the power men held in marriage, work and law. By the early 1970s tens of thousands of women had joined such groups. In February 1970 between 500 and 600 women met at Ruskin College, Oxford, for Britain’s first national women’s liberation conference and demanded equal pay, equal education, 24-hour nurseries and free contraception and abortion on demand. A method invented in small rooms became the grammar of a mass movement.
Abortion became the movement’s defining cause because illegal abortion was common, dangerous and hidden. Historians estimate that hundreds of thousands of illegal abortions took place in the United States each year before 1970. Infections from unsafe procedures, known as septic abortion, were a leading cause of maternal death, especially for poor women and women of colour who could not pay a sympathetic doctor. In March 1969 the radical feminist group Redstockings held a public speak-out in New York, after a state hearing on reform had invited fourteen men and a nun as its expert witnesses. In Chicago a clandestine service known as “Jane” performed an estimated 11,000 abortions between 1969 and 1973. In April 1970 New York’s legislature legalised abortion on request by a single changed vote, and because it set no residency rule, women came from across the country: in 1972 alone just over 100,000 travelled there from other states. The blue states show where the law had changed, and the arrows show who could afford to reach them.
The same logic of public confession crossed the Atlantic, where it met a different legal map. Britain’s Abortion Act of 1967 allowed abortion with two doctors’ agreement on broad health grounds, so British clinics drew women from France and from Ireland, where it remained banned. On 5 April 1971 the weekly Le Nouvel Observateur printed the Manifesto of the 343, in which Simone de Beauvoir and 342 other women declared that they had broken the law and dared the state to prosecute them. In 1972 the lawyer Gisèle Halimi turned the Bobigny trial of a teenager, Marie-Claire Chevalier, into an indictment of the law itself, and the girl was acquitted. On 22 January 1973 the Supreme Court, whose rulings bind every state, decided in Roe v. Wade by 7 votes to 2 that the constitutional right to privacy, which shields certain personal decisions from government, covered abortion in early pregnancy. In January 1975 France’s Veil law, named after the health minister Simone Veil, legalised it in the first ten weeks. Making the private public had changed the law on two continents within six years.
DEEP EXPLANATION — EVIDENCE & INTERPRETATION
Counting what was hidden
Estimating how many illegal abortions took place before legalisation is difficult because the practice was criminal, and the numbers have been used as weapons on both sides of the debate. American estimates for the 1950s and 1960s range from about 200,000 to well over a million a year; the lower figures come from extrapolating hospital admissions and the higher from surveys and from campaigners. Leslie Reagan’s When Abortion Was a Crime (1997) uses court records, coroners’ reports and hospital files to show that the burden fell unequally. One study of New York City in the early 1960s found that abortion caused roughly one in four pregnancy-related deaths among white women and about half among Black and Puerto Rican women. Deaths fell sharply after legalisation, a change that most historians attribute to safer procedures as well as to antibiotics. The uncertainty in the totals is real, but the pattern within them is consistent across every kind of source: criminal abortion was a danger rationed by money, which is why reformers described repeal as a question of equality as well as of choice.
Did Roe end the debate or start a new one?
Supporters of Roe saw it as completing the state-by-state campaign that the map records. Critics, including Ruth Bader Ginsburg, later argued that the Court had moved too far and too fast, removing the issue from legislatures where public opinion was shifting and handing opponents a powerful grievance. Linda Greenhouse and Reva Siegel have challenged this “backlash” thesis with evidence that organised opposition, led by the Catholic Church, was already growing before 1973, especially after New York’s repeal. The decision also framed abortion as a right to privacy and choice, which protected women from state bans but did not oblige the state to pay for the procedure. When the Hyde Amendment of 1976 barred the use of Medicaid, the government health insurance programme for people on low incomes, to pay for abortions, poor women lost practical access while the legal right remained intact. Black feminists and later “reproductive justice” activists argued that choice meant little without money, clinics and freedom from coerced sterilisation. The case therefore illustrates a general pattern in protest movements: a court victory can secure a right more quickly than politics could, but it shifts the conflict into new arenas, from the courtroom to funding, access and elections.
Europe: travel, civil disobedience and the Veil law
In Europe the uneven map of abortion law turned travel into a political weapon, and Britain became the first destination. Its Abortion Act of 1967 was steered through Parliament by the Liberal MP David Steel after the thalidomide scandal, in which a morning-sickness drug caused severe birth defects. By the early 1970s tens of thousands of women a year came to British clinics from France, Spain and, increasingly, Ireland. French campaigners went further: in 1973 the Movement for the Freedom of Abortion and Contraception (MLAC) organised coach trips to London and Amsterdam and, more provocatively, performed abortions openly in France with a simple suction method, daring the state to prosecute doctors and activists by the hundred. Historians such as Bibia Pavard argue that this mass civil disobedience made France’s laws against abortion, including a law of 1920 that banned even advertising contraception, unenforceable, so the government of Valéry Giscard d’Estaing chose to legislate. When Simone Veil, a magistrate and Auschwitz survivor, presented the bill in November 1974, most deputies of her own governing majority voted against it, and it passed by 284 votes to 189 with the votes of the left and about a third of the governing majority. The French case shows how protest can create change by making the existing law impossible to apply.
Key places on the map
On this day
Why it happened
A method that turned experience into evidence. Consciousness-raising groups gave women a way to see that their individual problems, from housework to sexual coercion, followed common patterns. Once a pattern is visible it can be blamed on institutions and law, which turns a private sorrow into a political grievance. The method was cheap, needed no leaders and could be copied anywhere, which is why it spread faster than any organisation could recruit. Its findings also gave women the confidence that they spoke for many others, which is the precondition of any public protest.
An injustice that fell hardest on the poor. Illegal abortion was available to women who could pay a sympathetic doctor or travel abroad, and dangerous for those who could not. Wealthier women could travel abroad or persuade a hospital committee to approve a “therapeutic” abortion, options that were closed to most poor women. Hospital wards for septic abortion filled with poor women, and maternal deaths fell disproportionately on Black and Puerto Rican women. The visible inequality of the old system made repeal an argument about fairness, which broadened its appeal far beyond the women’s movement.
Doctors, lawyers and clergy changed sides. Reform gained respectable allies when professionals changed sides: from the early 1960s the American Law Institute, an influential body of lawyers, proposed allowing abortion on limited medical grounds, and many doctors who saw the results of illegal procedures supported reform. In 1967 a network of Protestant and Jewish clergy in New York began referring women to safe providers. When professional elites shift, protest movements gain allies who can draft laws and testify with authority. Their support also made reform respectable to legislators who would never have listened to radical feminists.
Public confession as a weapon. Speak-outs, manifestos and courtroom protests broke the secrecy on which the old laws depended. When famous women such as Beauvoir and Catherine Deneuve announced that they had broken the law, prosecutors faced a choice between enforcing it against the respectable and admitting that it was unenforceable. The same tactic ran through gay liberation’s contemporary call to “come out” and reappeared decades later in the online testimonies of #MeToo. Making a crime public and collective can make a law collapse, because laws depend on being obeyed quietly.
THE TURNING POINT
Roe v. Wade, 22 January 1973. Roe is the hinge because it converted a slow, uneven state-by-state campaign into a national right in a single day, erasing the patchwork on the map. The case had been filed in Dallas in 1970 by two young lawyers, Sarah Weddington and Linda Coffee, on behalf of Norma McCorvey, a pregnant woman who could not afford to travel to a state where abortion was legal. By ruling that the right to privacy covered a woman’s decision, the Court protected women in the parchment and grey-tan states who had no political route to change their own laws. Its framing of abortion as a private choice, which placed no duty on government to provide care, would shape almost fifty years of conflict, until the Supreme Court overturned the ruling in 2022.
What it changed
A national right and a national opposition. After 1973 abortion was legal in early pregnancy everywhere in the United States, and the movement to reverse it became a national political force. Catholic organisations and, from the late 1970s, evangelical Protestants made opposition to abortion central to a new conservative politics, which joined the campaign against the Equal Rights Amendment. Abortion became one of the most divisive issues in American politics and remained so for half a century.
Rights without access. The Hyde Amendment of 1976 stopped Medicaid, the public health insurance for people on low incomes, from paying for most abortions, so the right remained but poor women increasingly could not afford to use it. Feminists of colour argued that a movement centred on “choice” had ignored the material conditions and the abuses, such as forced sterilisation, that shaped their reproductive lives. The gap arose because the Court defined the right as freedom from state interference, which protected a woman’s choice without paying for it.
Europe follows a similar path. Western Europe followed the same path of confession, trial and reform. France’s Veil law of January 1975, carried through parliament by the health minister Simone Veil against fierce hostility in her own majority, legalised abortion in the first ten weeks, and Italy followed in 1978 after a long campaign of civil disobedience. Ireland and Northern Ireland held out for decades, which shows that public confession could change the law only where religious authority no longer dominated politics.
DISCUSSION QUESTION — Was consciousness-raising a political method, or a form of therapy that distracted women from politics?
Critics at the time, including some socialist feminists and many men on the left, argued that talking about personal experience was self-absorbed and that real politics meant organising workers or opposing the war in Vietnam. The evidence of this chapter suggests otherwise. The groups produced a shared analysis that moved directly into action: the Redstockings speak-out grew out of consciousness-raising, and the same logic of making private experience public drove the Manifesto of the 343 and the Bobigny trial, both of which helped change national laws. The method also reached women who would never have joined a party or a union. Its limits were real, because groups were often homogeneous, mostly white and middle-class, so the patterns they found reflected the experiences of their members and missed those of others. The fairest judgement is that consciousness-raising was a genuinely political method whose findings were only as broad as the women in the room. The transferable lesson is that the way a movement gathers its evidence decides whose problems it will see.
An interesting fact
The Manifesto of the 343 is remembered in France by an insult. A week after it appeared, the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo ran a cover headline asking “Who got the 343 sluts from the abortion manifesto pregnant?”, with a cartoon of the defence minister Michel Debré, a champion of a higher birth rate, replying “It was for France!” The phrase “the 343 sluts” (les 343 salopes) stuck; some signatories later wore it as a badge of defiance, while others rejected it. The signatories included the novelists Marguerite Duras and Françoise Sagan, the actresses Catherine Deneuve and Jeanne Moreau, the filmmaker Agnès Varda and the lawyer Gisèle Halimi, who defended the Bobigny accused the following year, so the insult was aimed at some of the most admired women in France.
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