The Sexes: La Condition F

• Share

Long before there was a Mouvement de Liberation des Femmes in France, Journalist Franchise Giroud, editor of the left-leaning weekly, L 'Express, had been championing—as well as living —the life-style of an emancipated woman. A divorcee, Giroud, 57, has repeatedly spoken out for women's rights.

Now she will have a chance to do a good deal more. Last week President Valery Giscard d'Estaing appointed her to a new Cabinet post as State Secretary for la Condition Feminine. The decree creating her office defined the job as "overseeing the integration of women into contemporary French society."

The post is unprecedented. As Columnist Harriet Van Home wrote about the appointment: "Betty Friedan can eat her heart out, but one can't see either Richard Nixon or Gerald Ford setting up a department dealing with the feminine condition." In fact, Giscard at first tried to downgrade the Cabinet post to the head of a women's affairs bureau, but yielded when Giroud refused to accept such a position.

Skeptical French newspapers asked how Giroud, who supported Giscard's opponent, Socialist Party Leader Francois Mitterrand, could be more than a "liberal window dressing of a conservative policy." Le Monde, however, approvingly noted that "if anyone knows the uncertainties of the position of French women, and struggled to overcome them, it is Francoise Giroud."

At 16, Giroud became a film script girl, at 21 France's first female assistant director. During the Occupation she was active in the Resistance and after the war helped to found the popular women's weekly Elle and later L 'Express, for which she will continue to write. Slim and chic, Giroud often wears slacks to the office, buys clothes from St. Laurent. She lives alone in a modern French skyscraper near Montparnasse and frequently sees her grandsons and her daughter, Caroline, a doctor.

Giroud's mission is monumental if taken literally. Despite recent gains, the prevailing attitude toward women in France is aptly expressed by last year's popular song, Hands in the Flour: "I love my wife in the living room, I love my wife in the bedroom, but I love her best in the kitchen, with her hands in the flour." Idealized as wives and mothers, French women were almost the last in Europe to leave the home and go to work. Though 40% of the labor force is now made up of women, their total income is only one-quarter that of French men. Most still work in traditionally female occupations like teaching and nursing or in unskilled factory, office and shopkeeping positions.

Day Care. Giroud hopes to upgrade the status of women by encouraging professional schools to open their doors to them. She has suggested appointing delegates to travel around the country and inspect the way women are treated on the job. Though equal pay is mandated under a 1972 law, many employers classify jobs in such a way that they pay a woman less than a man for doing essentially the same work.