By Helen Bishop
After graduating in 1968, with a degree in French and German from St Andrews University in Scotland, I did a TEFL training course (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) and then taught a year in Italy, a year in London, then 6 years in Paris, 1970 to 76. In Paris I became a feminist. It started with an American friend at work, Marilyn, who kept saying ‘Why don’t you come to the women’s liberation meetings?’, to which I always said ‘Ha, ha! bra burners!’ Then an unreliable boyfriend lit the spark. He invited me to come over for the night, he would be home at 11pm from his political meeting. I waited on the stairs outside his flat. Past midnight and he still wasn’t there. It was the final straw. I was angry. I knew that his old Citroen 2cv was parked outside; it had no locks, and the engine was started by linking two wires under the steering wheel with a pair of pliers. I went downstairs and sat in the car, fuming. The pliers were there, and I wanted to drive it away and park it somewhere so he would never find it, but I had never driven in Paris so that was too scary. Then it dawned on me that this car had tyres. I put my pen in the valves, left it with 4 flats and went home jubilant. At work next morning people, both French and English, were divided, most were shocked, ‘How will he get to work in the morning?’ A few women thought it was great. I jokingly said to Marilyn ‘I am ready!’ ‘Good’ she said, ‘because by chance, the meeting is tonight, so come home with me for supper and we will go together.’
The meeting, at the American Library in Paris, had already started. It was the regular monthly meeting of the Paris Chapter of the American National Organisation of Women (NOW). The huge hall was filled with women, probably over a hundred. As well as Americans, there were women from all the Anglophone countries, UK, Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand etc, plus refugees from Pinochet’s Chile (some of whom I later found out had been tortured because they were part of left-wing organisations, unions, or were teachers) and from Brazil and several other countries, who wanted to join the ‘le groupe anglophone’ (the English-speaking group) mainly because of language. The English group was not completely separate, there sometimes were joint meetings with groups from the French MLF (Mouvement de Liberation des Femmes) and support for the big campaigns on abortion, rape, etc.
Women were sitting in circles on the floor, in groups of ten, discussing the Sexuality Survey from the latest issue of Ms magazine, the American feminist monthly magazine started by Gloria Steinem. I was assigned to a group and immediately felt out of my depth. Despite having been sexually active during and since university, I had never used the words clitoris, masturbation, orgasm, in fact I hadn’t talked about sex, just had it! An American woman, Jackie Lapidus, was going round the groups with a clipboard, collecting addresses and phone numbers for the contact list (no internet then!) ‘Oh, good’ she said to me, ‘you live near me. Would you like to be in a consciousness-raising group?’ ‘What’s that?’ I asked. She explained and I said yes, thinking it sounded interesting and would be a good way to meet new friends.
The following Tuesday eight of us sat on the floor in her tiny flat, introducing ourselves. Seven heterosexual women and one lesbian (this ratio changed over the years!), from Australia, USA, UK. We continued to meet every second Tuesday night for 3 years (1973-76). We discussed things that many of us had never discussed or even thought about before: the power relations between men and women; how men dominated everything that governed our lives (government, police, universities, the law etc); women and men in different jobs and unequal pay; why we did things to our bodies (shaving, deodorant, eyebrow plucking etc); our feelings about sex; the ways we behaved to suit men; the things it was taboo to talk about in mixed company, like menstruation; why walking at night was always frighteningl; abortion and rape, and the different laws in different countries; why there were more men than women in some jobs; lesbianism and many other topics. Through this process of sharing personal experience and relating it to society and the world, we came to analyse power relationships and began to understand that ‘the personal is political’. Most of our CR group were not very politicised to begin with, but Jackie came from a family of lawyers and left leaning educators, and she prodded us to look at things from a wide political perspective.
So, in my last three years in Paris, I was immersed in feminist thinking. In those years I taught English in a bank. One class was a group of secretaries, all female, who wanted to hear all about feminism while practising their English, and this was so much nicer than my classes teaching business English to the mostly male execs.
On my visits to London to see my family I would go to Compendium, the wonderful independent bookshop near Camden Lock, which had a table always full of the latest women’s liberation books (years later I found out that the helpful woman there who suggested books, was Lynn Alderson who went on to be one of the three founders of Sisterwrite bookshop in Upper Street Islington in 1979). I took books back to Paris to share with the group: from UK Juliet Mitchell, Sheila Rowbotham, Germaine Greer, from USA Valerie Solanas, Shulamith Firestone, Gloria Steinem, Kate Millett, Susan Brownmiller, and many others. As there was no internet, the only way to discover these books, unless they were reviewed, was to frequent the alternative bookshops, which were a valuable community resource and often had noticeboards advertising events and meetings: Compendium, Bookmarks, New Beacon books in Finsbury Park, and Foyles in Tottenham Court Road were well stocked. (Sisterwrite and Gay’s the Word bookshops didn’t start until late 70s.). I took out postal subscriptions to Spare Rib and Ms.
The American National Organisation of Women (NOW) was set up by US feminists in 1966, with Betty Friedan its first president. As a NOW chapter, our multinational group paid a subscription to NOW, but the American HQ would not give overseas chapters any funding. So, the Paris group decided to stop funding NOW, and changed our name to POW, Paris Organisation of Women. The POW newsletter, which Jackie Lapidus started, kept going for several years; before she left Paris she gave a complete set to a French feminist archive. (Writing this in 2025, sadly neither of us have managed to locate any copies, which would have helped with this article.)
POW, ‘Le groupe anglophone’, became my social circle. As well as the CR groups, it met in a small women’s centre in Les Halles, shared with various French women’s groups, all part of the MLF (Mouvement de Liberation des Femmes*). We printed our newsletters on the centre’s roneo machine, and once when it broke down, three of us, an Australian, an American and me, vowed not to be defeated, rolled our sleeves up, got covered in black ink, and despite our ignorance managed to take it apart, puzzle it out, swore a lot and laughed a lot, and got it working again.
Kate Millett visited Paris, gave an inspiring talk in a Town Hall, and there was a big party for her, we all danced. Then someone made an announcement requesting that men leave, to allow women to enjoy dancing together. This split the women present, some of whom had come with their male partners. A French friend of mine, a strong feminist, was with her sparky and supportive male partner who followed the instruction and left, then came back dressed up as a waiter, with a tray of drinks for us!
The POW group also kicked off the Three Marias campaign. Three Portuguese women had written a book about injustice and violence against women, New Portuguese Letters, which was loosely based on an 18th century sexually explicit Portuguese novel. The women’s book was deemed to be pornographic, so they were imprisoned and facing a lawsuit (Portugal at that time, under President Salazar, was extremely repressive). The book was found by a Brazilian theatre director in our group, Gilda Grillo, when she went to feed a French writer’s cat. She saw the Portuguese book on the writer’s desk with the women’s letter, asking for support, and sat down to read it, realised its importance, and brought it to our group. An American in our group, Faith Gillespie, took the book to a big American feminist conference in Boston, read some extracts and made an appeal for international action. Meanwhile our group in Paris, led by the Brazilians, were trying to ‘publicise’ the Three Marias case in Portugal, by sending hundreds of handwritten letters to random women taken from the Lisbon telephone directory which someone had a copy of. (Yes, telephone directories included addresses then!). In the end, fortunately, the trial was postponed because it was known that a change of regime was coming in Portugal, and when the socialist Mario Suarez became Portuguese leader, the case was dropped.
I left Paris in 1976 and with my savings from teaching at the bank, I went to America for a year to explore American feminism. But that’s another story.
* For those interested in more about the French women’s movement at this time, I recommend this website The History of Feminist Movements in France – Françoise Picq