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.
Chapter 3 is included with every paid plan. WW2 is free in full, and chapter 1 of every atlas is free. A free account opens 3 more chapters a day. Starter, at $9 a month, opens all 21 with no daily limit — see the plans.
Free printable Feminism and the Tunisian Revolution study guide, sent by email ↓
The map above is the world of Women’s rights, January 1972 — Abortion law before Roe v. Wade.
Every state on the map that year: The world in 1970 · Europe in 1970.
Part of IB History: Second-wave feminism and Tunisia →
SHORT EXPLANATION
A woman struggling with housework, marriage, sex or pregnancy might suppose that her difficulty belonged to her alone. Second-wave feminists in the 1960s and 1970s asked what would happen if women compared those difficulties. If the same patterns appeared in many lives, they might tell us something about power in families, workplaces and law. This was the claim behind “the personal is political,” a movement for equality beyond the vote.
In consciousness-raising groups, often about ten women met weekly to tell their stories. Like a support group, the circle made room for personal experience; its further purpose was to identify a shared cause that political action could change. The method spread through the United States, Britain and France between 1968 and 1972, and helped inspire a campaign to repeal criminal abortion laws.
The campaign brought a secret into public view. Women spoke about their illegal abortions in New York in 1969, and 343 French women signed a manifesto admitting to theirs in 1971. On the map of January 1972, four blue American states permitted abortion on request; thirteen grey-tan states allowed it on limited grounds, including rape or a threat to health; the parchment states banned it in almost all circumstances.
The arrows to New York and London show one consequence: a woman who could pay for travel could seek care unavailable closer to home. Others had no such option. The inequality strengthened the case for national change. In 1973 the Supreme Court's decision in Roe v. Wade swept away the American patchwork, and France legalized abortion in 1975. Public testimony had helped turn a concealed experience into a challenge to the law.
The full story
In 1968 Kathie Sarachild of New York Radical Women described a way for women to investigate their own lives. A small group would take one question at a time—about mothers, jobs or first sexual experiences—and compare the answers. One woman's account might sound like a private complaint. Several accounts together could reveal a pattern that none had been able to see alone.
Carol Hanisch defended this discussion as political action in a 1969 paper her editors titled “The Personal Is Political”. Women's unhappiness, she argued, was connected to power men held in marriage, work and law. By the early 1970s tens of thousands of women had joined groups. Their concerns also appeared in collective demands: in February 1970, between 500 and 600 women gathered at Ruskin College, Oxford, for Britain's first national women's liberation conference. They called for equal pay and education, 24-hour nurseries, and free contraception and abortion on demand.
The abortion laws gave the argument a particularly urgent application. Historians estimate that hundreds of thousands of illegal abortions took place each year in the United States before 1970. Unsafe procedures could cause infection, or septic abortion, a leading cause of maternal death. Women who could pay a sympathetic doctor had an advantage; poor women and women of color were especially exposed to danger when they could not.
In New York, a state hearing on reform invited fourteen men and a nun as expert witnesses. The women who had undergone abortions could speak for themselves, and in March 1969 the radical feminist group Redstockings gave them a public forum at a speak-out. In Chicago, women also organized care: the clandestine service known as “Jane” performed an estimated 11,000 abortions between 1969 and 1973.
New York's legislature legalized abortion on request in April 1970, after one legislator changed his vote. The law had no residency requirement, so its effect reached beyond the state. Just over 100,000 women traveled there from other states in 1972 alone. The blue states show where laws had changed; the arrows show a journey available to those who could afford it. A legal change in one place made the inequality between places more visible.
Britain offered another destination. Its Abortion Act of 1967 allowed abortion on broad health grounds with two doctors' agreement, and clinics drew women from France and Ireland, where abortion remained banned. French women challenged their own law publicly. On 5 April 1971 Le Nouvel Observateur printed the Manifesto of the 343, in which Simone de Beauvoir and 342 other women declared that they had broken it and dared the state to prosecute them. In 1972 lawyer Gisèle Halimi used the Bobigny trial of a teenager, Marie-Claire Chevalier, to indict the law itself; Chevalier was acquitted.
On 22 January 1973 the US Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade by 7 votes to 2. The Court held that the constitutional right to privacy, which shields certain personal decisions from government, covered abortion in early pregnancy. Its ruling bound every state. France followed in January 1975 with the Veil law, named for health minister Simone Veil, legalizing abortion in the first ten weeks. Within six years, women had carried experiences once hidden from public discussion into campaigns that helped change law on two continents.
FULL EXPLANATION
Counting what was hidden
The number of illegal abortions is hard to establish precisely because the practice was criminal. Estimates for the United States in the 1950s and 1960s run from about 200,000 to well over a million a year. Lower estimates extrapolate from hospital admissions; higher ones draw on surveys and campaigners. Both sides have used the figures as weapons. The uneven burden, however, can be studied through records other than a total count. In When Abortion Was a Crime (1997), Leslie Reagan uses court records, coroners' reports and hospital files to show who suffered. An early-1960s New York City study attributed roughly one in four pregnancy-related deaths among white women to abortion, compared with about half among Black and Puerto Rican women. Deaths fell sharply after legalization, a change most historians attribute to safer procedures as well as antibiotics. Different kinds of evidence point to a danger distributed by money, which made repeal a question of equality as well as choice.
Did Roe end the debate or start a new one?
For supporters, Roe completed the campaign visible in the map's changing state laws. Ruth Bader Ginsburg and other critics later offered a different assessment: public opinion was shifting and legislatures were responding, but the Court moved too far too fast, removing the issue from them and giving opponents a powerful grievance. Linda Greenhouse and Reva Siegel challenge this “backlash” thesis. They point to organized opposition led by the Catholic Church that was already growing before 1973, especially after New York's repeal. Another dispute concerned what the right could secure. The Court's privacy and choice framework protected women from state bans without requiring government to pay for care. In 1976 the Hyde Amendment barred Medicaid, the government health insurance program for people on low incomes, from paying for abortions. Poor women retained a legal right while losing practical access. Black feminists and later “reproductive justice” activists argued that choice needed money, clinics and freedom from coerced sterilization. The decision secured a national right quickly, while conflict continued over funding, access and elections.
Europe: travel, civil disobedience and the Veil law
Britain's 1967 Abortion Act made it an early destination for women living under stricter laws. Liberal MP David Steel steered the act through Parliament 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 turned travel into organized defiance. In 1973 the Movement for the Freedom of Abortion and Contraception (MLAC) arranged coaches to London and Amsterdam, and openly performed abortions in France using a simple suction method. Prosecuting the practice would have meant bringing cases against doctors and activists by the hundred. Historians such as Bibia Pavard argue that this mass disobedience made the laws unenforceable, including the 1920 law banning even advertisements for contraception. The government of Valéry Giscard d’Estaing chose to legislate. Simone Veil, a magistrate and Auschwitz survivor, presented the bill in November 1974. Most deputies in her governing majority opposed it, but the left and about a third of the majority supplied the votes for passage, 284 to 189. Protest had helped create the conditions in which the government acted.
Key places on the map
On this day
Why it happened
A method that turned experience into evidence. Consciousness-raising gave women a way to compare housework, sexual coercion and other experiences that each might have taken as a personal problem. Repeated patterns invited a further question: what institutions and laws sustained them? The answer could turn private sorrow into a political grievance. Groups were inexpensive, needed no leaders and could be copied anywhere, allowing the method to spread faster than an organization could recruit. Discovering common experiences also gave women confidence to speak for others, a precondition for public protest.
An injustice that fell hardest on the poor. Money affected both the choices available under the old law and the dangers women faced. A wealthier woman might travel abroad, pay a sympathetic doctor or persuade a hospital committee to approve a “therapeutic” abortion. Most poor women lacked those options. Wards treating septic abortion filled with poor women, and Black and Puerto Rican women bore a disproportionate share of maternal deaths. The inequality made repeal a question of fairness as well as abortion, drawing support beyond the women's movement.
Doctors, lawyers and clergy changed sides. Some professionals who had encountered the consequences of criminal abortion became allies of reform. From the early 1960s the American Law Institute, an influential body of lawyers, proposed permitting abortion on limited medical grounds; many doctors supported reform after seeing the results of illegal procedures. In 1967 Protestant and Jewish clergy in New York began referring women to safe providers. These allies could draft legislation and testify with professional authority, giving reform a hearing among legislators unlikely to listen to radical feminists.
Public confession as a weapon. Speak-outs, manifestos and courtroom protests made concealed acts visible and collective. When respected figures including Beauvoir and Catherine Deneuve admitted breaking the law, prosecutors faced the prospect of enforcing it against them or acknowledging its unenforceability. Gay liberation's contemporary call to “come out” used a related tactic; decades later, #MeToo testimonies appeared online. Public disclosure could weaken a law whose operation depended on people keeping quiet.
THE TURNING POINT
Roe v. Wade, 22 January 1973. Norma McCorvey could not afford to travel to a state where abortion was legal. In 1970 two young lawyers, Sarah Weddington and Linda Coffee, filed a case on her behalf in Dallas. The Supreme Court's decision on 22 January 1973 made Roe a turning point: instead of waiting for separate state campaigns, women in the parchment and grey-tan states gained protection under a national right. The Court grounded that protection in privacy, without requiring government to provide care. That distinction shaped almost fifty years of conflict, until the Court overturned the ruling in 2022.
What it changed
A national right and a national opposition. The national right recognized in 1973 was accompanied by a national campaign to reverse it. Catholic organizations and, from the late 1970s, evangelical Protestants made abortion opposition central to a new conservative politics, alongside resistance to the Equal Rights Amendment. The issue remained among the most divisive in American politics for half a century.
Rights without access. The Court protected a woman's decision from state interference; it did not require the state to finance care. The Hyde Amendment of 1976 stopped Medicaid, public health insurance for people on low incomes, from paying for most abortions. Poor women retained the right but increasingly could not afford to use it. Feminists of color argued that a movement centered on “choice” had neglected the material conditions and abuses, including forced sterilization, that shaped their reproductive lives.
Europe follows a similar path. France's health minister Simone Veil carried the January 1975 law through parliament despite fierce hostility in her own majority; it legalized abortion in the first ten weeks. Italy followed in 1978 after a long campaign of civil disobedience. Confession, trial and reform thus shaped change in Western Europe, although Ireland and Northern Ireland held out for decades. Public confession could change 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?
Some socialist feminists and many men on the left regarded talk about personal experience as self-absorbed. For them, real politics meant organizing workers or opposing the Vietnam War. Yet the groups did more than offer consolation. They developed an account of shared power that could guide action: the Redstockings speak-out grew from consciousness-raising, and the move from private experience to public claim also drove the Manifesto of the 343 and the Bobigny trial, both of which helped change national laws. The method reached women who might never have joined a party or union. Its evidence had limits, however. Groups were often homogeneous, mostly white and middle-class, and could miss experiences absent from the room. Consciousness-raising was a political method; what it revealed depended on whose lives were included.
An interesting fact
The Manifesto of the 343 acquired an enduring name from an insult. A week after it appeared, the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo asked on its cover: “Who got the 343 sluts from the abortion manifesto pregnant?” A cartoon showed defense 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; others rejected it. The women targeted included admired French figures: novelists Marguerite Duras and Françoise Sagan, actresses Catherine Deneuve and Jeanne Moreau, filmmaker Agnès Varda and lawyer Gisèle Halimi, who defended the Bobigny accused the following year.
Related
THE FREE PRINTABLE STUDY GUIDE
Get the printable study guide for Protest and Change free. I’ll send you a few short letters, then one when a new atlas opens. That’s all. — Paul
NO TRACKING · YOUR ADDRESS IS USED FOR THE DISPATCH AND NOTHING ELSE · UNSUBSCRIBE ANYTIME