Women Communist Activists in the Union des femmes françaises – Union of French Women – (1945-1979): The Contradictions of a Forced Autonomy

At the end of the Second World War, the French Communist Party (PCF) created the Union of French Women (UFF), a women-only movement wishing to organize non-Communist women who are not part of the professional world. Suffrage becomes universal and a hard competition is on to conquer the new female electorate. In this context, the PCF is aiming at building a hegemony within society and in the electoral field. The article analyses the difficulties and contradictions that communist activists active in the UFF faced in finding their place in this new organization that they helped to build and frame, from its foundation until the late 1970s. From 1945 to 1960, the identity of the UFF was gradually created, initiated by the PCF but at a distance from what the habits of communist women activists were. During the 1960s, the organization was destabilized by the ongoing major social changes, which led to a greater distance between communist activists and others within the framework of an identity which for the most part stayed the same. From 1968 to the end of the 1970s, the awareness of the growing difficulties of the UFF led the national leaders to try to save an increasingly out-of-date organization, in a paradoxical relationship to the PCF.