French Family Variations
VALLS-RUSSELL, JANICE
REFLECTING REALITY French Family Variations By Janice Valls-Russell Paris "We HATE FAMILIES," was a popular slogan of the May 1968 student uprising in Paris. Thirty years on,...
...A number of French psychologists agree with Jacques Lacan, France's most influential postwar psychoanalyst, that it is essential for a child to have one parent of each gender to build his or her own autonomy...
...Sylviane Agacinski, the feminist philosophy teacher who is married to Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, disagrees...
...That does not mean single women are staggeringly more prolific than married ones...
...Dismayed by the prospect of homosexual couples legally setting up families, the National Union of Family Associations, whose members cut across social, political and religious lines and tend to represent grassroots opinion, has gone so far as to question the right of single parents to adopt...
...The French may revel at White House antics, but they do not like the media—or anyone else—to look too closely into the private lives of public figures...
...Jospin's think tank advocates more and cheaper day care, and reducing to a few months the three-year leave that women can now take—besides their three-month maternity leave—after the birth of a second child...
...Not all Socialists, however, favor parity...
...In Italy, where mothers are discouraged from working, the birth rate is 9.6 per thousand...
...A study carried out by the Council for Economic Analysis, a think tank that advises Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, suggests that women working generates economic activity...
...In one area of France, a single, adoptive mother was ostracized by other adoptive families after she admitted to being a lesbian...
...Janice Valls-Russell writes about French and Spanish affairs for the NL...
...Unmarried heterosexual couples already enjoy the last right and are entitled to allowances for their children...
...Single men and women, its leaders contend, can make dedicated parents...
...Most women appear to be more interested in legislation that would help them juggle their family and professional lives than in a law enacted in March by the Senate and the National Assembly...
...Many reckon it will take more than a law to eradicate male chauvinism in politics: Two women I know were invited to join their village's Municipal Council— only to find themselves in charge of making curtains for the Mayor's parlor and coffee for the male Councilors...
...If Jospin acts on this proposal, fathers would similarly be entitled to the shortened leave...
...It would be cruel to deprive a child whose "official" parent has died of the other "parent...
...Actually, many unskilled, lowincome women are unable to return to their jobs and have difficulty finding new ones...
...The issue has been made all the more topical by the fact that the Jospin government is backing another legal reform, currently before the Senate, which homosexuals have been urging for a number of years...
...All this has resulted in numerous variations on the traditional family...
...Thirty years on, French families are not what they used to be and the Socialist-Green-Communist majority in Parliament is attempting to push through legislation that reflects contemporary realities...
...rather, they should be subject to the same social and psychological criteria applying to all would-be adoptive parents...
...They stopped short of doing so because they realized that this would badly damage their image...
...As a small-town mother of two recently told me: "It's all very well to see homosexuals on television, but imagine having them livingnextdoor, bringing up a child...
...But any rights granted to homosexuals should not be deemed automatic, it argues...
...Off icially the Civil Joint Responsibility Pact (PACS), it has been put forward as a reform intended to grant unmarried couples some of the rights associated with marriage...
...Resorting to surrogate mothers is banned in France, but artificial procreation is authorized for married and unmarried heterosexual couples...
...It received the backing of neo-Gaullist President Jacques Chirac, in spite of his followers' criticism—and his wife's...
...This view tends to be shared by French public opinion...
...Parents whose relationships have failed increasingly try to keep their separations civil and share in the upbringing of their children...
...The most prominent critics among them have been Robert Badinter—who was Interior Minister under François Mitterrand and has been President of the Constitutional Court—and his wife, Elizabeth—a professor of philosophy specializing in gender relations...
...Overall, 85 per cent of the children whose parents have split up go on seeing their father regularly (a majority live with their mother...
...According to a recent opinion poll, one lesbian in 10 is reckoned to be a parent, against 7 per cent of homosexual men (some of whom have kids they bring up as a result of a marriage...
...The grandparents' role has changed too...
...In 1998, 14 per cent of France's 29.2 million couples were unmarried, and 38 per cent of the country's children were born out of wedlock...
...Two-thirds are women, and half live in Paris...
...in addition, parents of minors, whatever the age of their children, would be allowed to take a second such leave at some other time...
...The conservative daily Figaro quoted Bernadette Chirac as saying she saw no need for this law...
...The general instability in relationships has prompted women, who make up 46 per cent of the workforce, to hang on to their jobs after they marry and have children...
...Sooner or later, some sociologists argue, legislators will have to recognize these de facto situations...
...Its position is that a child's right to have a loving home should always be considered first...
...An anti-PAC S demonstration on January 31 drew about 100,000 people in Paris...
...Extended families may include the separated parents, their new partners, and the offspring of both couples...
...But two traditional aspects of family life have survived: a sense of solidarity, even if it is different from what it used to be...
...and an attachment to children...
...Thirty-eight per cent of them divorce (two-thirds have children under 18), often to set up house with someone else...
...They further argue that it opens the door to calls from ethnic and other minorities for positive discrimination, a situation the Badinters see as going against the French spirit of "universal equality...
...One militant homosexual group complained about homophobia and threatened to "out" a conservative deputy who took part in the anti-PACS march...
...The truth is that homosexual couples would have difficulties adopting under any circumstances...
...Women are also more likely to have children if they can reconcile a family and a professional life than if they have to choose between the two...
...The Association of Adoptive Families takes quite the opposite stand...
...They provide ahaven as well for holidays, weekends and even evenings, collecting kids after school and keeping them until parents come home from work...
...About 70 per cent of the 5,000 or so children adopted by French families each year (the highest proportion in the world after the United States) come from countries in Asia, Latin America and Africa that are unlikely to entrust children to single-sex parents...
...It is difficult to know how many families with "single-sex parents" there are in France: The Association of Gay and Lesbian Parents and Would-be Parents has 800 members (there were barely 70 two years ago...
...The PACS says nothing about children and Justice Minister Elisabeth Guigou, who defends the project, has been at pains to insist that there is no question of allowing homosexuals to adopt...
...Basically, the PACS would allow partners to inherit each others' property and file their income tax jointly (à la married couples...
...Even part of the Center-Right, which opposes provisions of the PACS as "a threat to marriage," acknowledges the need to find a way to "improve the rights of unmarried couples, be they heterosexual or homosexual...
...Legal loopholes do exist, though...
...Those with decent pensions help their children financially, often setting money aside for grandchildren's studies...
...In an interview in Le Monde, she argued that men and women, while different, are complementary...
...Adoption is authorized for married couples and single people...
...Parents simply tend to marry after the birth of their first or second child...
...In spite of all the public debate, family life is very much a private matter here...
...It would also make them responsible for each others' debts, and would enable the one who worked (assuming only one did) to provide health coverage for both...
...That "favors the equal access of men and women to electoral mandates and elected responsibilities" (women makeup barely 10 per cent of Deputies and even fewer Senators...
...They oppose the principle of positive discrimination on the grounds that it is unnecessary and humiliating for women...
...These days couples are marrying in their 30s and splitting up much more frequently than they used to...
...Sometimes single men or women who have never been married bring up one or more children...
...Some crude slogans recalled the virulence that greeted the legalization of contraception and abortion in the mid1970s...
...The "parity" bill was proposed by the Socialists, Greens and Communists...
...In France and Denmark where, respectively, 61.3 per cent and 74.2 per cent of women work, the birth rates are 12.7 and 12.5 per thousand...
...Eight per cent of those under the age of three live with only one parent...
Vol. 82 • April 1999 • No. 4
