Society

Alice Schwarzer has been the face of feminism in Germany for decades. In 2011 she brought out her autobiography to a surprisingly benevolent reception by critics. Goethe.de interviewed her.

Ms. Schwarzer, in 1949 Simone de Beauvoir noted that the struggle had been won. Twenty years later, you thought women had still achieved almost nothing. Surely that has changed since the 1970s. Do you look upon the struggle of the women’s movement as won or lost today? There’s a difference of course between feminism, the women’s movement, and the de facto social development, that is, the active participation of women in working life, in public life and in politics. What role does feminism play today?

The women’s movement of the 1970s is undoubtedly the most momentous social movement of the second half of the twentieth century. In the past forty years we feminists have stirred up a real cultural revolution! Today the world is open to women, at least theoretically. Women have access to all sectors of society, and the first women are penetrating male-dominated domains; Germany even has a woman chancellor. And more and more fathers know or at least suspect that it’s no longer enough to take their son to the football field on Sunday or to buy their daughter an ice-cream once in a while. We women have made progress by leaps and bounds.

At the same time, this progress isn’t guaranteed; it has to be defended anew every day. As, for example, the right to abortion. There are still some of the old problems, plus new ones. Women have conquered the professional world, but men still don’t shoulder their half of the housework. And above all there still exists the problem of familial and sexual violence. This humiliates both children and women and makes their lives unsafe. Today such sexual violence is openly played down or even propagated – by the approving of prostitution and the ubiquity of pornography. By pornography I mean the linking of sexual desire with the lust for humiliation and violence. That destroys not only women and children; it also destroys men’s desire, in short, their pleasure. So there still remains much to do for feminists and their sympathizers.

“My life story is both typical and untypical”

What role has feminism played, particularly in your life?

I’ve just published the first part of my memoirs. My “CV”. My life story is both typical and untypical. Typical is that I’m a girl of the post-war period, when women were the really strong figures and men were insecure – but therefore asserted their superiority all the more resolutely. Untypical is that I grew up with very young grandparents. They were not only offensively anti-Nazi, but there was also a certain role reversal: my grandfather was my social mother, was responsible for taking care of me and feeding me, while my grandmother was the one who set the political tone.

When I first went out into the world, I didn’t understand why men didn’t take care of children and women shouldn’t be able to think. But I didn’t have words to describe my feeling of discontent. They were first given me by the women’s movement. In my case this meant the reading of de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex and Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. And then at zero hour in 1970 I was one of the pioneers of the women’s movement in Paris, where I was working as a young correspondent. The experience of the anarchic-creative awakening of the Mouvement de libération des femmes has shaped my life to this day.

In Germany in 1971, I instigated the protest against the ban on abortion, published my first books and, in 1977, founded EMMA. I’m still the publisher and editor-in-chief of the independent feminist magazine. Feminism is also a key part of my life. At the same time, as a comprehensively political-minded person, I find it depressing always to be reduced to the most simple-minded versions of feminism (in the style of “Feminists have something against men”). Feminists are simply women who have cast a gender-conscious glance at the world, the whole world. And who fight against the abuse of power.

Things have changed – and therefore also the forms of struggle

How do women of today’s generation of students respond to you? With agreement and understanding? How do you, for your part, see the situation of twenty year-olds today.

EMMA has the youngest readers of all German women magazines; one in three is under thirty. And if you go to the website (www.emma.de), you’d think EMMA is a young people’s magazine. What I mean is that there are both young women who are aware and those who are unaware and opportunistic – just as in my generation. Age isn’t a defining criterion. But things have changed and therefore also the forms of struggle. A good example of this is the “Femen”, a women’s group from the Ukraine, who are the title story of the current issue of EMMA. They protest against the buying and selling of women and prostitution – and do so with bare breasts and faces full of pride. That’s the new irony. I find it interesting.

A speculative question: Will the emancipation process continue? Will it lead to a feminization of society? What would this look like?

I don’t think much of “feminizing” society. I’d prefer to see a humanizing of society. Both traditional “masculinity” and traditional “femininity” have to be put into question. Both have deformed people. But I’m afraid that, before such a humanizing can take place, there will be an attempt to reconstruct “masculinity” – a renaissance of machismo and violence. On the international scale, I see the Islamists. We have to find constructive responses to this.