Visit our website:
http://www.france24.com
Like us on Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/FRANCE24.English
Follow us on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/France24_en
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00 And for more, we can speak to Professor Annabel Lever. Hello to you. Thank you for speaking to
00:04 Paris Direct this Sunday. Does this date get as much recognition as you think it deserves?
00:11 I think it does. I mean, it's very exciting to celebrate 18 years.
00:17 When it becomes 100, it's going to be absolutely fantastic. But yeah, I mean,
00:24 like there seems to be quite a lot in the newspapers on radio, this program. So that seems
00:29 to be a lot of recognition. And I'm just wondering, do you think I mean, I think we could probably
00:38 agree that the women who fought for suffrage back in the day were feminists. Today, now,
00:44 some places that word has taken on perhaps a negative meaning, depending on who you speak,
00:49 do someone say they support equality, but that they're not feminists? Do you think
00:54 that's nonsense? Or do you think there's some legitimacy to how we throw around this word
00:59 feminism today? Well, I'm not sure that even in even historically, all the people who fought for
01:06 women's rights would have called themselves feminists. And some of them may have identified
01:11 in other ways as socialists, as workers of one sort or another, as Quakers or Methodists. So
01:19 I didn't think I sometimes think we get so fixated on names and terms, we fail to look at actually,
01:28 the whole matters is what people are doing and what they're saying, rather than the words they
01:33 use to describe themselves or to describe others. Yeah, on that note, one of the things that someone
01:39 did want to do, one of the first goals of Emmanuel Macron when he came to office was to have gender
01:44 parity. How well represented are women politically in France? Not very well represented, I would have
01:51 thought. I mean, if you look at the main political party, the heads and all the leaders seem to be
01:59 men. This is increasingly true, I think, since, well not increasingly true, but it's very striking
02:07 that you can see its effect within, say, France and Tunisia, where it looks as though part of the
02:13 tensions within the movement concern the treatment of women, the recognition of issues like domestic
02:19 violence, and questions about the future leadership of the party. At the moment, the only party with
02:26 a female leader is the FEN's party, the Réunion nationale, which is a far-right party. And
02:35 it seems like many women, I mean, she's managed to attract quite a lot of women voters. Before her,
02:40 the party was mainly dominated by men. So it's clear that having a woman leader can be mobilising
02:48 many people. I mean, admittedly, you have to choose the right leader, that doesn't work all
02:52 by itself, not any old woman will do. But there is a serious lack, it seems to me, of women in
02:58 French politics and in positions of power and responsibility more generally. It's not just
03:03 politics, there is the economy too, the media, in control of newspapers. There's a shortage.
03:11 All right, Professor, thank you very much for your time. Sorry,
03:14 we have to leave it there. Professor Annabel Lever, thank you.