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5 - Changing One’s Life to Change the World? The Politicisation of the Private Sphere

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 December 2020

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Summary

The effects of the events of May ‘68 can also be found in the private sphere, which was subject to its share of breakdowns and upheavals in the wake of activism. Indeed, the sociology of the biographical consequences of activism cannot ignore the personal spaces in which political dispositions and preferences will be applied. From the beginning of the 1970s, many interviewees thus sought to continue their activism by attacking the logics of social reproduction within the family and within the school system. For them, participation in May ‘68 produced a critical redefinition of social relations of sex, generation, and the roles of parents and children (Chamboderon and Prévot, 1973, p. 317-318). This transfer of protest aspirations into the private sphere did not uniformly affect all the interviewees – it primarily concerns the sub-group clustered around non-institutionalised forms of activism in the 1970s (situated on the right of the factorial plane presented in Chapter 3). This chapter therefore focuses on the biographical impact of May ‘68 on the youngest members of the corpus, who are mostly women, and who were mostly first-time activists, high school and young university students in 1968, and who generally came from more privileged backgrounds. It focuses on those for whom May ‘68 played a role in political socialisation by awareness raising, altering their political and professional trajectories to different extents, but particularly affecting their private trajectories. This is the pole at which individuals attempted to change their own lives in order to maintain the opening of possibilities they experienced during May ‘68, including non-linear careers, social marginalisation, or communitarian utopias. This critical renewal of everyday life (Mauger, 1999, p. 234) therefore participates in the politicisation of causes that had previously remained outside the political sphere, such as the family, the place of women in society, the environment, or education.

Politicising the private sphere

The core of the many repercussions of activism during May ‘68 on the familial and private spheres lie in challenges to the family institution, conjugal relations, established norms relating to gender and sexuality, and also child-rearing practices.

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May '68
Shaping Political Generations
, pp. 177 - 210
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
Print publication year: 2018

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