Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Text Boxes, Figures and Tables
- Acknowledgements
- List of Acronyms and Political Organisations
- Introduction
- 1 The Roots of Participation in May ’68
- 2 Shaping the Event: Socialisation Effects and Registers of Participation
- 3 The Long-Term Consequences of May ’68
- 4 Working to Avoid Social Reproduction
- 5 Changing One’s Life to Change the World? The Politicisation of the Private Sphere
- 6 Micro-units of Generation ’68
- 7 A Ricochet Effect on the Next Generation?
- Conclusion: The Event, a Frame for Political Resocialisation
- Appendix 1 List of Interviews Conducted with the Ex-’68ers Cited
- Appendix 2 List of Interviews Conducted with the “Children of Ex-’68ers” Cited
- Appendix 3 Micro-units of Generation ’68
- Bibliography
- Index
- Protest and Social Movements
5 - Changing One’s Life to Change the World? The Politicisation of the Private Sphere
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 December 2020
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Text Boxes, Figures and Tables
- Acknowledgements
- List of Acronyms and Political Organisations
- Introduction
- 1 The Roots of Participation in May ’68
- 2 Shaping the Event: Socialisation Effects and Registers of Participation
- 3 The Long-Term Consequences of May ’68
- 4 Working to Avoid Social Reproduction
- 5 Changing One’s Life to Change the World? The Politicisation of the Private Sphere
- 6 Micro-units of Generation ’68
- 7 A Ricochet Effect on the Next Generation?
- Conclusion: The Event, a Frame for Political Resocialisation
- Appendix 1 List of Interviews Conducted with the Ex-’68ers Cited
- Appendix 2 List of Interviews Conducted with the “Children of Ex-’68ers” Cited
- Appendix 3 Micro-units of Generation ’68
- Bibliography
- Index
- Protest and Social Movements
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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- Information
- May '68Shaping Political Generations, pp. 177 - 210Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2018