Do all daughters want to airbrush their mothers out of history or even reject them? Simone de Beauvoir herself, as the above quotation suggests, was seen by some in 1970 as part of a past age. (She was 62.) On the pattern of most revolutionary movements, whether in politics or arts, there is an element of rejecting the old. But revolutions, viewed historically, do not usually come out of a clear blue sky. The essays in this book were originally inspired by a particular event of 1975, the publication of Les Femmes s’entetent, a collection of writings marked by the effervescence of the women's movement of the early 1970s and intended to unsettle and disturb. In this chapter I aim to look at the relation between the ‘new’ of Les Femmes s’entetent and the ‘old’ that came immediately before it: the so-called ‘trough’ between the two waves of French feminism, lasting from the end of the Second World War to the events of May 1968. It will draw on the patient historical work that has been done since the 1990s to re-evaluate the post-war precedents for ‘women's liberation year zero’, while also considering the role of feminist intellectuals and their writings, including those of Beauvoir, and finally examining the notion of ‘the 1968 generation’ as it related to the women's movement.

Unlike other ‘second wave’ feminist movements throughout the world, the French Mouvement de Libération des Femmes (MLF) has laid claim, rightly or wrongly, to a precise year of birth: 1970. The MLF’s first appearance in public is usually identified as the demonstration of 26 August 1970.