When domestic violence (finally) entered the public debate

"

," implored in 1978 in the newspaper

Nicole Pasquier, the Secretary of State for Women's Employment.

Despite some advances in women's rights - reform of the matrimonial regime, law on contraception, the right to abortion - the woman beaten by her spouse was still very often a source of jokes in the 1970s.

"

», Affirms a man interviewed in 1975 in a video recently unearthed by the National Audiovisual Institute (Ina).

Thanks to feminist movements, in particular the Ligue du droit des femmes, chaired by Simone de Beauvoir, the seriousness of the subject ended up being essential.

In 1978, the first specific shelter for battered women was created in Clichy, the Flora Tristan center.

It is the fruit of a long fight waged for three years against this fatalism which sees the battered woman as a “tradition as old as the world”.

To read also The mixed results of the "Grenelle of domestic violence"

A battered women SOS number

The project began in 1975 when the book

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