LAST WEEK two of France's leading magazines splashed women all over their front covers.
L'Express featured 10 leading women politicians launching a manifesto demanding moves towards parity between the sexes in parliamentary representation.
Elle had a 60 page feature on (mainly) women's bottoms.
The situation of women in France is full of such contradictions. Legally, French women are better off than in the vast majority of advanced Western countries it is laid down that there should be equal pay for equal work contraception and abortion (up to 12 weeks) are free and publicly available and French state pre-school care is the envy of the world.
Yet women are actually paid on average about 20 to 30 per cent less for the same work abortion is virtually impossible to obtain in many parts of the country women's bodies cover the advertising boardings school textbooks are full of passive female role models and far fewer women than in other northern European countries reach leading positions in politics or business.
There are fewer women in the French parliament than in any other country in Europe, including such bastions of machismo as Spain, Italy and Greece. From being the first country to introduce universal male suffrage in 1848, France was one of the last to bring in votes for women, in 1944.
The feminist historian, Florence Montreynaud says politics in France has always been run like a traditional male clan. It is all about chiefs" warring with each other training "sons" to take their place and having "clients" who pay them tribute.
She says that the men who run French politics are old, usually between 55 and 80. They are extremely antagonistic to women gaining positions of power she cites how Edith Cresson, Mitterrand's prime minister in 1991-92, was cruelly undermined by her socialist colleagues.
And they are still overwhelmingly the products of the elitist male culture of the "grandes ecoles".
President Chirac once said albeit a long time ago. For me, the ideal woman is the woman of Correze (the rural part of France from where he comes) of the old days, who works hard, serves the men at their meals, never sits at table with them, and does not talk."
The dominant male culture also holds sway in the civil service. The rare woman who reaches the exalted position of bead of cabinet to a government minister has an absurd male title "Madame Le Directeur."
The historian Theodore Zeldin tells the story of Francoise Chandernagor, who made history two decades ago by coming first in the highest of all public examinations graduation from the ENA the National School of Administration.
Within a few years she was back at home bringing up her three children. Her attempt to combine a career as a high flying civil servant with motherhood was sabotaged by male colleagues who refused to adapt their traditional routine of leisurely business lunches into the mid afternoon, requiring endless late nights in the office.
Equality of tasks within the home is still something of a dream for most French women, if the country's ubiquitous statisticians are to be believed. They say that in 97 per cent of couples it is still the woman who most often washes the clothes in 84 per cent it is she who most often cooks in 75 per cent she vacuums in 73 per cent she washes the dishes in 67 per cent she does the shopping.
However, change is coming slowly Patricia Lebouc, a 27 year old media consultant is optimistic. She says that whereas her father, a product of the `68 Revolution' generation, is only starting to do household tasks, her male friends are happy to help out, while her 20 year old sister's boyfriends "do everything in the house".
Feminism is considered a dirty word in France, with its connotations of aggressive man hating US style women's liberation.
"I never meet a young woman who says she's feminist," says Florence Montreynaud, "even though I meet many whose lifestyle and thinking are feminist. When you call yourself a feminist in France you have to justify your self, to stress that you're not homosexual or wanting to emasculate men."
It is something of a puzzle why the women's movement in France has always been weaker than elsewhere. Apart from the suspicion of US style feminism, it has suffered from the kind of splintering between centre, left and extreme left which is one of the characteristics of this most ideological of countries.
"To younger women, it seems that most of the feminist battles have been won," says Elyane Lebre, a journalist with Elle. "They are living off the gains of the previous generation."
Florence Montreynaud disagrees, pointing to the 40,000 people who turned up in the middle of last November's social upheavals, to demonstrate in defence of the right to free abortion and contraception.
French women's main problem remains French men. While paying lip service to equality, too many of them hold onto the traditional attitude that women should above all be prized male possessions.
Nothing else can explain the recent explosion of plastic surgery among middle class women. If you want to be a successful woman in today's France you still have to be beautiful.