Jospin's wife beats her own drum

The French Prime Minister's aides remark cynically that Mrs Lionel Jospin may be her husband's most valuable asset in his contest with Jacques Chirac for the 2002 presidential election.

Her elegance was the subject of a six-page fashion spread in Elle magazine last month. Long before that she earned a doctorate in philosophy and a professorship at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales.

France's law on political parity - which requires parties to field equal numbers of male and female candidates - is widely credited to Mrs Jospin's influence on her husband. So is the fact that a third of his cabinet are female. And unlike his predecessors, Mr Jospin has entrusted the key ministries of justice and employment to women.

Mrs Jospin is better known as Sylviane Agacinski, the author of two books on the 19th-century Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, as well as Politics of the Sexes, published in 1996. She wants the French terms for doctor, professor and minister to be feminised when a position is held by a woman, but she mocks the "feminist ghettos" of US women's studies programmes.

"I refuse to become a feminist philosopher," Ms Agacinski explains. "I am a philosopher before being a feminist." And before being a prime minister's wife. Their romance started in 1989 when Ms Agacinski met Mr Jospin, then education minister, to plead the cause of French philosophers.

A few days ago 200 people attended Ms Agacinksi's opening lecture in a series entitled "Masculine-Feminine" at the Paris Institut d'Etudes Politiques. Not once during the two-hour session did I hear the name "Jospin".

Ms Agacinski's central theme is that women will not obtain equality with men by becoming like them. Vive la difference, she says: be equal, but different. In the US, she believes, the wonderful, enigmatic difference between men and women is contested, often in the name of gay culture. "A sort of suspension, cancellation, neutralisation of the difference between sexes occurs," she said.

"That difference is condemned as something that always leads to male domination."

The refusal to recognise difference results in an "abstract universalism" which erases femininity by making all humanity neutral and therefore masculine, Ms Agacinski said. Thousands of years of "androcentrism" - the term she prefers to sexism - have identified humans with the male gender. "The human being par excellence is the male being," she said. "Masculinity is considered universal, femininity a particularity."

Ms Agacinski calls those who deny the difference between sexes the "fanatics of universalism". At a time when women enjoy legal equality, "if you forget history, you can't understand the absence of women in political and social life."

When France granted "universal" suffrage to men in 1848, "something that involved only men was considered universal," Ms Agacinski noted. In his 1835 book, Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote: "In the United States, there is no one who does not vote, with the exception of slaves, servants and the natives". It did not even occur to him to put women in the list.

The 20th-century anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss provided a more recent example. "The entire village departed the following day," Levi-Strauss wrote, "leaving us alone with the women and children in abandoned houses."

When women began demanding the right to vote, men feared that if women moved from the private sphere of the home into the public sphere of politics, the French Republic would disintegrate. So in late 19th-century debates, it was suggested that only single, divorced or widowed women could be allowed to vote.

In English-speaking countries, Ms Agacinski said, feminists have often demanded a role in politics on the grounds that they would bring to it something new - compassion, generosity - because they were women. This always horrified French feminists.

"We demand to be integrated in public life because we are half of humanity every bit as legitimately as men," she explained. "We are not less universal than men."

Inequality in the home was the first obstacle to reconciling the public and private spheres. A recent survey by the statistical institute INSEE shows that 80 per cent of household chores are still done by women. "If there is no domestic parity, there cannot be political parity," Ms Agacinski said. At this point, I couldn't help wondering whether Lionel washes dishes.

One of the few men in the audience stood up to demand that women relinquish their monopoly over domestic chores and childcare.

There were angry female faces throughout the amphitheatre, and for a moment I thought they might physically attack him. Ms Agacinksi waited patiently for him to finish. "Experience proves that the desire of men to share tasks is quite feeble," she concluded.