lit a candle 7 Sept 2026Yvette Roudy translated the big books that changed minds, then she changed the laws herself. That's a life.
Their story
Yvette Roudy was born Yvette Saldou on 10 April 1929 in Pessac, near Bordeaux, into a modest household. Her father, Joseph Saldou, was a metalworker who came home from the First World War with a disability pension and later worked for the municipality of Pessac. Genealogical and biographical notices name…
Yvette Roudy was born Yvette Saldou on 10 April 1929 in Pessac, near Bordeaux, into a modest household. Her father, Joseph Saldou, was a metalworker who came home from the First World War with a disability pension and later worked for the municipality of Pessac. Genealogical and biographical notices name her mother as Marie, called Jeanne, Dicharry, a concierge, who died on 7 April 1941, when Yvette was twelve. She later described a patriarchal house and a father she called very authoritarian and fairly macho. She said she entered feminism and socialism perhaps because of him, and that the two fights were inseparable for her. A family saying she quoted from her memoir À cause d'elles stayed with her: "Ça, ça n'est pas pour nous" ("That is not for people like us"). She built a public life against that sentence.
At seventeen she left school to work as a typist in a Bordeaux fish-canning plant, studying at night. In 1948 she met Pierre Roudy, then a lycée student, who opened books to her. They married on 16 July 1951 in Pessac. She had enrolled in correspondence courses for the baccalauréat. Pierre took an assistant post in Scotland to prepare his own degree; they spent about three years in Glasgow, where she strengthened her English. Back in Bordeaux in 1955 she passed the baccalauréat, then took a job with an American company that moved to Paris in 1956. RTL later described her as holding an English diploma and working as a translator in Bordeaux and then Paris.
In Paris, through Pierre's school theater, she met Colette Audry, a former Resistance fighter, socialist, and feminist close to Pierre Mendès France. At Audry's request she translated Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, published in French in 1964 as La Femme mystifiée. The book gave her words for a feeling she already had: the educated woman living below her capacities. She also translated Eleanor Roosevelt's autobiography and, later, Elizabeth Janeway. Translation let her leave office work for intellectual and political work.
She joined the Mouvement démocratique féminin (MDF) in 1964, alongside Audry and Marie-Thérèse Eyquem, and helped recruit other militants. In 1965 she founded and edited the MDF journal La Femme du XXe siècle, which campaigned for contraception, then still restricted, and published an interview in which François Mitterrand called himself a supporter of family planning. She backed his 1965 presidential campaign and entered the Convention des institutions républicaines. She stood unsuccessfully at Meaux in 1967 and in Paris's 31st constituency in 1968 (6.22 percent in the first round). She also researched the condition of women in Sweden and interviewed Prime Minister Olof Palme. In 1971 she entered the new Socialist Party with the MDF at the Épinay congress, and she signed the Manifesto of the 343, the public declaration in which 343 women said they had had abortions and demanded legalization.
Inside the party she met misogyny and kept organizing. The 1974 Suresnes congress accepted a 15 percent women's quota and a national secretariat for women's rights, which she led. In 1977 she became national secretary for women's action; in 1979 she created and chaired the party's women's rights commission. She lost a 1978 legislative race in Lyon. In 1979 she was elected to the European Parliament on the Socialist list and founded, then chaired, its committee on women's rights. She served as an MEP from 17 July 1979 until 16 June 1981.
After Mitterrand's election, Prime Minister Pierre Mauroy named her, on 21 May 1981, minister delegate for women's rights. She was 52. She said she wanted to build a ministry that worked toward its own disappearance. France had already had a secretary of state for the condition of women, Françoise Giroud, from 1974. Roudy was the first holder of a full ministerial brief dedicated to women's rights, sitting in government. The ministry was described as having about 5,000 staff and a budget about ten times that of Giroud's secretariat. On the day of her first cabinet she noted that six women in government was not enough and that there should be more. Advisers included Dominique Jourdain, Simone Iff, and Jeannette Laot.
She opened with a national contraception campaign, including television spots, and asked filmmaker Agnès Varda for a short film. In 1982 France officially marked 8 March as International Women's Day, with Mitterrand presiding at a ceremony and charging her to correct injustices suffered by women. She published a Guide des droits des femmes and backed information centres and shelters for battered women. The law of 31 December 1982, often called the Roudy law on abortion, provided reimbursement of abortion costs. The Veil law of 1975 had legalized the procedure without covering the cost. Obituaries and the current equality ministry describe the reform as reimbursement through social security or national health insurance. The Maitron, more precise about the negotiation, records that Mitterrand settled on partial reimbursement at 70 percent through a special budget rather than the ordinary social-security scheme. Both facts belong in the record: she carried the reimbursement reform, and the first settlement was a compromise.
Her other named law, of 13 July 1983 (published in the Journal officiel the next day), banned refusing hiring, promotion, or training because of sex, shifted the burden of proof toward the employer, and required employers to report equality measures, goals, and actions. She also set up, in 1984, a commission on the feminization of job titles, ranks, and functions, chaired by Benoîte Groult. Not every project passed. A 1983 anti-sexism bill, aimed at degrading advertising and modeled on anti-racist law, was buried after fierce opposition from advertisers and defenders of press freedom. A plan to reserve at least 25 percent of electoral lists for women was struck down by the Constitutional Council as discriminatory. In March 1983, when the Mauroy government limited full cabinet to ministers of full rank, she was briefly shut out. In 1984 she was named a full minister, a change she later linked to an intervention by Simone de Beauvoir with Mitterrand. She remained until the 1986 cohabitation, leaving office on 20 March 1986, when Jacques Chirac's government dismantled the ministry.
She was then "parachuted" to Lisieux and elected deputy for Calvados in 1986, re-elected in 1988 against Gaullist André Fanton, defeated by Fanton in 1993, and returned from 1997 to 2002, also serving as a secretary of the National Assembly. She was mayor of Lisieux from 24 March 1989 to 25 March 2001, the first woman in that post in a town governed by the right since the Liberation. Her list won 54.08 percent in 1989. She gave the town a media library, the Nautile aquatic centre, the bypass begun by her predecessor, a pedestrian Rue Pont-Mortain, and a branch of the Caen IUT, and she renamed Place Thiers as Place François-Mitterrand. She lost the 2001 municipal election after a split on the left to UDF candidate Bernard Aubril.
After office she kept campaigning for parity. The 1992 Athens declaration was a spur. She created the Assemblée des femmes (1992-1993) to write parity into the constitution and institutions, published Mais de quoi ont-ils peur?, and signed the Manifesto of the 577. In June 1996 she helped assemble the "manifesto of the ten" in L'Express, former ministers of left and right including Simone Veil and Édith Cresson. She is counted among the forces behind the 2000 law requiring parties to field equal numbers of women and men. She backed Ségolène Royal in 2007 and François Hollande in 2011. In January 2017 she withdrew support from Benoît Hamon in the citizen primary, telling him he had lost her vote over remarks on the Islamic veil. She was a member of the Grande Loge féminine de France and received the Grand Orient's Prix de la Laïcité in 2016. In 2014, to honor Pierre, who died on 24 August 2012, she gave 72,000 euros to the Chancellerie des universités de Paris to found the Pierre-et-Yvette-Roudy prize for a woman and a man who had taken the optional theater exam at the baccalauréat. Her last book, Lutter toujours, appeared in 2020. In a 2018 L'Obs interview at the start of #MeToo she called the movement a fundamental event of the twenty-first century and a historic stage of feminism, and said it made the patriarchy tremble.
She died on the morning of Tuesday 18 August 2026, aged 97, in the medical residence at Cabestany where she had lived for three years. Her nephew Jean-Pierre Saldou told AFP. No cause of death was made public. A funeral was held on 26 August 2026, and she was buried in division 6 of the Cimetière du Montparnasse. The Socialist Party said "Lutter toujours" was the meaning of her life. François Hollande called her a woman of conviction who never stopped defending her ideas, and recalled that she had 8 March officially recognized in France. Laurence Rossignol, president of the Assemblée des femmes, wrote that reimbursement of abortion, the feminization of job titles, professional equality, and parity were still hers. Aurore Bergé, the serving equality minister, said she had to persuade, challenge, and fight for progress when women's rights still had to force their way into the halls of power.
Biography adapted from French Wikipedia; English Wikipedia; Maitron (Sowerwine); AFP via Le Figaro, France 24, RFI; equality ministry; France 3; RTL; L'Obs; LCP; GLFF.. Wikipedia ↗
In their own words
“Je veux former un ministère qui travaille à sa propre disparition.”
On her 1981 appointment as minister delegate for women's rights, aged 52. Source: Le Figaro and L'Obs obituaries, 18 August 2026.
“Je me suis engagée, peut-être à cause de lui, dans le féminisme et le socialisme. Ces deux combats sont chez moi indissociables, complémentaires.”
On her father, whom she described as very authoritarian and fairly macho. Source: RTL, citing her own account, used in the 2026 death report.
“Ça, ça n'est pas pour nous.”
The parental formula she reacted against, quoted in À cause d'elles, p. 16. Source: Maitron (Charles Sowerwine).
“Ce n'est pas assez, évidemment, il en faudrait davantage.”
Day of her first cabinet, on there being six women in government. Source: France 3 Normandie.
“Il n'y a pas, pour moi, de devoir sans droits.”
Aujourd'hui Madame, 15 September 1981, soon after she entered government. Source: INA archive note, republished 2026.
“Comment regretter de voir que les valeurs du féminisme sont en train de devenir réalité... Nous bâtissons.”
8 March 1985 television interview, on moving from claim to implementation. Source: INA, republished 18 August 2026.
“30 percent of what, exactly: token candidacies with no real chance of election, or a genuine push to get women into the National Assembly?”
1996, on plans to reserve 30 percent of constituencies for women. Source: RFI obituary, 19 August 2026 (RFI English rendering).
“Mon mari a beaucoup œuvré pour obtenir que le théâtre devienne une option au bac... on pense que ça peut aider l'ascenseur social.”
AFP, 2014, on founding the Pierre-et-Yvette-Roudy prize. Source: French Wikipedia, quoting AFP.
“Tu as perdu ma voix.”
January 2017, withdrawing support from Benoit Hamon over remarks on the Islamic veil. Source: BFMTV, cited by French Wikipedia.
“#MeToo ... est un événement fondamental du XXIe siècle et une étape historique du féminisme... Ce mouvement fait trembler le patriarcat.”
L'Obs interview, February 2018. Source: L'Obs, quoted in the 18 August 2026 obituary.
Photos
1Yvette Roudy, former French minister for women's rights. Wikimedia Commons File:Yvette_Roudy.jpg, the portrait used on the French and English Wikipedia articles for this minister. Commons summary date February 2012.
by People Forever
Exactly. That's the whole story right there.