Le manifeste des Antigones – Antigones Manifesto in english
Préambule
We, the Antigones, wish to play the principal role in our future as women. We intend to suggest a different logic than the one we hear from TV sets. Women are not an oppressed minority, they represent half of humanity.
We are not fighting for new rights; we are fighting for far more than that: we want to give another meaning to women’s engagement in society, and that with dignity and responsibility. We want to think about what women can bring to society and not only about what they can get from it for themselves. We wish to open doors many would like to keep closed. We have many questions needing debate and for which we don’t have ready-to-use answers.
We want to answer these questions with all the women sharing our principles and who are joining the Antigones’ adventure. Express yourselves! Because it’s together that we will develop creative answers and constructive solutions to get out of the dead ends in which we are trapped today, so as to build our future freely.
The Antigones are a gathering of women who decided they wouldn’t put up with this any longer. This gathering is not subordinate to any party or religion. We do not claim to represent every woman: we are part of those who want to step into the Agora and take part in public debate and society.
We do not recognize ourselves in the vision imposed on us by a minority – however dominant in the media and in political spheres: gender theories and sextremism.
Even if the Antigones’ first action was an insurrection against the Femen, opposing them is not our main purpose. We want to actively take part in the debates concerning women’s condition: woman and man relationships, family, working conditions, quotas and parity, commercial exploitation of life and of the female body…
Our principles
We, the Antigones, exhort women to be feminine: it is our coherent and profound nature. Affirming it is the first step to enriching society with the best we have to give. In a world in which individualism reigns, many don’t have the opportunity to accomplish themselves fully. Yet each of us has in her the promise of becoming an accomplished and committed woman. The Antigones offer a way to become that.
Women have a sensibility, willpower, ways of action different from those of men. These differences are a richness which needs to be cultivated and this alterity is fertile on every level. That’s why we build our approach on sexual complementarity. Truly, a woman is not like any man.
We, the Antigones, favour legitimacy over legality. If laws written by men overstep natural laws – that is to say the unwritten norms which are the base of human experience – we have the duty to rebel. We will not bury the common decency, the common sense and the dignity which should preside over the laws and changes in society.
We, the Antigones, defend liberties. In this atomized world, where people’s relations are hardly more than commercial, we want to bring a liberating message. Our approach aims to be fundamentally emancipating. Our nature, which is feminine, constructive and open to life, inspires us to want to forge strong social bonds, so crucial to liberty and solidarity.
As said Albert Camus « Only through love do we reveal our true selves ».