A New History of 1968: Feminism and the Student Revolts in the Colonels’ Greece

Dr Margaret Poulos

This project examines the anti-junta student movement in Greece from a gender perspective. It aims to establish clear links between the student movement and the second wave of feminism which emerged immediately after the collapse of the junta in 1974. The overarching aim of the project is to locate the Greek student revolts, known as the ‘Polytechnic uprising’, in relation to their more famous counterparts elsewhere in Europe and in North America, which also spawned women’s movements in their respective aftermaths. As such this project presents a new dimension to the history and historiography of May 1968.

The primary outcome of this research will be an article on Egypt’s contribution to the development of sociological research in the 1930s and 1940s. Historians have paid attention to the role played by many African American men in the formation of the discipline of sociology, and to the relationship between social science research and political activism, especially the civil rights movement. Including a figure such as Ophelia Egypt might just transform this story in some way. The significance of this study, therefore, will lie in the deeper understanding we gain of the role gender played in the development of sociology and social research in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century.

As Europe and the United States prepared for the transformative political and cultural movements of the 1960s Greece was plunged into another period of military rule when the ‘Colonels’ junta assumed power in 1967. This regime suppressed the momentum of post-war recovery and modernisation which had barely begun after the lingering turmoil of the Civil War. The junta effectively created a barrier between Greece and the so-called events of May 68 when students, trades unions workers artists and intellectuals, rose against the prevailing culture, consolidating the social movements against inequality that shaped the following decade– women’s rights, gay rights, black power, the anti-war movement. Or so it seems. In the latter years of the junta the discourses of the emerging student resistance movement bore an uncanny resemblance to those of May. This project will investigate these narrative similarities but also make use of the hundreds of untapped testimonies of former participants. The oral history component is crucial to opening up uncharted dimensions of this history, of direct relevance to Greek historiography, but also to the broader history of 1968.

Popular and nostalgic views of the ‘Polytechnic’ movement focus exclusively on the violent climax of 17 November 1973, when the junta sent tanks into the campus of the Polytechnic University in central Athens, to bring a days-long student occupation of the main buildings, to an end. This resulted in a still uncertain number of student deaths, an event which most distinguishes the Greek revolts from others of the period. But the student movement has a far more complex and diverse dimensions than exclusive attention to November 17 allows. Some of these themes revolve around imperialism, totalitarianism, labour, militarism and feminism. This project is centred on the latter.

A published essay by a former female participant (Leontidou, 1992) describes the politicising effects of oppressive rule, and specifically, the impact of political involvement on gender consciousness. My own interviews with participants (M. Papandreou, A. Michopoulou, 2002) have elaborated this idea in the assertion that the post-junta groundswell for the democratisation of gender relations in Greece - the women’s movement, originated in the experience of anti-junta student activism. Historians (e.g. Eleni Varika 1992) have made similar assumptions about the links between student activism and the women’s movement, albeit unsubstantiated. The connections between 1968 and the rise of second-wave feminism have been broached in other national histories, particularly in the case of France and Italy. This project’s purpose is to establish these connections clearly in the Greek context and to situate this history firmly within the broader literature on 68 and histories of European feminism.

The project is funded by the Australian Research Council in conjunction with the University of Sydney.