Yvette Roudy, a tenacious feminist who successfully championed state reimbursement for abortions in her role as France’s first minister of women’s rights, died on Tuesday in Cabestany, outside Perpignan, on the Mediterranean coast of France. She was 97.
Her death, at a nursing home, was announced by President Emmanuel Macron of France, who saluted her for “a life spent making equality between men and women a real right” and for her “untiring capacity for indignation.”
The 1982 law that Ms. Roudy (pronounced ROO-dee) supported, guaranteeing that women’s abortions would be covered by France’s national medical insurance, united two of her passions: the rights of women and the fight against economic inequality.
Abortion had been legal in France since 1975, but it was available only to women with the means to seek it. That rankled Ms. Roudy, a lifelong Socialist with a working-class background. And as the woman in charge of a newly created ministry, she could do something about it.
“I thought, since this law existed,” she recalled in a 2008 interview with France Culture radio, referring to the 1975 law legalizing abortion, “it should be open to everyone, not just those who could afford it.”
She added: “This was an inequality requiring a measure of social justice.”
Every week for months, she said, she hounded the new French president, her longtime ally François Mitterrand, reminding him of his campaign promise to reimburse women for their abortions, even as the Roman Catholic Church lobbied him in an attempt to thwart her.
“He was very annoyed,” Ms. Roudy said, but “he finally gave in.”
That persistence was the hallmark of a career that began unpromisingly, under the thumb of a chauvinist father, in Ms. Roudy’s telling. Her feminism, she said, sprang from her early resistance to the status quo — an inequality between the sexes that felt stifling in the small town outside Bordeaux where she grew up.
“I had to become what I eventually became on my own,” she told France Culture.
Ms. Roudy’s two other major initiatives under Mr. Mitterrand encountered mixed success. A 1983 law calling for professional parity between the sexes — in hiring and salaries — remained largely “a dead letter,” the newspaper Libération wrote this week. There was no enforcement mechanism, Ms. Roudy said in a 2019 interview with Le Parisien, and employers “had no desire to enforce it.”
She had better luck with her determination to make contraception more widely available, bringing the issue to the attention of every French household with an advertisement directed by the filmmaker Agnès Varda that was broadcast on prime-time television. Again, the Catholic Church lobbied against her.
But she knew what she was up against. “Machismo in France is stronger,” she told The New York Times in 1985, comparing the situation in her own country unfavorably with what she thought prevailed in the United States.
Even so, she was dismissive of the idea that condescending treatment of women was simply a matter of culture — French culture, specifically.
“I have no idea if there is such a thing as ‘French gallantry,’ and to tell you the truth, I’m not in the least bit interested,” she told the magazine Le Nouvel Obs in 2018. “What I want is for men to stop rubbing themselves up against women in the metro, among other things, and that they stop thinking they are naturally superior.”
Yvette Saldou was born on April 10, 1929, in Pessac, the youngest of three children of Jeanne (Dicharry) Saldou and Joseph Saldou, a metalworker who had been disabled by injuries in World War I and was employed by the municipal government.
When Yvette was 12, her mother died. Under pressure from her father, who saw no need for her to pursue further education, she left school at 16 to work as a secretary at a local fish-processing factory. She began studying at night for her baccalauréat — roughly equivalent to a high school diploma and all-important in France — and finally obtained it at 26.
In 1951, she married Pierre Roudy, a teacher who later became the head of one of France’s national theater schools, and they moved to Scotland, where he had obtained a teaching job.
She learned English as well, and when they returned to France in 1955, she became friendly with the feminist Colette Audry. In 1964, Ms. Audry suggested that Ms. Roudy translate “The Feminine Mystique,” Betty Friedan’s recently published and hugely influential book expressing the frustrations of women who felt trapped or subordinated in domestic roles.
“I was already a feminist, by intuition,” she told Libération in 2019. “But doing this translation allowed me to give words to what I was feeling deep inside.”
Through Ms. Audry, she met Mr. Mitterrand, who was running as a Socialist in a failed bid for the presidency in 1965, and her own career in politics began. Ms. Roudy was serving as a Socialist deputy in the European Parliament by the time Mr. Mitterrand finally became president in 1981 and appointed her as the women’s rights minister, a position that she held until 1986.
Afterward, she went on to serve two stints as a member of the French Parliament from the Calvados department in Normandy, from 1988 to 1993 and from 1997 to 2002. She also served as the mayor of the Norman town Lisieux from 1989 to 2001.
Mr. Roudy died in 2012. Ms. Roudy has no immediate survivors.
After she left government service, Ms. Roudy continued to be regularly consulted by successors to the ministerial position she had held and by journalists eager for her views on the progress of women in France. The #MeToo movement, she told Le Nouvel Obs in 2018, was “making the patriarchy tremble.”
But she hadn’t lost her hardheaded realism about who was calling the shots in French politics.
As she had observed on the television program “Apostrophes” more than three decades earlier, when her book “À Cause d’Elles” (loosely translated as “Thanks to the Women”) came out, “All the rules have been dictated by men. They made all this stuff up in the back rooms of bistros.”
Alain Delaquérière and Daphné Anglès contributed research.
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