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Abstract
This article reassesses the Utile known work of Margaret Papandreou, the American-born widow of Andreas Papandreou, in the context of the post-junta Greek women's movement. It highlights her Western background, her proactive global-minded feminism, and her public role as the socialist prime minister's wife. (1981-1989). The article is based on published scholarship and other documentation that exists in the public domain but also draws from personal interviews with Margaret Papandreou and from an original study of her unpublished papers of 1972-1991. Given this variety of sources, it paints a fuller yet "historically " different picture enriched with biographical elements and statements of (self-)justification which respond to Greek journalistic slurs and attacks. In 1975 Margaret Papandreou founded the Women's Union of Greece and during the following decade she and other feminists rallied for the most urgent amendments to be made to Greek women's legal status in the family and in the labor force. She was a master at organizing, raising awareness, and directing the Union's exchange with the international women's movement.
"(Ironically) I never dreamed I would be the wife of the Prime Minister of Greece; I dreamed I would be the Prime Minister of Greece."
Margarita Papandreou, Chicago Tribune (1982)
The purpose of this article is to clarify the role of Margaret Papandreou in the formation and development of the post-junta women's movement in Greece. Papandreou's role is embedded in various contexts, such as the international feminist movement of the 1970s and 1980s and its influence on Greece, the history of the Greek women's movement itself, and the politics of metapolitefsi, or Greece's return to democracy after the collapse of the 1967-1974 military dictatorship ("democratic transformation," Close 2002:141). I will necessarily be brief on these three broad subjects, each deserving attention in its own right.
My article defines Papandreou's function not as a feminist theorist but as an activist who made Greek women's practical advancement a priority. Most important is her role in the transformation of Greek women's demands into official legal rights. It is fair to state up front that some criticisms of Papandreou's thinking and practice are understandable but also that my personal view of her work is generally positive. However, beyond those differences and tensions, my own hope remains...