One of the Best Examples of the manipulative and corrective power held by those who are constructing “1968” in Germany can be found in the way female activists were excluded and later (partly) reintroduced into the dominant narrative. While today there is general agreement that the modern German women's movement was born in 1968 (via the Aktionsrat zur Befreiung der Frau [Action Council for the Liberation of Women] and the famous Tomatenwurf [tomato-throw], see below), the 68er women who were an integral part of the movement had been progressively written out of its history, or relegated to a “schmückende Nebenrolle” (decorative minor role). Over the first three decades, their role had been reduced to a collage of media images and clichés. In 1968: Ein Zeitalter wird besichtigt (1968: An Era Revisited, 1997), for instance, the photographer Michael Ruetz includes a series of images of female activists: they are shown sitting around a table, looking glamourous, smoking, and apparently waiting for their male comrades to return from their revolution. The title Ruetz gives these photographs is “Bräute der Revolte,” literally brides of the revolt, but, in a more accurate translation of the colloquialism, tarts of the revolt. Only in recent years have we seen attempts to correct this blatant manipulation of the history of “1968.”

Again, such phenomena are not specific to Germany (though they are more keenly felt due to continuing debates about “1968” here). In her autobiography Promise of a Dream (2000), Sheila Rowbotham, a noted socialist feminist theorist, talks about the way women were written out of the history of the sixties in the United Kingdom: