In the private film of the wedding anniversary of the parents of the filmmaker Michèle Dominici from 1960 you can see a red carpet on the church steps, you can see a relaxed-looking groom and a bride with a veil in the fashion of the time, piled high, as if teased.

The bride chats animatedly, she doesn't seem particularly happy, perhaps she just wants to appear demure.

Her mother was "happy and hopeful" that day, reports the author's voiceover from the off.

Until then, the mother wrote about her life.

Memoirs about desires, dreams and observations.

After the marriage there was nothing interesting enough to write down, she is reported to have said.

She stopped writing.

"She had become a housewife," concludes Dominici, "invisible."

And fell silent.

This film aims to give housewives of the fifties and sixties their voices back.

Diaries and amateur recordings, along with private photos, are the material for bringing up the subject, from which a “story of the housewife” is to be reconstructed in “We are not dolls!”.

The perspective of the documentary film is as subjective as it is fragmentary, mostly fragmented, sometimes illuminating larger contexts.

"L'histoire oublié", the forgotten story, is the original title of the film, although most of it is probably known in the abstract.

Once a self-employed “mistress”

It is also not "the" story of the housewife that is at issue here, even the term that in the case of Goethe's mother, affectionately known as Aja, meant a self-employed "mistress" who ran a large household with many servants, also financially independently administered, as vividly described in "Poetry and Truth", plays no role.

"We are not dolls!" portrays the post-war period from a strictly personal point of view, when jobs had to be vacated for those returning from the war.

In favor of the traumatized, who should move back to sole family authority, and "back to the stove" as a reconstruction of pre-war dependency had to create socio-political stability.

In their repeated diaries, Anna, Ruby and Francine reflect on their role, the domestic sphere, the limitation to tasks that some find an insult to their intelligence.

They quarrel with being fulfillers of the convenience of the working husband.

With laws that require them not to open their own bank account without their spouse's consent, to accept paid work unless they allow it.

The financial dependency, the responsibility for the good behavior of the children, the women's own words speak existentialist exaggeration.

And the feeling of being exposed to dumbing down.

The advertising of the fifties and sixties shows the wife as the actual object of the economic miracle - as a consumer of clothing and household goods,

of technology and food.

Increasingly, preparations against "Housewife Fatigue" are prescribed, Valium becomes the housewife's best friend.

Surprisingly, in the early 1970s, numerous men took part in French emancipation demos.

Some of the women portrayed write, for example to their daughters, well into old age.

The tone is mostly elegiac.

Dominici is clearly not concerned with historical-critical reappraisal or with the fight for equality alone.

She is indirectly concerned with questions of the freedom to choose a woman's role, however determined.

Her focus is on the constraints that silenced housewives and prevented them from participating in public life (and still do).

One would have liked to know more about the impact and function of the (Catholic) Church in France in the 1950s and 1960s.

But the film is just as consciously one-sided as it is personal, (representatively) self-empowering.

We are not dolls!

runs today at 8.15 p.m. on Arte.