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Looking beyond the standard perspective ( i.e. turning from the MLF – Women’s Liberation Movement – to a wide range of feminist mobilizations; from Paris to other French cities; from theory to practice) this paper proposes a socio-historical analysis of the exclusion of men from feminist activism during the 1970s in France. Far from being a universally employed form of activism in the early days of the movement, women-only groups gradually became the norm only during the second half of the 1970s, after a period of learning and adjustment (1970-1975). Focusing on what happened in practice, this article seeks to understand the historical processes by which the exclusion of men from meetings became symbolic of post-1968 feminisms.