Doctor, journalist, lawyer, but also coachwoman or postwoman, the woman who wears a “ man’s job » arouses disbelief, hilarity, and more generally hostility during the Belle Époque. Reactions of which postcards – a medium whose expansion corresponds to that of early feminism – offer a striking representation.
In a beautiful illustrated book in square format (22 by 22), Juliette Rennes shows, through the presentation and analysis of 314 postcards mostly from her personal collection, the contrasting reactions that aroused, at the turn of the XIXe century, the penetration of women into professional worlds hitherto exclusively male.
Doctor in political science after literary training, the author, currently a teacher-researcher at theEHESShas been carrying out research in the history and sociology of gender and professions for several years, paying particular attention to the controversies surrounding demands for equality in law. She notably published in 2007 with Fayard Merit and nature. A republican controversy, women’s access to prestigious professions, 1880-1940taken from his thesis. Women in Men’s Jobs, prefaced by Michelle Perrot, pioneer in the history of women and gender, exemplifies this noted study, and offers a wide audience the possibility of discovering, through images, a journey of emancipation.
The postcard, media of the Belle Époque
It was precisely at the time when the first female graduates of higher education were demanding access to professions previously reserved for men that the production of postcards flourished. Between 1900 and 1914, several hundred thousand were printed each year. Real media at a time when press photographs are rare and of mediocre quality, these postcards depict urban and rural workers in their professional activity as well as in their struggles (strikes, meetings, demonstrations and riots), and are echo of the concerns of the times. As the mail is collected and distributed at least three times a day in large cities, they are then, in all social circles, the medium of diverse and varied messages. The golden age of the first feminism therefore corresponds to the golden age of the postcard. Which gives Juliette Rennes’ approach all its relevance.
During the Belle Époque, publishers created series of cards like “ The emancipated woman ” Or “ The woman of the future » presenting in a ribald as well as burlesque mode military women of all ranks, country guards, masters of arms, journalists or deputies, with generous chests, compressed into costumes unsuitable for their body shape, or covered in alluring outfits contrasting with the helmets and kepis with which they wear their hair. The unsuitability of women to occupy these functions can be deduced from the unsuitability of professional costume for feminine forms. The mischievous look and smile of these emancipated people, clashing with the seriousness of the functions they embody, signify to the recipient of the card (to reassure him ?) that all this is just a game, a charade.
The difficult conquest of prestigious professions
At a time when women demanding access to the bar encountered fierce opposition from the council of the bar association, also hostile to the entry of foreigners and naturalized citizens, the publisher Jules Royer published a series entitled “ The female lawyer “. An actress flanked by a baby doll plays a lawyer who must repeatedly interrupt her pleading to breastfeed, change and calm the fruit of her womb. The curly, rebellious hair protruding from the hat reinforces the idea that women, irremediably placed on the side of nature and not culture, cannot be a lawyer.
These fanciful representations are skillfully compared with the photo card published at the request of Jeanne Chauvin, the second woman doctor of law in France, and the first to apply for registration at the bar in 1897. She poses in an outfit which contrasts with those of his parodic doubles: long sleeves and loose dress hiding the shapes, hair pulled back under a sober hat. If the strongest resistance arose around this profession, it is probably because it was a springboard for political careers to which women, who did not yet have access to the status of active citizen, could not aspire to.
Women doctors also encountered hostile reactions from the medical profession. Authorization to become an external student was only granted to them in 1881, and the competition for residency at Public Assistance hospitals only opened in 1885, against the advice of the dean of the Paris faculty of medicine, doctors and surgeons in hospitals. And it took all the stubbornness of Doctor Madeleine Pelletier, unfortunately barely mentioned in the work, for the asylum boarding school to be open to women in 1903. Less mocked than the lawyer to the extent that women were traditionally associated in care, the doctor however provides card publishers with the opportunity to evoke in an obscene manner the intrusive gestures that she could be required to perform on her male patients. While others, to better underline her incompetence, caricature her as a friendly magician preparing fanciful drinks.
Editors have not neglected women with names. And portraits of famous actresses, artists, writers or journalists, photographed or drawn, circulate in the form of cards: the painter Rosa Bonheur, the violinist Marie Hall, the journalist Séverine, Colette, Anna de Noailles and Sarah Bernhardt . Treated with deference, the woman of science appears in the guise of Marie Curie, Nobel Prize winner in physics and chemistry, who was on several occasions the victim of hateful press campaigns with an anti-Semitic tone, although she was born into a Catholic family. What the conservative right could not accept is that a woman occupies a chair at the Sorbonne and directs a research laboratory, what is more a woman committed to the left, free-thinking and Polish by birth.
When her affair with the physicist Paul Langevin was made public, the attacks from supporters of Action Française redoubled while the people of the left expressed their disappointment at not seeing their heroine conform to the image of a secular saint conveyed, among others, by by the cards representing her: that of a learned woman, exemplary wife and mother. An image precisely used by supporters of female emancipation to counter the major argument of opponents of women’s work: the impossibility of pursuing a career and motherhood. An argument which appears in a series of cards showing husbands struggling with domestic work under the contemptuous gaze of wives engaged in more noble pursuits: a reversal of roles so unimaginable that it can only be treated in a comical way.
Workers, between tradition and modernity
The common women working in the factory, in the mine, in the fields are not, for their part, the object of any mockery. The maps, sketches or photographs, on the contrary, show the difficulty of the postures, the harshness of the working conditions, and bear witness to the muscular strength of women, revealing the important role they play in the modernization and industrial development of the country.
It is also with a certain respect that the sea workers, the Corsican shepherdesses, the resin workers are photographed. The oyster harvesters, the shrimp or mussel fishermen, the fish carriers, posing with their work tools, in short skirts or pants, are presented to tourists as a local curiosity, but which does not call into question the division sexuality of work, these activities having been assigned to them for a long time.
The senders’ comments, noted and analyzed throughout the book by J. Rennes, are, however, not very pleasant: they express a barely veiled disgust for the virility of their poses and their outfit. The bourgeois tourist’s contempt for this almost exotic figure of the woman of the people.
Special treatment is reserved for female coachmen or autotax drivers who arouse disbelief and hilarity. The accessories of the profession, the whip, the reins, the mastery of the technical and mechanical gestures involved in driving the hypomobile cab and then the automobile, represent a real attack on order. natural » of the sexes. “ Female drivers earning their living in the exercise of their profession seem as improbable as female astronomers and female engineers. », we can read in Le Figaro of August 5, 1905. Either they are presented as devoid of any femininity, men, in their unsightly uniforms, or on the contrary they abruptly reveal their charms, thanks to a collision which puts them ass over head. In all cases, we seek to make people laugh at their expense.
The conquest of the image
Finally, Juliette Rennes suggests that women played an active role in this game of representations. Not only famous and recognized women or feminist activists like Nelly Roussel, but also more humble women like these poster pasters, these newspaper peddlers, these mine and sea workers already mentioned, who, through their pose and their proud look, express the desire to control their image and their destiny.
And what can we say about the extraordinary Juliette Caron, the only woman to practice the profession of carpenter, according to the legend accompanying the cards that she designed and hawked herself? ? Dressed in a corduroy suit, wearing a cap and wearing high flat-heeled ankle boots, she appears frail, graceful and strong, staring defiantly at the objective.
By reappropriating their image, these pioneers, whether they occupy a profession “ prestigious » or a manual profession, have therefore made the postcard something other than a tool of derision: the vector of demands.