Doctor, journalist, lawyer, but also co -bite or factor, the woman who takes on a “ man’s business »At the heyday, disbelief, hilarity, and more generally hostility. Reactions whose postcards – media whose expansion corresponds to that of the first feminism – offer a striking representation.
In a beautiful illustrated book of square format (22 of 22), Juliette Rennes shows, through the presentation and analysis of 314 postcards from his personal collection, the contrasting reactions that aroused, at the turn of XIXe century, the penetration of women into professional universes hitherto exclusively male.
Doctor of political science after literary training, the author, currently a teacher-researcher at theEhesshas been continuing research and sociology of gender and professions for several years, paying particular attention to controversies around equality in law. She notably published in 2007 at Fayard in 2007 Merit and nature. Republican controversy, women’s access to prestigious professions, 1880-1940taken from his thesis. Women in the job of men, prefaced by Michelle Perrot, pioneer in the history of women and gender, exemplifies this remarkable study, and offers a large audience the possibility of discovering, by image, an emancipation path.
The postcard, media of the Belle Époque
It is precisely at a time when the first graduates of higher education require access to professions hitherto reserved for men that the production of postcards flowers. Between 1900 and 1914, several hundred thousands were printed with them each year. A real media at a time when press photographs are rare and poor quality, these postcards stage urban and rural workers in their professional activity as in their struggles (strikes, meetings, demonstrations and riots), and echo the concerns of time. The mail being noted and distributed at least three times a day in major cities, they are then, in all social circles, the support of various and varied messages. The golden age of first feminism therefore corresponds to the golden age of the postcard. Which gives Juliette Rennes’ approach all its relevance.
At the heyday, publishers create series of cards like “ The emancipated woman ” Or “ The woman of the future »Presenting in a brave as much as burlesque mode of military women of all grades, guards-championes, masters of arms, journalists or deputies, with generous breasts, tablet in costumes unsuitable for their morphology, or coated with all-out outfits contrasting with the helmets and képis from which they are wearing. From the inadequacy of the professional costume to female forms deduces the incapacity of women to occupy these functions. The mutine look and smile of these emancipated, swearing with the seriousness of the functions they embody, come to signify to the recipient of the card (to reassure it ?) That all this is just a game, a masquerade.
The difficult conquest of prestigious professions
At a time when women claiming access to the bar come up against the fierce opposition of the Council of the Association of Lawyers, also hostile to the entrance to foreigners and naturalized, the publisher Jules Royer publishes a series entitled “ The lawyer ». An actress flanked by a baby embodies a lawyer there before interrupting her pleadings several times to breastfeed, change and calm the fruit of her bowels. The curly and rebellious hair beyond the toque reinforces the idea that the woman, irreparably placed on the side of nature and not of culture, cannot be a lawyer.
These fanciful representations are skillfully compared with the photo card published at the request of Jeanne Chauvin, second woman doctor in law of France, and first to ask the inscription at the bar in 1897. She posed in an outfit that contrasts with those of her parody doubles: long sleeves and a loose dress masking the forms, hair pulled under a sober toque. If the most lively resistances have manifested themselves around this profession, it is probably because it was a springboard for the political careers to which women, who did not yet have access to the status of active citizen, could not claim.
Women doctors also struck the hostile reactions of the medical profession. The authorization to become external was not granted to them until 1881, and the assistance of the internship of public assistance hospitals opened until 1885, against the advice of the dean of the Faculty of Medicine of Paris, doctors and surgeons of hospitals. And it took all the obstinacy of Doctor Madeleine Pelletier, unfortunately barely mentioned in the work, so that the internship of asylums was opened to women in 1903. Less mocked than the lawyer insofar as the woman was traditionally associated with the care, the doctress, however Male. While others, to better emphasize her incompetence, caricature it as a kind magician preparing for whimsical beverages.
Publishers have not overlooked women who have a name. And the portraits of actresses, artists, writers or famous 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. Treaty with deference, the science woman appears in the guise of Marie Curie, Nobel Prize in physics and chemistry, who was repeatedly victim of hateful press campaigns with anti -Semitic tone, although she was born in a Catholic family. What the conservative right could not accept is that a woman occupies a pulpit at the Sorbonne and directs a research laboratory, which is more a woman engaged on the left, self-thinner and Polish birth.
When his affair with the physicist Paul Langevin was made public, the attacks of the supporters of the French Action redoubled while the people on the left expressed their disappointment not to see their heroine comply with the image of a secular Holy Holy conveyed, among others, by the maps representing it: that of a learned woman, wife and exemplary mother. An image precisely used by supporters of female emancipation to counter the major argument of opponents of women’s work: the impossibility of leading a career and maternity. Argument that appears in a series of cards showing husbands struggling with domestic works under the contemptuous gaze of wives going to noble occupations: an inversion of roles so unimaginable that it can only be treated in a funny mode.
Workers, between tradition and modernity
The women of the people working at the factory, at the mine, in the fields are not the subject of any mockery. The cards, sketches or photographs, show on the contrary the difficulty of postures, the harshness of working conditions, and testify 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 sea workers, Corsican shepherdes, resinières are photographed. Oyster parque, shrimp or mussel fishermen, fish carriers, posing with their work instruments, in short skirts or pants, are presented to tourists as a local curiosity, but which does not call into question the sexual division of labor, these activities being devolved to them for a long time.
The comments of the sender, noted and analyzed throughout the book by J. Rennes, are however little reduced: they express a barely veiled disgust for the virility of their poses and their outfit. Contempt of the bourgeois tourist for this almost exotic figure of the woman of the people.
Particular treatment is reserved for coachmen or autotax drivers who arouse incredulity and hilarity. The accessories of the profession, the whip, the reins, the mastery of the technical and mechanical gestures implied by the conduct of the hypomobile then automobile fiacre, represent a real attack on the order “ natural “Sexes. “” The hectors earning their lives in the exercise of their profession seem as incredible as women astronomers and women engineers », Can we read in Le Figaro of August 5, 1905. Either they are presented as devoid of any femininity, tributes, in their unsightly uniforms, or on the contrary they abruptly reveal their charms, thanks to a collision which puts them ass on top. In any case, we try to make people laugh at their expense.
Conquest of the image
Finally, Juliette Rennes suggests that women have played an active role in this game of representations. Not only are famous and recognized women or feminist activists like Nelly Roussel, but also more humble women such as these poster colors, these newspapers of newspapers, these workers of the mine and the sea already mentioned, who, by their laying and their proud gaze, express the will to master their image and their destiny.
And what about the extraordinary Juliette Caron, the only woman to exercise the profession of carpenter, according to the legend accompanying the cards she conceived and peddled herself herself ? Dressed in a ribbed velvet tailor, wearing a cap and wearing high -heeled boots, it appears frail, graceful and strong, fixing the objective of a challenge.
By reclaiming their image, these pioneers, that they occupy a profession “ prestige Or a manual profession, therefore made the postcard something other than a derision tool: the vector of claims.