Within the institutions where they were placed in the 1950s, single mothers, marginalized and repressed, sometimes had the opportunity to rebuild ties. It is this bond that sociologist Jean-François Laé recreates through the correspondence of a “single mother” with her social worker.
Jean-François Laé’s latest book continues a work that has been going on for over fifteen years on the ordinary archives of our contemporary world: correspondence, personal journals, professional writings, labor jurisprudence… “Weak” archives that contain sensitive material and “tiny practices,” he says. They are not recognized, often invisible, neglected, forgotten on the shelves of institution cellars, found in attics or sold in bulk at flea markets. Jean-François Laé takes us here into the world of child and adolescent protection in the 1950s, through abundant correspondence between a social worker and one of these isolated young girls, pregnant by accident, placed in an institution for “correction,” removed from their family and their environment. They had seriously sinned, it was said.
But in A girl in correctionit is neither a question of a love story nor of a “beautiful case” of archive, still less of a historical testimony. Between Micheline and her social worker will be formed intense bonds that the author restores by articulating an ethnography of writings, a sociology of motherhood and an almost cinematographic narration. The text articulates the correspondence as such – raw material that is abundantly given to us to read -; the description of the places – through very precise documentation on Avignon in the 1950s, work in the fields, daily life in a maternity home; finally, the story of Jean-François Laé, who confronts them with his personal experience. It is undoubtedly this crossing of registers that gives an intimate tone, a rhythm to this journey where one is constantly inside and outside, between order and disorder.
Surviving as a Single Mother
In her correspondence with Odile, her social worker, Micheline writes, expresses and challenges the world around her with great determination. For her, it is about accessing the minimum resources that would allow her to survive and welcome her unborn child “in spite of everything”. Against her mother, against the father who has disappeared, against her reputation as a “dirty slut”. She does it with delicacy and vigor, and knows how to use writing to convey the emotions aroused by the violence and arbitrariness of her situation. She visits several establishments, complains about the harshness of relationships, thefts and other misdeeds: the opportunity for Jean-François Laé to interweave “reconstructions” with his experiences as a young educator at the end of the 1960s: he knew these castles where young people in “great difficulties” were placed. He recognizes the smells and atmospheres that permeated the dormitories, corridors and kitchens. We can smell the wax of the parquet floors! In this way, he restores the layers of writing, the “narrative folds” and the strength of the “words from below” used by Micheline. They enlighten us on the condition of young “single mothers” then exposed to discredit and to corrective measures. He brings back to life the loves and hatreds, the threatening and threatened bodies, the violence and intimate wounds resulting from a shirked abortion, a “seduction abduction”, as they said at the time to evoke rape. The girls look at a belly that for them refers to an unbearable event that does not belong to them: “It is not mine” we hear between Micheline’s lines! “I will abandon it if you abandon me”. And her mother replies, in a terrible lettre de cachet addressed to the court: “in any case she will not be able to keep it and neither will I”. No waffle, no euphemism, the reader is gripped by this extraordinary violence, and by the absence of fathers. It is not for want of having sought them out! The impossible search for paternity masks this violence. Everything is cleverly locked away.
In this story, we cannot help but think of all the women silenced after “this accident” that changes their lives. Like them, Micheline experienced the difficult youth of children from modest backgrounds; the backbreaking work at 15 in the fields: picking strawberries, working in canneries, carrying crates… She had a “broken neck and tired hands” very early on. But she passed her school leaving certificate, an unusual feat for girls of her condition. Despite her destitution and isolation, she has a strong capacity for resistance and questioning; her approach and her speaking out bear witness to others who remain invisible, like her friend Rose, whom she talks about in several of her letters. After a difficult start, Micheline’s letters to Odile quickly become intimate, sensitive, and full of emotions; They provide us with valuable information on the objective conditions of existence of “unwed mothers” from working-class backgrounds, who were often “put out on the street”: forced apprenticeship in a particular trade, injunction to put the child in a nursery, being put to work as a handywoman in the home of the bourgeoisie. Guardianship continues well beyond the age of majority.
The women’s circle
This is how Micheline is surrounded by multiple female figures (her mother, social workers, wet nurses, a few parishioners, the court order, the maternity home) who fuel judgments and reputations and reduce her body to a “deviant womb”. The slightest deviations are interpreted as the attributes of “bad girls” (the documentation collected in Bad girlsby Véronique Blanchard and David Niget completes this correspondence well). Trust is established between Odile, who at first tended to incriminate Micheline, and the latter, who finally opens a window of relationship and expression for her, which she invests with the energy of despair. This will be, says J.-F. Laé, the basis of a “feminine device”, that is to say an arrangement of forces that borrows the figure of “godfathering” associating affects, empathy and careA relationship free from traditional filiation links, but also from the institution’s control purposes.
Jean-François Laé analyzes the ambivalences of this “social motherhood” that is established under the aegis of child protection: a “nesting of motherhoods – biological, moral and authority” – animated by a “network of attention”, an “institutional circle”. Thanks to the inflection that Odile gives her, some of the attentions will allow Micheline to escape the “sexualization of codes” that encourages her to dispossess herself of her intimacy and her motherhood. We can say that this circle of “social motherhood” around poor women is a socio-sanitary cordon all the more formidable because it is discreet.
This work also provides us with valuable elements of analysis on the “living memory of professional experience” of social service actresses engaged “body and soul” in this type of support, with those who choose proximity, support and sharing: social worker, justice assistant, etc. Odile gradually appears as a modern professional, even if she remains attached to the founding values of protection and rehabilitation. Single, she does sports, is close to popular education and is committed to re-affiliating the mother and her daughter Corinne. To do this, she deviates from her professional duties, with small gestures that testify to the affects involved: mediation with the mother, playing with institutions, attention and material aid (making layette for little Corinne), moral support. And above all by agreeing to be the godmother for the little girl’s baptism. With this new attribute, her benevolent authority increases. The chapter devoted to wet nurses shows the ambivalence of the position of these workers within the framework of a policy based on control and mistrust.
Resistance strategies
The correspondence also reveals the know-how and tricks used by the girls in care (like Micheline) to bear the burden of their “bad reputation” and to create, despite the surveillance and precariousness of their situation, private corners and resources for confrontation. They “do not calm down”, “scream at the top of their lungs, manage as best they can, hide to give birth”, so that their child is not taken away from them. Like Albertine Sarrazin, a novelist writing at the same time, mentioned in the text, Micheline must transform herself to find some consistency.
She makes demands, asks for help, refuses this status of “bad girl” and aspires to “pretty things”: sheets, fabric, money. She runs away very early so as not to feel locked up; then she disappears from the correspondence. The sociologist does not let himself be discouraged and goes looking for her. He finds her, five years later, transformed: married, mother of a family, at peace.
Finally, the evocative force of the writing lies in this sensitive thickness introduced by the sociologist-narrator who intrudes into the intimacy of the relationship: the small engines of affects are animated, as in a film, sometimes fueled by his imagination: suppositions, the probable. He seems to be attending the baptism of little Corinne, and whispers in Micheline’s ear: “We must hold on!” The meticulous reconstruction of the places, events, social and cultural practices of the time allows him to show how “small things” can become “springs” and the smallest words “small uproars”.
Deprived of faces, rendered unrecognizable by the blows, even more anonymous than foreigners from the ends of the earth, these women raise their heads and find a possible representation in this book that dialogues in particular with many works by historians such as those of Ivan Jablonka, who wrote the history of abandoned children, or of Véronique Blanchard and David Niget on the “bad girls”, previously cited, as well as with those of Michel Foucault, Erving Goffman, Gilles Deleuze, Robert Castel, Arlette Farge, Philippe Artières. This mix is part of the current of narrative sociology where, alongside other researchers, Jean-François Laé seeks to reshuffle the cards of the archives of everyday life.