She hates being ecstatic about her age, we read, so we don’t tell her, but we think it loud, very loud. Rarely have we seen a person of 94 spring so alert and elegant, physically as intellectually and with a memory as intact as the spirit is sharp. To believe that the work preserves… Project manager, with Georges Duby, of the colossal History of women in the West (seven volumes published between 1991 and 1992), having come to fill an abyssal void of a story written by men with a masculine outlook, Michelle Perrot is indeed teeming with projects.
“I’m going to have to sort it out, she concedes, and then there are also all these prefaces that I accepted, it’s over; besides, what’s the use of a preface?” But we feel that the lady has trouble refusing requests: thus, her March 8, International Women’s Day, is booked (“I’m not crazy about the Days, that said, that one has a historical meaning , difficult not to participate”); thus, this book, The time of feminismsthe result of 14 interviews of two hours each over a year with the journalist and writer, Eduardo Castillo, one of his former students.
“I am a historian, and a feminist”
A “little” didactic and educational book, capable of enlightening today’s young generations on the status of women in the past and the incredible female conquests of the last fifty years. “It was Eduardo who took the initiative, confides Michelle Perrot, with precisely this idea of a passage to young women aged 20-30 and to other audiences. They want to know more. It disarms me to see that some of them no longer have any idea what it was like to “get pregnant”, as they said, abortion remains abstract for them.”
“I am a historian, and a feminist. The nuance is very important, she wishes to affirm at the opening of the essay. I reject the idea of a history ‘at the service of’. The historian is the mediator of speech, and it participates in the deconstruction of evidence and the emergence of new objects”. Michelle Perrot began her career by studying economic and social history (with a doctoral thesis on the workers’ strikes of the 19th century), and knows the pitfalls. “There were things you couldn’t say, dogmatic language; all of this was not to the liking of my boss at the Sorbonne, Ernest Labrouste, who said ‘the working class has a right to its history, but to his true story.”
George Sand and “the infamous Civil Code”
The same for women. No militant or ideological history, therefore, from the pen of Michelle Perrot, who frankly points out her late awakening to “the cause”. “We are not born a feminist, we become one”, she writes, paraphrasing Simone de Beauvoir, whose work she admired as much as her personality. Just as she was fascinated by those of George Sand, whom she cites here abundantly, in particular with regard to the “infamous Civil Code”, a monument to patriarchy (tolerance of adultery and the crime of passion for men, etc.) and lack of education, “the great crime of men against women”.
Remember that the baccalaureate only became unisex in 1924… and that women’s access to the bar and the Ecole des Beaux-Arts dates back to 1900. Randomly on the pages, Michelle Perrot also offers us some masculine pearls: the Abbé Sieyès distinguishing active citizens from passive ones, that is to say the poor, foreigners, madmen and… women. Proudhon, he, downright misogynistic, praising the virility of the working world and seeing only two categories of women, “courtesans or housewives”.
“#MeToo, a major event”
Education, work, political rights and finally the body… It is more or less in this order that claims and progress have taken place. Until the #MeToo movement which enchants the nonagenarian historian: “The formula is very beautiful, Me, me, as an individual, and Too, too, the others; it signals the end of the distinction between the public and the private. The particular becomes general, and it is no longer just ‘a child if I want…’ but ‘love if I want…’. Social networks are essential here, and women have been able to seize it.”
We would listen to him for hours, and we would also read his memoirs. The ace ! “I still have a very strong idea of the secret and my self is not very interesting, she tells us. No, what amuses me the most is a modest essay on the stairs, as a place of power, architecture, a place where one also stumbles, I intend to explore some of these paths.” So go for the stairs, and we promise to climb up, his own, for this great occasion. Marianne Payot
The time of feminisms, by Michelle Perrot and Eduardo Castillo. Grasset, 208 pages, €20.