In « Corset de papier » (ed. Divergences), published on March 26, Lucie Barette, literature researcher at the University of Caen, concisely retraces the history of the women’s press in the 19th century and brilliantly questions the matrix that was able to constitute for the current newspapers the sexist contents of the time. Exclusion of women from the political field, devaluation of their creative capacities, reduction to a domestic function, idealization of their bodies, but also unexpected union around common interests… revolutions up to us and which, Lucie Barette has a presentiment of, are in the process of changing. The scientist returns to this fascinating object of study for ELLE.
SHE. In the 19th century, the first women were born when a formidable legislative arsenal was erected to curb the spread of the press. Can you recall this troubled context?
Lucie Barrette. The 19th century was a very repressive period for the press in general. Under Napoleon, first, who understood very well how to use the media and censors any form of opposition that would pass through this medium. Then from 1836, the year that marks the entry into the « media era » mentioned by researchers Marie-Ève Thérenty and Alain Vaillant. Two press owners then endeavored to greatly reduce the cost of subscriptions by inserting advertising inserts into their pages. The number of readers is exploding, and newspapers with it: the media are becoming more democratic. Many laws come to frame this definitive emergence of the press as a fourth power. The general press must, among other things, pay a deposit. The principle is the same as for an apartment — only you have to pay a fine if you speak ill of the king.
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SHE. Strangely, the specialized press, intended for women or children, escapes the guarantee.
LB An exception that could suggest that you can write whatever you want there… except that not at all. In reality, it is accepted that anyone who is not subject to this sanction simply does not approach politics. This is even more true when you are a woman. The citizens have wanted access to political institutionalization since the Revolution of 1789, but are systematically sent back to the ropes. No question of giving them the right to political reflection, in writing or elsewhere.
SHE. You show, however, that some take roundabout ways to assert themselves.
LB Faced with this attempt at muzzling, women rely on circumvention strategies. In the feminine, political commentaries are obviously not designated as such, rather included within more conventional articles. But aren’t the themes linked to the conditions of women, to their education, in short to fields considered as feminine, political in themselves? As they also do not have the right to own a newspaper, it is necessarily men who are placed at the head of the newspapers founded by women. They can therefore quite write an article without signing it: one will imagine that it is a man who wrote it. Writing under a pseudonym is also used.
SHE. So how are women who write perceived?
LB They are not taken seriously at all. It was estimated at that time that women were deprived of all genius, to the point of subjecting them to a “denial of anteriority”. This expression, coined by Delphine Naudier, designates the tenacity that men have in refusing any literary ancestry to the opposite sex. As if women were nothing but eternal beginners, without know-how or talent.
The few who have the audacity to comply despite this displayed disdain remain confined to genres considered minor – romance, manual of good manners, educational writings – consistent with the maternal function expected of them. They often find themselves caricatured in a monstrous way because in the male mind, a woman who writes is no longer quite a woman. She enters a territory that does not belong to her and suddenly leaves the characteristics envisaged as feminine – devotion, absence of ego, sensitivity… In a drawing depicting a woman writer, the cartoonist Honoré de Daumier shows her thus hunchbacked, with a child who drowns in the bathtub in the background, not far from a starving husband. The total.
SHE. The editorial line of the women’s press then focuses on religious morality. Why ?
LB I tend to say that women have done “good luck with bad luck”, that is to say, as best they could. We had to find solutions to talk about what concerned them without putting ourselves out of the law. However, in the 19th century, the discourse that directed them towards religious morality was omnipresent. It was accentuated from the 1850s when the papal bull on the Immaculate Conception was promulgated. Mary, identified as the only woman not to have been touched by original sin, becomes the ultimate model. As they took part in the revolutionary riots, even claimed the carrying of arms, it is also a question for the men of ensuring a new function to the women, while being careful to keep them away from political responsibilities. They will be the guardians of the home and, therefore, the guarantors of republican values.
SHE. This assignment of the woman to the domestic aspect implies that she is, according to your terms, both « good wife », « good housewife » and « good mother » – a « total woman », in short. To what extent did women’s newspapers convey this image at the time?
LB The couple, the home and education then constitute the three themes that we find without exception in all the women’s magazines. Young girls, who no longer go to school after the age of 14, are taught that their only destiny, on which they must concentrate all their attention, is to find a husband, to bear him children and to hold all that little world in a comfortable home. These injunctions go through educational articles, fiction, direct addresses to readers. Paradoxically, the home is seen as the realm of women, a place where they would enjoy all rights, as opposed to a hostile outside world. However, this is completely false: women have no power over their children and remain the property of their husbands. The house therefore represents for them the most dangerous place there is – and this is, statistically, still the case today.
SHE. You also insist on how the representation of the female body, still condemned today, was already biased in the 19th century. In what ?
LB The representation of the body then varies according to the social hierarchy. The bourgeois body is a coat rack, a brand content before the time of this class and its value, money. Therefore, the female body must illustrate the financial success of the household, in particular by the quality of the fabrics: the more fabric there is, the more means there are. Her immobility, too, is characteristic: an immovable woman is a woman who does not have to move to do things, who waits for others to do things for her – she is also a woman who is prevented from participating in public life and who, by not acting, is doing a service. The injunctions to whiteness, thinness and ultra youth are already present: time is not supposed to mark the bourgeois female body.
The physique of peasant women and artists, on the other hand, is described as more available, more helpful, even workable. Knowing that these women had trouble making a living from their profession, they were then mostly demi-mondaines – sort of sex workers of the time. This positioning, in fact, on the side of sexuality outside marriage and outside of religion makes them appear with a frontal gaze, loose hair, neck and chest exposed.
SHE. The feminine are still pinned, currently, for their more or less assumed connivance with the advertisers. However, you prove that this path to consumption has existed since the 19th century and is even constitutive of the idea of the press.
LB The press is presented as regularly in crisis: yet it has always been a question of it being profitable. From the outset, newspapers may have been a space for information, but they were also a source of investment for greedy bosses, as Balzac’s “Lost Illusions” shows so well.
In the 19th century, native advertising or infomercials were therefore already developing: this was called “farmed” chronicles. They often take the form of “fictitious walks”. These walks have the virtue of showing the streets, the city in evolution with its monuments, its building sites – in Paris, it is the period of the great works of Haussmann – and its working women. In her wanderings, like a happy coincidence, the journalist often ends up mentioning such a shop that sells earrings, such a seamstress who offers clothes. Then from 1835, under the impetus of advertising agencies like Havas, there would appear advertising inserts that were suddenly much easier to spot, pages entirely filled with small rectangles of advertising. The current feminine are quite the heirs.
SHE. Despite the contrasting picture that you paint of the history of the women’s press, you insinuate that this press could also prove, from the 19th century, a vector of emancipation for women. To what extent?
LB The 19th century renewed and anchored very marked gender norms. In this context, where it remains very difficult for a woman to embark on a literary career, journalism nevertheless stands out as an extremely effective parallel path. The women’s press, in particular, turns out to be a place occupied above all by women. These women are certainly constrained, but this space exists: they find themselves on the editorial board, write, earn money because of this activity – even if they cannot, it is true, yet enjoy it freely. In other words, the women’s press generates autonomy and the collective, principles that go against the very solitary role attributed to these women – a law then goes so far as to prevent them from meeting in groups of more than five, out of fear. that they foment.
There has always been, in the women’s press, something of the order of non-mixed choice. This configuration, which can only lead to thinking about a particular object, gives hope for what can happen in the current consecrated journals.
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