A Visual History of Women’s Emancipation

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    During the Belle Époque, the women who took on “men’s work” – doctors, journalists, and lawyers, but also coach drivers and postal workers – met with incredulity, hilarity, and more generally hostility. Postcards began to spread as a medium during the rise of early feminism and offer a striking representation of these reactions.

    Working-class women, labouring in factories, mines, or fields, were not subject to any mockery however. On the contrary, the sketches or photographs on the cards showed their difficult postures and working conditions, testifying to women’s muscular strength and unveiling the important role they played in the country’s modernisation and industrialisation.

    Sea workers, Corsican shepherdesses, and resin tappers were also photographed with a measure of respect. Oyster gatherers, prawn and mussel catchers, and fish carriers posed with their working instruments in short skirts or trousers. They were presented to tourists as a local curiosity, but one that did not threaten the sexual division of labour, as these activities had long been the remit of women.

    However, the senders’ comments, identified and analysed throughout the book by J. Rennes, were largely unkind: they expressed thinly veiled disgust at the virility of the women’s poses and outfits. The bourgeois tourist therefore regarded the almost exotic figure of the working-class woman with disdain.

    Female drivers of coaches or motor-driven taxis met with a particular degree of incredulity and hilarity. The instruments of this profession – whips, reins, and mastery of the technical and mechanical gestures necessary to drive horse-drawn and then automobile carriages – represented a real attack on the “natural” order of the sexes. The Figaro of August 5th, 1905, stated that: “Female chauffeurs earning a living in this profession are as implausible as female astronomers or female engineers”. They were either presented as devoid of all femininity, mannish, in their inelegant uniforms or, on the contrary, they suddenly bared their charms for all to see following a collision that sent them head over heels. In all cases, the aim was to make people laugh at their expense.