Madeleine Pelletier

Madeleine Pelletier (born May 18, 1874 in Paris , † December 19, 1939 in Épinay-sur-Orge ) was a French doctor and psychiatrist . She is considered one of the most influential French feminists and socialists before Simone de Beauvoir .

Live and act

Pelletier grew up in Paris, where her mother Anne Palassy from Auvergne and her father Louis Pelletier from Deux-Sèvres met for the first time. Her father had found a job in the transport industry, her mother worked as a domestic servant. After a third child was born in 1865, the parents started their own business as fruit and vegetable traders. Business was bad, and her father was severely paralyzed after an accident in 1878 and was dependent on care. Only two children had survived their mother's 12 pregnancies. Life had made her hard and alienated her from her daughter, who was looking for ways to escape the cold and social misery. She also separated herself from the increasing religiousness of her mother.

Initially active in anthropology , she studied with Charles Letourneau and Léonce Manouvrier the relationship between skull size and intelligence according to Paul Broca . His idea that the size of a human skull is a measure of intelligence and that women are generally intellectually inferior to men, attacked them later and left anthropology. In 1906 she was the first French woman to be admitted as a psychiatrist.

A lifelong activist in the women's movement , she was already in contact with feminist and anarchist groups in her youth . In 1906 she became secretary of La Solidarité des femmes and established it as one of the most radical feminist organizations of its time. In 1908 she represented them at the demonstrations for women's suffrage in Hyde Park . She edited their magazine La suffragiste . During this time she was also involved in the French section of the Workers' International (SFIO), was subsequently a member of its governing body until the outbreak of the World War and repeatedly represented the SFIO at international socialist congresses. In 1904 she interrupted a banquet to mark the centenary of the Civil Code , and both she and Hubertine Auclert demonstrated at polling stations in 1908. But her militant tactics were not successful with her fellow campaigners or in public.

In addition, she had been a Freemason in the mixed-gender lodge La Nouvelle Jérusalem since 1904 . She was close to Neo-Malthusianism ( see: Thomas Robert Malthus ), wrote for Le Néo-Malthusian and advocated birth control and the right to abortion .

After her death, she was buried in the communal grave of the Perray-Vaucluse Psychiatric Clinic.

Fonts (selection)

La femme en lutte pour ses droits , 1908
Idéologie d'hier: Dieu, la morale, la patrie , 1910
L'émancipation sexual de la femme , 1911
Le Droit à l'avortement , 1913
L'éducation féministe des filles , 1914
Mon voyage aventureux en Russie communiste , 1922 (first in La Voix de la Femme at the end of 1921 )
La femme vierge (autobiography), 1933

literature

CS Allen: Sisters of Another Sort: Freemason Women in Modern France, 1725-1940 In: The Journal of Modern History , 2003, 75: 783-835
F. Gordon: The Integral Feminist, Madeleine Pelletier, 1874-1939, Feminism, Socialism and Medicine . 1990, Polity Press
C. Sowerwine: Activism and Sexual Identity - the Life and Words of Pelletier, Madeleine (1874-1939) . Mouvement Social . 1991, 157: 9-32
C. Sowerwine: Woman's Brain, Man's Brain: feminism and anthropology in late nineteenth-century France . Women's History Review . 2003, 12: 289-307
Christine Bard : Les Filles de Marianne: Histoire des féminismes. 1914-1940 . Paris: Fayard, 1995

Web links

Claudine Mitchell: Madeleine Pelletier (1874-1939): The Politics of Sexual Oppression Feminist Review, No. 33, D. 72–92 (English)

Individual evidence

^ ^A ^b Yannick Ripa: Femmes d'exception - les raisons de l'oubli: Madeleine Pelletier, “un individu avant d'être un sex” (pp. 63–71) . Éditions Le Chevalier Bleu, Paris 2018, ISBN 979-1-03180273-2 , pp. 66-69 .
↑ ^a ^b Jad Adams: Women and the Vote. A world history. Oxford University Press, Oxford 2014, ISBN 978-0-19-870684-7 , page 295.

personal data
SURNAME	Pelletier, Madeleine
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	French suffragette
DATE OF BIRTH	May 18, 1874
PLACE OF BIRTH	Paris
DATE OF DEATH	December 19, 1939
Place of death	Épinay-sur-Orge

[:0-1] A ^b Yannick Ripa: Femmes d'exception - les raisons de l'oubli: Madeleine Pelletier, “un individu avant d'être un sex” (pp. 63–71) . Éditions Le Chevalier Bleu, Paris 2018, ISBN 979-1-03180273-2 , pp. 66-69 .

[Adams295-2] Jad Adams: Women and the Vote. A world history. Oxford University Press, Oxford 2014, ISBN 978-0-19-870684-7 , page 295.