First conference in the cycle dedicated to women workers offered by the Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris. It will address the "midinettes" women workers of fashion, gender, domination and resistance at the turn of the 20th century. By Anne Monjaret, ethnologist.
Gustave Charpentier and other male artists (writers, painters, sculptors...), bourgeois or moving in bourgeois circles at the turn of the 20th century, brought, in their own way, the women workers of fashion, the "midinettes", heirs to the "grisettes", out of anonymity. But it was indeed in their own way that they forged a representation of these needle workers, ignoring working conditions in the workshops, preferring instead to valorize the embodiment of their femininity, the fruit of a masculine imagination. These artists somewhat neglected social reality. And even when it was taken into account, as Gustave Charpentier did by founding a social work aimed at young women workers, it was indeed in his own way that he sought to educate these working-class women. Although opening a window for them onto artistic disciplines that were barely accessible to them, wasn't this popular education a means of better controlling them. So many initiatives that nurture a paternalistic, if not patriarchal, androcentric vision of society that never ceased to confine the midinettes symbolically and socially, under the pretext of good morality, and which ultimately erased them from the social scene. In what ways were the midinettes troublesome? How, in such a context, can we untangle the paradox of these male-female relations, understand the expressions of gender and class relations that were then at play, as well as the ways the midinettes sought to free themselves from this domination through small and large acts of resistance? How can we explain the "silences of history" (Perrot) as well as the "silences of heritage" (Monjaret) regarding them? The midinettes are the great forgotten of fashion, even more so the "forgotten vanguard of the proletariat" (Didry). Anne Monjaret is an ethnologist, research director at the Laboratory of Political Anthropology (CNRS/EHESS), she is involved in numerous journals in social sciences and humanities, co-organizes a research seminar at EHESS. Her work is part of an anthropology of work and focuses particularly on cultures, memories and professional and urban heritage. She is interested in fashion professions (milliner, dressmaker, feather worker) and the figure of the midinette, Parisian needle worker.
Source: paris.fr — photo: Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris/4-EPM-00303