Marguerite Durand is considered as one of the first feminists in France. From her birth to a personnal and professionnal career full of emotions, to an icon of feminism in France using press as a means to spread the feminist ideology.
Biography
Marguerite Charlotte Durand was born on the 24th January 1864 and died the 14 March 1936 in Paris. She was raised in the Dames Trinitaires coven, where she studied before attending the Conservatory of Paris where she received the first price of comedy in 1880.
That's how she was able to enter the French Academy in 1881. Five years after this event, she got an out-mariage kid with Antonin Périvier, the co-director of the famous French Figaro newspapers.
He tried to remove her child from her, and Marguerite has to call minister Georges Clémenceau for help in order to get her kid back.
Professional career
Une vocation
Her professionnal career and fight for feminism began in a strange manner. In 1888, Marguerite Durand decided to stop working as an actress to mary Georges Laguerre, an advocate and boulangist deputy. From this union resulted her future vocation.
Thanks to her husband being a deputy, she attended several conferences and politic and journalistic congregations. She then worked as a journalist for the propagandist boulangist La Presse newspapers owned by her husband.
Finally, the couple split in 1895 while Marguerite Durand decided to start a journalist career for the Figaro, a famous French daily newspapers.
Her fight for feminism
Working for the Figaro, she got sent several times to conferences and congresses to write articles about what happened and got said. In April 1896, the Figaro sent her once more to a congress, this time in order to write a false article that would qualify the pronounced speeches as mischievous. The aim of this action was to scare and divide the people, yet she realized what was actually said sounded very coherent and deep, which interested her a lot more than the mission she got asked to do.
The decision
After this event, Marguerite decided to not write anything about the congress. Instead, she got the idea to write a directed newspapers, written by women for women to finally give visibility to their work.
"One knows nothing about women's admirable activity, even feminists ignore three quarters of what we do."
Creation of the newspapers
That's how was born the La Fronde newspaper, in 1897, showing articles about women, gathering their opinions and testimonies on the system, politics, sports, etc. Marguerite Durand fought during her whole journalist career for women's right to vote. She also created, in 1909, another newspapers called "Les Nouvelles" with the aim to fight for the same objective. Marguerite Durand participated a lot into fights for the feminist movement, knowing defeats as well as victories, and helping the public opinion moving forward about the importance of women in society.
To remember
Marguerite Durand was the first woman willing to equip her movement with journalism, in order to fight alongside the people and against the government, and have more influence and impact on the political and social decisions to come. Despite the defeats, she kept asserting that feminism and pacifism are linked to each other. She finally decided, at the end of her life, to bequeath all the documentation she had about women's History to the town of Paris in 1931. Marguerite Durand then became an icon of feminism for her relentlessness and determination during all these years.
