In children’s publishing, highlighting the “forgotten” people of History

Introduce children to the “forgotten” of History: a growing crop of children’s books and podcasts feature eminent women scientists, resistance fighters or chivalrous women who marked their era but remain in the shadow of men.

Pioneers: 50 women with extraordinary destinies, Evening Stories for Rebel Girls 1 and 2, Portraits of women frees, Our heroines… Driven by the success of Pénélope Bagieu’s Culottées, this feminist wave is now sweeping through the children’s sections of bookstores but also on the airwaves.

Historical podcast aimed at 7-12 year olds, The Odysseys from France Inter have thus totaled 40 million listens in five years by taking a facetious look at Alice Guy, the first female filmmaker, the little-known discoverer of DNA Rosalind Franklin or the pirate Anne Bonny.

Also readAlice Guy, the world’s first female director, is reborn in a superb album

Producer of this program, Laure Grandbesançon talks about a “very, very long” rebalancing work “after 2000 years of patriarchy”. “We must tell the story of these women to open the imagination and show that it is not only men who are daredevils and brave danger”she told AFP.

Also targeting the younger generation, the essayist Titiou Lecoq extended his work on The Great Forgotten in an illustrated version intended for teenagers and entitled Women also made history (ed. Les Arènes). “My idea started from a question: what is the history that I was not taught at school?”she explains to AFP. “For a long time, I believed what they said at school: that women had not been able to participate in the major events of French life because they had been prevented from doing so as women”she explains. “But it’s false, they always participated in political life, always wrote, excelled in the field of the arts but they were just forgotten posthumously”.

“Not a foregone conclusion”

School textbooks have long been held responsible for this «invisibilisation». According to a 2020 study by the Hubertine Auclert Ile-de-France Center, the works or work of women are “25 times fewer” in history books than those of men and only 3.2% of the biographies present in the works ofSecond are devoted to women.

Citing physicist Marie Curie and mathematician Tatiana Ehrenfest, the study also highlighted the “tendency to downplay importance” women scientists by associating them “above all (…) to the work of their husbands”. A Senate report in 2014 cited as an example a school textbook which devoted a double page to the dissemination of Newton’s thought by Voltaire in “simply forgetting” to mention his translator Émilie du Châtelet.

Also readCatel: “The lives of my heroines go beyond fiction”

There is, however, no shortage of leading female figures. “There are even plenty of them”underlines Albin Quéru, founder of Quelle histoire. Alongside the famous Joan of Arc and Coco Chanel, this publishing house for 7-10 year olds has explored more unknown female destinies including that of Eleanor of Aquitaine (1122-1204), who was successively Queen of France and England and played a major political role. “It is not a militant act but, when we are interested in History, we want to tell it in the most complete way possible and it turns out that History is full of female figures who have had an importance capital”adds the publisher, who recently published The 100 great women of history.

Without completely obscuring exceptional destinies, Titiou Lecoq insists in his work on the role “ordinary women”including in very distant times. “We always talk about prehistoric men, assuming that these were the men who hunted and made fire. The question doesn’t even arise, when in reality we don’t know it at all.says the writer who hopes that these books will help children take control of their destiny. “The idea is to tell them: it is up to you to write the rest of this History and it is not a foregone conclusion”.