By Maryse Dumas, trade unionist
For fourteen years, from 1967 to 1981, Ménie Grégoire had a daily radio show on RTL. For the first time, the floor is given to women, to all women, the anonymous ones, those who are never heard, those who do not dare to express themselves. The show airs daily at 3 p.m., a time when husbands are at work, children are napping or at school, and household chores are on a slight break. Built around the testimonies of women, it constitutes a triple innovation. From being a simple passive listener, the audience becomes an actor in the show. It is the words of women, often from working-class backgrounds, which are collected even though they are almost non-existent in the public space. They tackle intimate subjects, still taboo in families and society.
“Half of France is still waiting for the telephone and the other half for the dial tone”, it is the mail which collects women’s confidences. The letters, at least some, are read on the air, preserving the anonymity of the authors. Ménie Grégoire answers them in the show. She advises them and encourages them to express themselves from deep within themselves, without taboos. She doesn’t lecture them, doesn’t give them morals. She listens to them, values them, understands them. The listeners recognize themselves in what is said by others. The letters are multiplying: 5,000 letters will be read, at least in extracts, on the air but tens of thousands more arrive in whole bags at the station. Preserved and archived, for the most part, they now give rise to both historical and sociological studies.
They bear witness to the intimate experiences of women in a moment of profound changes in their condition: massive entry into paid work, the beginnings of contraception and abortion, transformation of couple and family relationships, demands for equality in all the domains. Like a foretaste of our current social networks, other letters rebel, insult, threaten Ménie Grégoire, demonstrating the depth of resistance to the emancipation of women. A recent book, “Women’s Hour”, retraces this period and allows us to take stock of it. It’s a novel, neither an essay nor a biography, but a bit of all of that at the same time. Adèle Bréau, granddaughter of Ménie Grégoire, is the author.
It interweaves three stories: that of Ménie Grégoire and the transformation that takes place in her, in her own life and that of her family, as the show develops; that of two women from working-class backgrounds whose lives will be turned upside down. Finally, the third story is that of the narrator, our contemporary, whose personal life in the era of MeToo echoes and extends the developments made by the previous generation. This very well-written novel makes us feel the profound changes in French society in those years, when the private became political and women were actors of their destinies. Ménie Grégoire, “the most listened to woman in France” is herself drawn into the movement. Born in 1919, raised in a rather bourgeois and Catholic environment, she admitted in 1973 to having radically changed her point of view on abortion due to the number and content of the testimonies received to the point that it seemed impossible to refuse any longer. its legalization.
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