At 87, Micheline Dumont begins to tell the story of a historian: her own. In such long roots, she delivers her memoirs. “Basically, it could be the life of all the women of my generation that I tell,” she says. “All the same, she admits in an interview, I had a privileged chance. I realized, while writing this book, that for a very long time, I had no intellectual beacon to find my bearings. I always told my students that I had completed all my studies before Duplessis had even died. This gives an idea of the climate in which I grew up. I took what they told us to be true… I repeated it. »
She was one of the first to document the “situation of women in the province of Quebec” by studying several issues that affect their lives: divorce, contraception, abortion, equal pay, discrimination, citizenship, exclusion from the world of work. Micheline Dumont is interested in the lives of all women, not just those who serve as emblems in old history books, such as Marie de l’Incarnation, Jeanne Mance, Marie Rollet and other heroines of New France. “Notice that often there is not much more today that is said about women in what gives us to read a nationalist history! We are always presented with heroines. […] On the sidelines. To the side. The women in there are never really part of the overall narrative. It’s a page here, a page there that we add about a woman. Nothing more. But the bottom line is not changed: women are left out. Micheline Dumont regrets that this story is perpetuated in defiance of a global history.
A lot of ground has been made, it seems to him nevertheless. However, “there still remains the obligation to rethink history to integrate the reality of women. We must add, to the strictly political framework, a social dimension, a global perspective, a feminist anchorage. »
At the University of Montreal, the class to which Micheline Dumont belongs has only two women. She was marked in particular by the courses of Guy Frégault, while quickly regretting the narrow nature of her training. Her studies did not “acquaint her with any of the important philosophers of the West, such as Hegel, Kant, Marx, Nietzsche, Bergson and de Beauvoir”.
On the occasion of the graduation, John Diefenbaker, the new Prime Minister of Canada, speaks. He does it in English only. Micheline Dumont remembers having to salute the British flag. In fact, a large part of the social life of his time took place in English. “I suffered, all my youth, this social relationship of domination, to several degrees. And I was bathed, moreover, in the purring nationalist. Back home, there was a framework with all the prime ministers of Canada. I knew everyone’s name. It was much later, with the Parti Québécois, that I learned to question this regime. »
It will become independentist, but not in the name of an old revengeful nationalism which reproduces a model of domination which it abhors. “I have always been very critical of the relationship between nationalism and feminism. I stayed out of it. Besides, if you are really a historian, it is difficult to be a nationalist. Yes, there are nations that are oppressed. But the facets of the story are many. And the story does not just come out of politics. In the narrative we have been told, in the name of nationalism, the complexity of society is passed over in silence. »
The reading of Second sex of Simone de Beauvoir, at the time of her studies at the university, will change her. “Yes, this reading literally transforms me. It’s major. Before reading the Second sex, I had assimilated the principles imposed by Catholic society on women, their place, their role, the children, the husband… and I was, until very late, overwhelmed by a considerable ignorance regarding sexual relations. »
The experience of sexuality was repressed. The babies, it was said, were simply found in the hospital. It was the “Savages” who brought them, people repeated to avoid the question. This expression, used without qualms, was frequent and considered normal at the time, observes the historian. “I realized, with Simone de Beauvoir, the power of the social prescriptions against which I was still struggling in a rather confused way. »
In her personal diary of the time, the historian indicates that she was “impressed” by reading Simone de Beauvoir. This was certainly not the case for everyone in the community of Quebec historians. At the same time, in Ways of the futureLionel Groulx rails against this youth who read “greedily the existentialist Sartre [et] his sad muse, Simone de Beauvoir, both secularists of theological and Christian themes,” writes the historian in his cassock.
Come back from afar
In the mid-1950s, Micheline Dumont belonged to the ranks of the Christian Student Youth (JEC), a Catholic movement that incubates executives for the society of tomorrow. In the summer, the members of the JEC go near Valleyfield, to an island that belonged to the Dr Paul-Emile Lalanne. This man, during the 1930s, supported the fascist party of Adrien Arcand. In his island residence, swastikas are embedded in all the furniture. This house, ceded to the archdiocese, the members of the JEC will occupy it without worrying about these swastikas. “It was a bit mysterious, remembers the historian. We arrived there by boat. I didn’t know much about World War II or the Holocaust. To be honest, I didn’t know. But I knew the Dr Lalanne was an “illegitimate” doctor. I had known that he performed abortions. But I didn’t even know what it was! Women come a long way, she says.
“For me, the major evolution, in the XXe century, it will always be the feminist revolution, asserts Micheline Dumont. It is however not won yet. Far from there. Look at these women in Iran who are being killed. In our country, very often now, women adopt the same behavior as men, simply because they find themselves in politics or on boards of directors. They believe that what matters is to make money, at all costs. They repeat that, like our Prime Minister, moreover, who constantly makes these indecent remarks where his society is reduced to questions of money, big salaries. Many women hold the same speech as him. It’s distressing. This does not advance us at all. The necessary feminist revolution, that was not it! It was necessary to conceive of relations of collaboration, friendship, mutual responsibility, while promoting social equality and the redistribution of wealth. »