What if Émilise Lessard-Therrien’s decision, announced on April 29, to resign from her position as female co-spokesperson for Québec solidaire was only the tree that hides the forest? The same old forest, I mean, the one that has overshadowed women in politics — and elsewhere — for a long time.
I do not personally know the 32-year-old resigned. I have no idea how governance works within QS, as within other Quebec political parties for that matter. I am neither an analyst nor a parliamentary correspondent. It is rather as a citizen that I express myself, by trying to raise questions about the place that women find in politics in 2024. Considering this resignation, that of other female politicians who have thrown in the towel in progress of mandate; between their commitments, their desire to change things and their personal life, including motherhood, the eternal mental load and, very often, the weight of guilt of not being adequate anywhere in the end, I wonder how it is Is it possible to keep up week after week? Is there a reconciliation between active politics and family, balance in short? In my opinion, this should be one of the priorities of the time. “Then, at one point, I came home and there was a lot of meaning there, sitting at the kitchen table, Flora tinkering in the sun. […] I was so thirsty for this sweetness, so thirsty for this light. I could no longer justify why I was gone all the time,” the woman who gave birth to her second child in 2020 wrote on her social networks.
It was, among other things, this passage that caught my attention, perhaps above and beyond the rest. The rest will pass through electoral realignments… Not this crux. Afterwards, we wonder why it is so difficult to recruit younger people into politics – especially women, we will say it frankly – and to keep them in the long term, and in health. I don’t see how it’s possible in the current system to stay afloat, in an ever more accelerated manner, while always meeting everyone’s expectations. Unless perhaps you are one of the privileged ones, have outside help, a hyper-invested co-parent who has time, a lot of time to fill in the absences of the one who goes to the front 7 days a week. Otherwise, who can boast of having all that? If, in addition, we encounter misogynistic remarks online, and we swallow a feeling of immobility, I understand the confusion.
Of course, there will always be counter-examples of those who have succeeded from yesterday to today. With or without offspring. I imagine they have some serious armor, combined with volcanic energy. I would like to know their recipe. However, if devoting yourself entirely to your convictions, even if it means forgetting yourself, is achievable, depriving yourself of your children, of quality time, the time of a mandate, is another story. Is this one of the concessions to be made when taking part in active politics? In a so-called progressive society? Really ?
“We never name the sacrifice of mothers,” replied columnist Josée Blanchette to one of my comments along these lines under her Facebook sharing of the said Lessard-Therrien announcement. “All the sources of inequality that we are struggling to combat suggest that it will still take a long time to eradicate them. Especially if we don’t make it an object of collective combat. Women can complain about it among themselves, but do not dare to do so publicly, as if society was not ready to hear them. […] These are the consequences of the remnants of patriarchy,” underlines the philosopher Élisabeth Badinter in Gentlemen, one more effort… (Flammarion-Plon), his most recent essay, in which the octogenarian questions motherhood, which is not “shared” enough between mothers and fathers. We can agree or disagree on this theme, but it is difficult not to highlight it in the lack of engagement of the younger generations in politics.
As a voter, I seek to identify with profiles that suit me; able to grasp the content of my reality and that of my family. Without feeling represented, I find it difficult to keep faith in our elected officials. I don’t think I’m alone in my clan. Because of a political system poorly adapted to current realities and still woven with a few retrograde strings, we may be missing out on some damn good politicians. I don’t think we can afford it. This “crisis” and the next provincial elections should be an opportunity to set the record straight on the place we really want to give to women in politics in 2024. Beyond the quest for parity that the parties claim pursue. For me, at the polls, that will count well before the rest…