By reading in The duty of March 26 our file on the under-representation of the word of the experts in the media space, Michèle Stanton-Jean remembered a paper which she had written in 1978 for the French magazine witches. With the theme “La jasette”, this issue was precisely about the invisibility of women’s speech. The historian, who wrote History of women in Quebec for four centuries with the Clio collective, allowed us to reproduce it as a testimony to the progress made, but also of the progress that remains to be made for women’s voices to pass from private to public.
Of all the places where discourse is organized from which women have been excluded, history is perhaps the most scandalous. History consecrates the cancellation of women’s speech, its reduction to chatter, to insignificance since the object of History is to retain through daily events what is significant and that she didn’t remember anything about women.
Speeches by men, we’ve all read them, famous sayings, witticisms, quotes, etc., but from women… nothing. We would not have opened our mouths that everything, it seems, would have happened anyway. The importance of what we have said has little weight since it is not up to us to define what is important or not: man decrees what History retains in his sexist memory. Regulated by this machine that does not belong to us, we have always missed the boat of History.
And that in other centuries we women said that the world was wrong, that violence was not acceptable, that the environment was important, that was the chatter of women from of beings with bird brains. But as soon as the preoccupations of male discourse turned to one or another of these subjects, it became significant.
Located in the spatiotemporal space, the discourse of women continually appears as something marginalized in its content and in its meaning. Relegated to the private, the feminine discourse is that of the kitchen, of the children, of the things that women talk about among themselves: they chat on the telephone, in the office, on the galleries, in the street. There is in learning to speak what a little girl, what a young girl, what a woman must say and what she must not say, what she can talk about and what she cannot can talk. All things being sifted, they were left with the chatter.
But it happens that today large dimensions of chatting have been taken over by the introduction of interpersonal relations into the culture of work. Over time, we realized that purely economic performance standards were no longer enough to maintain a motivating climate in companies. Psychology and animation are now fattening by teaching men to dialogue, to cry, to shout, to express themselves.
All this “nonsense” became serious things because the males picked them up. They learn through human relations sessions, through big money, to cry, to shout, to tell others how they feel. What we have tried unsuccessfully to teach them over the centuries, they are now paying to learn, because it can help them become better bosses or employees and get pay raises. They have the means to pay to learn what they don’t know, whereas we, at work, if we don’t know how to do something, we have to find it ourselves.
Basically, analyzing the question, we discover that chatting is a non-scientific discourse, an individual discourse, a discourse that takes place in private. And as soon as the woman brings or tries to bring her concerns into the public arena, she is described as mad or hysterical. On the other hand, when these same concerns are taken up by men, they have a good chance of being well received.
What we wanted to avoid, and what we are still trying to avoid, is that chatter becomes political through the mouths of women. Then he would risk being heard by all women and creating the basis of solidarity between them. Isn’t the fear that feminism inspires and the fear of seeing it spreading intimately linked to the fear of the politicization of chatting?
Already, in 1919, Mr.gr Paquet wrote about the arrival of women in the workplace: “These environments are very mixed. Meetings are made, conversations are held, contacts are established from which new aspirations are born in the female heart. This worthy Quebec prelate understood the danger of letting women “hold conversations”.
Little by little, they understood that they had to appropriate their gestures and their words. They discovered the importance of chatting. After believing that it was necessary to become like men to enter history, they understood that it is as women, by chatting, that they would have to discover and write their history.