Once a month, The duty challenges history enthusiasts to decipher a current theme based on a comparison with a historical event or character.
On March 8, the name of Jeanne Lapointe was officially anchored in the toponymy of Laval University, which announced with a moving ceremony the new designation of its educational sciences tower.
The Jeanne-Lapointe pavilion permanently honors the memory of this influential thinker of modern Quebec, the first woman professor of literature at Laval University, from 1939 to 1987. Her pioneering career left its mark on the university institution, literary life, school system and feminist advances in Quebec.
Jeanne Lapointe would highlight the irony of finding herself celebrated in this way when she preferred to place artists and ideas at the forefront rather than herself. This recognition, however, extends its deep desire to see women given the merit of their work and recognized the relevance of their voices in the public space.
The event also reminds us of the ways in which the values of freedom and humanism that she defended throughout her life are relevant in our social issues. The debates of recent years on the autonomy of mediated speech, secularism and the financing of the education system, or equality of opportunity and the sexes have shaken up the cards of the historical games led by this woman of letters and her acolytes.
Open the way
The initial trajectory of Jeanne Lapointe shows the breakthroughs made by and for women, at the end of the 1930s, in the masculine and clerical enclosure that then constituted the university order.
Originally from Quebec, she was not yet 20 when she had to study at Marguerite-Bourgeoys College, to then obtain her baccalaureate. ès arts from the University of Montreal. Returning to the capital, she obtained a graduate degree at Laval University in 1938, becoming one of the first graduate graduates from the establishment.
In 1937, Mr.gr Alphonse-Marie Parent founded the summer course unit at Laval University with the assistance of Agathe Lacourcière-Lacerte, doctor from the University of Madrid and professor of Spanish. Building on this unique female hiring in the history of French-speaking universities in Quebec, this unit appears to be the first entry point for women into university teaching.
In 1939, Jeanne Lapointe accepted a teaching position in French grammar and thus began her long career as a visionary. The Lacerte and Lapointe pavilions of Laval University together carry the memory of these university pioneers and their commitment to creating a space for women in higher education.
Intellectual freedom
During the 1940s, Jeanne Lapointe easily integrated into the progressive fringe of Laval University, where, under Father Georges-Henri Lévesque, the new generation of secular professors who would force university institutions to renew their approaches.
Jeanne Lapointe’s practice readily breaks with the prescriptions of the classical program and, above all, with the nationalist and religious approaches favored by the authorities. His teaching centered on individual sensitivity, freedom of interpretation of texts and direct dialogue with the student community reflects his unwavering esteem for human intelligence. This educational posture foreshadows the recommendations of the future Parent report, which she will consider and co-sign with conviction.
Jeanne Lapointe’s significant media activity during the 1950s remains faithful to this respect for the dignity of the human spirit. On television, radio and in newspapers, she led an open fight against the alienating effects of clerical authoritarianism on culture and education. Not without daring, the professor even invited her faculty dean, M.gr Félix-Antoine Savard. Their exchange on the founding values of teaching is published in the journal Free city in October 1954.
In private, Jeanne Lapointe pleads before the dean in favor of the media independence of the faculty. She relativized the duty of loyalty to the university, defending the autonomy of academics, an issue that concerned intellectual circles of the time. In the light of current debates on the responsibility and ethics of public speech, we will also reread with renewed interest the January 1958 issue of Free city dedicated to academic freedom.
The Lapointe and Savard pavilions now stand next to each other on the Laval University campus and seem to embody the ancient tensions between religious traditionalism and humanist modernity. They also stand as two observation towers on the educational, ethical and social changes of the 21st century.e century.
We can imagine their gazes at the multiple windows weighing the issues of virtual teaching, learning difficulties, class overload, censorship and evaluation in the era of artificial intelligence.
Unequal system
Let us also remember that Jeanne Lapointe’s public speaking engagements during the 1950s contributed to the opening of intellectual fields for women. The professor discusses subjects with men that are then more reserved for them, such as national culture or literary modernity. This strategy helps to give credibility to its voice within canonical instances of power and change, such as the university and state committees.
During the 1960s, Jeanne Lapointe made a series of appointments to two commissions of inquiry which would mark a milestone in the achievement of greater social equity in Quebec.
The first, the Royal Commission on Education in the Province of Quebec (1961-1966), established recommendations that favored the democratization of schools (genders, social classes, regions). As commissioner, Jeanne Lapointe writes a large part of the Parent report and modulates the reflections on deconfessionalization, accessibility and diversity of the Quebec school system.
She also wants to put an end to the financing of private schools with public funds, but this avenue will only be half taken. During the unveiling of the Jeanne-Lapointe pavilion, sociologist Guy Rocher lamented the current repercussions of this breach: “Unfortunately, we still have an unequal school system. […], mainly because of the financing of private institutions, and this is what has distorted our Quebec education system. »
Could a new commission of inquiry on the subject today bring back the Quebec ideal of democratization to the center of the education system, reducing it from three to a single egalitarian speed?
Public space
Jeanne Lapointe then joined the Royal Commission on the Status of Women in Canada (1967-1970). The recommendations of the Bird report keep equality between men and women as a guideline. They will notably promote pay parity, maternity leave, as well as the right to contraception and abortion. The problems experienced by indigenous women, which are still significant today, are explored, but not resolved.
Within the commission, Jeanne Lapointe campaigns for the consideration of the sociological and psychological issues which condition the education of girls and the realities of women. Her fight against the pejorative perception of the feminine, well anchored in Western culture, then took place through psychoanalytic studies at the beginning of the 1970s. The researcher, however, quickly broke with the Freudian approach due to the androcentrism which permeated it.
In her sixties, filled with lucid anger against injustices, Jeanne Lapointe feels she has the critical experience to carry out several concrete actions against academic sexism and, above all, to ensure the relay of women’s voices and their recognition in the public space.
Since the 1940s, her mentoring of several notable Quebec women writers has fostered the creative conditions that allow women to assert themselves in the cultural world. In the 1980s, Jeanne Lapointe collaborated in the founding of the Multidisciplinary Feminist Research Group (GREMF), then she launched the first feminist literature courses at Laval University.
At the end of her career, she created a feminist scholarship for female students, wrote a non-sexist research guide for the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), then ensured that her department founded a professorship of literature in a perspective feminist, before retiring in 1987.
The title of professor emeritus awarded to her by Laval University in 1990 honors her progressive contribution to pedagogy, knowledge and equality. These are all legacies that the Jeanne-Lapointe pavilion allows us to commemorate even in the language of young students, who will now say: “My course is at the Lapointe pavilion! »
The first attribution of the name of a female figure to a teaching and research pavilion on the Laval University campus reflects our slow but progressive collective awareness of the blind spots maintained by traditional history. In this regard, the scope of the investigations carried out in the literary and intellectual history of women becomes palpable.
The consecration of Jeanne Lapointe came through a combined work of scientific research and dissemination carried out for around twenty years on her achievements, formerly hidden. In accordance with her inclusive vision, the toponymic recognition of such a pioneer contributes to readjusting the readings of history that shape our collective imagination.
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