On July 24, a great Quebecer died as her centenary approached. A brilliant woman with laughing eyes and spirit, Monique Béchard was the first French Canadian in history to obtain a doctorate in psychology.
At the dawn of the 1950s, she took up her pen to publicly defend the intellectual vocation of women, then denied by the prevailing mentality in Quebec. Supported in secret by some members of the clergy, the young citizen had rubbed shoulders with the acrimony of influential figures. She had notably suffered the rebuffs of Abbé Albert Tessier, the great champion of the “Schools of Happiness”, these establishments where women were taught to become “queens of the home”, that is to say wives, mothers and self-employed housewives.
Braving opposing currents, Monique Béchard paved the way for an entire generation of women, both through her personal example and through her writings. Seeing herself neither as a warrior nor as a slayer, this intellectual wanted to instil, according to her own confidences, a little rationality and realism within debates that she found unreasonable and deleterious. Without rejecting marriage, motherhood or domesticity outright, she believed that women could also flourish in other spheres of activity, namely within the university environment.
Contrary to what has been said, she insisted on specifying, she was not opposed so much to Christian thinkers, whose spiritual affinities she shared, but she felt that they placed too much emphasis on certain supposedly natural vocations. of “the woman” in defiance of the personal preferences of each. The psychologist had understood, decades before the idea became common, that there is not an immutable and unique femininity, but a diversity of legitimate ways of being women.
Without a shadow of a doubt, Monique Béchard has contributed to modifying the collective discourse on the social roles of women. Its cultural legacy cannot be obscured from memory without prejudice to historical fairness.
Moreover, she was an eminently likeable woman who also deserves to be remembered for this reason, the greatness of a person being measured as much by her attitude in the banality of everyday life as by the imprint she left on his company.