Every year in September, it is the " European Heritage Days". For several years now, the event has been punctuated by discussions on the place of women in heritage and enriched with initiatives to better value those who have contributed to the common heritage... And then in 2015, the " Matrimony Days" appeared, exclusively dedicated to the female part of the legacies of the past.
How can we measure the invisibilization of women heritage actors? What are the means of re-establishing a certain equality in the recognition due by contemporaries to their illustrious elders? Why does the spotlight on heritage women sometimes awaken the fear of a " woke drift " with great blows of "cancel culture " ? We take stock.
" Matrimony ", a militant neologism?
The Académie française will end up getting angry ! Standing up against inclusive writing, she ended up admitting the principle of feminization of job names without being convinced that the ambiguity between the masculine and the neutral could contribute to the invisibilization of half of humanity. So, if we come up with a neologism such as " matrimony ", it looks like provocation.
Except that " matrimony " is not a neologism. It was a word in common use from the Middle Ages until the seventeenth century. It then simply refers to all the assets transmitted by the mother. Marriage certificates indicate the acquisitions made to the community by the man as patrimony and those made by the woman as matrimony. Simply. The first meaning of patrimony and matrimony thus concerns family transmission cases.
It was with the Enlightenment and the French Revolution that the notion of heritage took on a new meaning, covering collective goods: resulting from the provision of the property of the clergy and the overthrown regime to the nation, the national heritage is made up of buildings, monuments, works of art whose preservation and possession the State is entrusted with.
It was at the same time that civil marriage was introduced and then, a few years later, the default matrimonial regime ( !) of community of property. The Napoleonic Code also enshrined the minority status of women : matrimony in the family sense of the term was buried with the autonomy of women. There remains the question of women's participation in the national heritage, and by extension in the world heritage of humanity.
When heritage becomes patriarchal
From the beginning of the nineteenth century, collective heritage became a political issue. It is a question of expressing the greatness of a nation/civilization through the inscription of the works that symbolize it in historical depth. Entry into heritage is a sign of the people's recognition of a cultural heritage. Heritage also indicates the degree of power of a nation, a people, a civilization.
But the works are not disembodied, especially since the national narrative is hungry for heroes and geniuses. Heritage is as much made up of works as it is of people : Notre-Dame is Sully and Viollet-le-Duc ; the Mona Lisa, by da Vinci ; the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo... The extension of heritage to the diversity of cultural forms highlights writers, men of the theatre, film directors, musicians ; the opening up to industrial work gives pride of place to entrepreneurs ; the notion of political legacy consecrates military leaders, great Resistance fighters, personalities who have carried major laws or accomplished emblematic reforms... That is a lot of men !
In any case, there are significantly more men than women, as evidenced for example by the gendered distribution of street and street names as well as that of pantheonized personalities. Is this scarcity of women in the heritage directory the result of a lesser capacity of women to create, to excel, to leave important works to humanity ? Nothing genetic or biological to validate this hypothesis (fortunately outdated). But then, are the authorities that decide that a work and its author deserve to be included in the heritage sexist category?
Not excluded, if we consider that most sexism is the result of unconscious biases that tend to make us better see what we have already seen (in this case, " great men ") and take better account of what already exists than what emerges. This also applies to social acceptability, the shared feeling that such and such a person is or is not legitimate to access collective recognition.
Giving visibility to women in heritage
Concern about the place of women in the patrimony is growing. It is a threefold issue of justice (that women creators are not sent to the margins of history books, or even dispossessed of their works unjustly attributed to men), exhaustiveness (so as not to deprive the collective memory of the contributions of half of humanity) and the stimulation of vocations (because how can today's girls and women project their ambition without role models to inspire their confidence, boldness and excellence).
Various actions are carried out to give visibility to women in heritage :
These can be measures to rebalance the role of men and women in the naming of common spaces (street names, public transport stations, meeting rooms in companies) or in the attribution of symbols of public recognition (Pantheonization, erection of statues, etc.).
It can also be a question of reattributing works to their creators : Colette's writings for a time appropriated by her companion Willy ; Margaret Keane's paintings sold by her ex-husband (unable to hold a brush) as if they were his own ; the work of astronomer Jocelyn Burnell plundered by his thesis director; the paintings of Judith Leyster , which an art dealer found more expensive if they bore the signature of a man ; the plays of Catherine Bernard which for a long time figured in the complete works of Bernard de Fontenelle (moreover plagiarized by Voltaire)...
Actions to enrich knowledge
Historiographers agree that many attribution errors, as well as a large part of the invisibilization of women creators, are mainly due to a lack of knowledge and information sharing. When the sources are available, the work consists of appraising and then valuing the work of the creators of past times.
Numerous scientific or more general public works (such as Titiou Lecoq's bestseller Les grandes oubliées) as well as proactive actions by institutions working to develop knowledge (such as the Wikimedia Foundation, which produces " editathons " aimed at enriching the collaborative encyclopedia) contribute to the enrichment of knowledge on the real place of women in heritage, thus promoting their legitimate recognition. But it also happens that sources are lacking or that the available documentation does not allow a work to be formally attributed to a creator. Very symptomatic are the cases of couples of artists who produced together at a time when it was socially (or even legally) accepted that women had no signature, no public existence, no ambitions to be recognized...
Actions to reflect on the philosophy of heritage
The conversation about the place of women in heritage also leads – and perhaps above all – to a reflection on what heritage means. Is it a social instance of " conservation " at the risk of conservatism ? Or is it defined as a process of link between past, present and future ; This would lead us to think about the needs of current and future generations in terms of the relationship to the long term?
Considering heritage as a matter of meaning and collective belonging in the dialogue between eras should leave more room not only for women, but more generally for all those who, without building monuments or leading armies, without directing companies or signing a work of their name, participate in the great stages of human history forging a before and after.
