What are women’s lives made of?

Unspoken, whispered tales, stories that don’t get told: endless days, caring for others, nights of love and nights of anguish. To unravel these silences, Nadège Abadie set out to meet a hundred women born at the beginning of the 20th century. Together, they remind us that it is in everyday life that the essential is played out, that it is in their ordinary trials that our rights have emerged: our freedom to vote, to work, to dress as we wish, to welcome a child or not, to love whom we choose, to free ourselves.
Each chapter is a place inhabited by these women, where the funny and the tragic of existence, its happiness and its horror, have crystallized. Suzanne shot herself in the stomach with a rifle to escape a pregnancy; Monique remembers the insults she received when she proposed a law criminalizing rape; Mireille has been traveling alone since she dared to ask for a divorce.

With poetry, they speak of common things, of what is, of what we are, of what we owe them.

Flammarion, Paris, 2022
8 color photos
134x204mm | paperback
240 pages
ISBN 9782080283801