The Great War had been a chance for women to show they could be useful, that they deserved to work and be free. In England, the Suffragettes had won the right for women to vote two decades earlier, but in France the struggle was far from over. In the Paris Echo they wrote: “In some countries there are more women than men working in factories, and everywhere the consequences are the same: fewer births, higher rates of infant mortality, and the growing desire among girls and young women to abandon the family way.” Society wanted women to stay at home, safe and indoors like good housewives, as they had done in the grand old days before the war.
These Parisian women are typists, workers, seamstresses and secretaries: free and independent, carefree and content to spend their day off strolling around Notre Dame Cathedral. Christmas is just around the corner; the streets of Paris are gaily illuminated and the shop windows bedecked with festive decorations. Still, there’s no better place to gather than the square in front of the great dame herself. The battle begins, with no rules agreed upon: one of the women gathers up a handful of snow, presses it into a ball, and the opening salvo is fired. The second is not long coming, and soon they hurl their snowballs in volleys, laughing with gay abandon.
“Let’s get rid of our corsets tonight! Let’s smoke cigarettes and go dancing!” cried Gisele.
“I want to meet some artists! A painter or a musician. I want a wild night up in Montparnasse drinking champagne at the Dome or at the Coupole!” replied Jacqueline, before chucking a snowball at her.
“Montparnasse isn’t the same anymore. Everyone around there is poor, so they can’t buy the artists’ paintings. They’re no fun now that they’re all starving,” Jeanne opined.
“This morning I went up to Montmartre. I went in to the Sacré-Coeur to say a prayer for France.”
“You mean that monstrosity that looks like a cream cake? How you can you pray in a church like that? Look at Our Lady here - she may be old, but at least she has class!”
“I like new things. It’s still fresh and white, like this snowball!”
Times change, and customs too. Suzanne Lenglen wears a pleated skirt at Wimbledon, and Jean Patou has perfected a trouser for women to wear on the slopes. But as long as they are still thought of as weaker in body and in mind, the women of Paris will fight for their equal right to pursue their own happiness, as they were doing here today in front of Notre Dame Cathedral. At this moment she sounds out her bells, calling to her children across the capital on this snow-covered Sunday. “Vive la France, and long live our ladies of Paris!” yells Jacqueline, hitting her target.
Alan Alfredo Geday