Established since 2007 in a spacious courtyard on rue Jacob, the editions Des Femmes uttered their first cries not far from there, at 68 rue des Saints-Pères, in the same 6e district of Paris. It was 1974, light years away. In the wake of the birth of the Women’s Liberation Movement (MLF), in October 1968, the statutes of the feminist publishing house created by Antoinette Fouque and her twenty other members were filed in 1972. The first three titles appeared for two years later.
Alongside her sisters in arms and in the wake of the crazy energy driven by May 1968, the psychoanalyst and activist “wanted women to write their own history”, summarize Elisabeth Nicoli and Christine Villeneuve. Co-directors of the house, the two sixty-year-olds are now at the helm of the building left to them by their friend. “Antoinette”, died in 2014. The year 2024, chosen to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the house, will above all be that of a great “femmage” to Antoinette Fouque.
“Our choice to use the word “femmage” made people cringe a little…” they smile. Nothing could be more normal: the question of vocabulary was already at the heart of the project of Antoinette Fouque and her team, who thought very early on the themes which still agitate society today, by fighting against “phallocracy” and the “filiarchy”, denouncing “gynocides” or calling, from 1971, to create a “encyclopedia of women”… “We have always led the way! “, insist the veterans of the feminist movement.
From 1980, a collection of “talking books”
From 1974, Editions Des Femmes became the place for the development of avant-garde and international feminist thought. The French writer Hélène Cixous, the Lebanese poet Etel Adnan, the American Susan Faludi (author of Backlash, Pulitzer Prize in 1991) and Andrea Dworkin (known for her criticism against pornography), the Brazilian author Clarice Lispector, but also the Chilean women fighting against the Pinochet dictatorship in the 1980s or the Femen at the very beginning of the 2010s, all found there a setting commensurate with their convictions. From 1980, Antoinette Fouque and her teams created a collection of “talking books” (audio books, we would say today): Catherine Deneuve, Sonia Rykiel, Isabelle Adjani, Françoise Sagan, Marguerite Duras or Jacques Derrida participate in the “Library of voices” (even if the primary vocation of the house is to publish women, men are not excluded from the catalog).
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