Tiina Veikat

The aim of the present essay is to provide a survey of the joint development of journal- ism and feminism in France in 1830-1930. e inspiration for the essay was a seminar on French women journalists at the University of Montpellier Paul-Valéry 3 which showed that scholarship on media and women’s studies has only begun. However, women journalists deserve considerable attention because without the many anonymous or little known women journalists and reporters the later recognized feminist writers would not have been able to write what they did. The women journalists covered in the present article are the foundation on which the later generations have been able to construct their success story. 

The notable French women journalists include Saint-Simonists, Delphine de Girardin, Séverine, George Sand, Titaÿna. They created or adapted styles and modes of writing, journalistic genres and approaches to journalism as such (e.g., Sèverine who went to the mines in order to write her report, thereby changing journalistic practices). The author also hopes that the present text invites Estonian gender scholars to write on the development of Estonian journal- ism, women’s thought and rst and foremost feminism in the Estonia of the past century to introduce the possibly completely unknown women authors who have dared and wanted to make their voice heard in the journalistic arena. Hommageto them! I would like to close with the call of Hélène Cixous from her „The Laugh of the Medusa“ (Le Rire de la Méduse): „Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies — for the same reasons, by the same law, with the same fatal goal. Women must put her- self into the text — as into the world and into history — by her own movement.“