The engagement ring, the pill, the corset… In 100 objects told about women’s emancipation.

Yesterday, Annabel Hirsch interviewed British actress Charlotte Rampling for a German magazine. A few weeks ago, he talked about love with the French essayist Mona Chollet. Tomorrow she will leave for Rome, where she lives with her husband, writer Olivier Gues. But this morning in the German building of his publisher, Les Arenas, there is a young freelance and multilingual journalist, 36 years old, who works for the German press. The first interview in Collette’s language about her book. A hundred subjects tell about women (1), published in France after Germany. Born in Germany, she was raised “by a French mother, single and working, which was frowned upon in this country where motherhood and professional careers are still difficult to reconcile”, and where all her friends’ mothers were “stay-at-home mums”. :

In the video, Filipino Leroy-Beaulier discusses the importance of women “speaking up.”

Annabel Hirsch lived in this country until she was 28 years old. He studied art history in Munich, worked in Berlin before moving to Paris in 2015 “right after the attacks”. A city where he spent six years, including one at Normal Diner, before moving again. This time for Italy. An openness to the world reflected in the whirlwind European epic she envisioned to celebrate women, known or anonymous, through tools, accessories, artwork, flyers, clothing, novels, intimate or everyday things that tell their story through the ages. .

Bone to cap

Opened 30,000 years before our era, his treatise on liberation through objects begins with a prehistoric human bone, the “healed thigh.” The precious bone illustrates the “grandmother hypothesis,” a theory that women, including postmenopausal women, played as important a role in the Archaic community as men. It concludes 2017 pee hat this pink hat, girls color, with cat ears (piss It means “piss” in English), which was carried out and demonstrated by hundreds of thousands of American protesters in response to the sexist remarks and attacks of Donald Trump, who was then newly elected president of the United States.

However, Annabelle Hirsch did not attempt to revise the history of struggle or suffering, any more than a “feminist activist manifesto.” On the contrary, she conceived her book as a “dialogue between the ages” to show “how much women stuck together, helped each other, found ideas that seem so new to us today, while they were already imagined three centuries ago. Jesus Christ.”

Corset eras

Body, sex, love, work, art, politics, health, sex. All topics are covered. And that, with no spatial limitation other than that of Western society, which he personally knows better than Asia or Africa, and without necessarily anathema to the masculine.

Thus, for a metal corset (XVI^e century). Depicted in Renaissance Spain, it is said to have been “invented by men to torture women, to deprive them of their freedom of movement, a bit like binding the legs of Chinese women…”. But another option is just as valid as it would be. it was adopted by fashionistas of all European courts to shape their silhouette or even to prove the superiority of the Spanish aristocracy through impeccable posture. And what to think of Jean Paul Gaultier or Vivienne Westwood, who made it a symbol of free and strong femininity? In her demonstrations, Annabelle Hirsch never wants to be dogmatic, but asks questions and observes things. Remington typewriter, for example. Invented by men, also adopted by women, it contributed to their emancipation by opening job prospects for them. Until the moment when they found themselves locked in this role of a typist, which remained with them for a long time.

Of all the items on the list, the most important is “obviously the pill for the sexual freedom it has allowed.” But, sentimentally, Annabel Hirsch’s favorite is a small ivory mirror (circa 1300) that she discovered in the Louvre. In the background, a man and a woman are playing chess. “A metaphor for political love that proves the chips aren’t down, that a woman can win, and that one doesn’t throw herself at her without trying to seduce her.”

Also of interest is the hat pin (1900), a formidable weapon used to hold hair in place, but also to defend against attack in public. What was called “street harassment” after #MeToo. Because the author does not hesitate to build bridges between yesterday and today in the same chapter. Between Coco Chanel and bags, between the fabric vulva invented by M^me Kudray in the 18th century^e century, to educate future births and the sculptures of Louise Bourgeois; Between the self-portrait of Sarah Coolidge (XVIII^e), the bare chest she sent her son-in-law to tempt with selfies, like teenagers these days. Amazing situations and characters make up a wonderful cabinet of curiosities that Annabelle Hirsch just gave to her mother.

(1) A hundred subjects tell about women, By Annabel Hirsch, foreword by Leila Slimani, Éditions Les Arènes, 420 pages, €22.90. In bookstores September 14.