The National Assembly is a world that is declined in “masculine plural”, writes Delphine Gardey in Le Linen du Palais-Bourbon. Body, materiality and gender of politics in the democratic era (The Edge of the Water, 2015). If the representatives of the people settled on the Quai d’Orsay in 1798, the first women deputies only arrived there in 1945, the first women stenographers only in 1972, the first women ushers only in 1990. They are, according to the politician, the “clandestine passengers of a common boat, a territory which in its entirety, from the benches of the deputies to the perch, passing through the carpets and the gilding of the adjoining rooms and the most remote corridors, breathes male domination”.
When the first deputies were elected to the Palais-Bourbon, at the Liberation, they were only 33 (5.6% of deputies) and the situation worsened in the decades that followed: from 1958 to 1978, there were never more. a dozen (around 2%). “As women have been excluded from the Hemicycle since the Revolution, the rules of dress that concern them are still very vagueanalyzes the political scientist Etienne Ollion. Especially since there is no obvious “correct” outfit for women comparable to a suit and tie for men. The newcomers must therefore conform to the codes of the time, which impose extreme “decency” and extreme discretion on them. »
“A permanent conquest”
In the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, pioneers quickly discovered that their clothes were an inexhaustible source of sneers. “At the beginning of the Ve Republic, when a woman speaks in the Hemicycle, many elected Gaullists – I am thinking in particular of Robert-André Vivien, described as “always cheerful” in “Le Monde” in 1991 – make macho jokesobserves political scientist Michel Offerlé. Any deviation from a certain norm (length of the skirt, intensity of the make-up, style of the hairstyle) engenders mocking reprobation which is not only not sanctioned, but is considered perfectly normal. For women politicians, legitimacy is a permanent conquest. »
Since the inclusion of the principle of parity in the Constitution in 1999, women deputies have been more and more numerous – their percentage varies between 12.3% and 38.8% – but the jeers and chicken cackles that have greeted , in 2012, the flowered dress of Cécile Duflot, then Minister of Housing, shows that misogynistic calls to order are never far away. “It is very difficult for a woman to position herself in a space that has always been thought of as masculineunderlines the political scientist Olivier Rozenberg. Since the increase in the number of deputies, and especially since the end of the glass ceiling, in 2022, we can however say that the normalization of their presence within the Hemicycle of the Palais-Bourbon is underway. »