Three inspirational women for International Women’s Day

We previously published a blogpost about Cambridge University Library’s French acquisitions in relation to Women’s History Month. For International Women’s Day, we would like to shed light on three inspirational women featured in recent French language publications. Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier was a photographer, a Communist and a resistante. Uyaïnim was a member of the Jivaroan peoples in Peruvian Amazonia who fought for indigenous and women’s rights, and Nina Bouraoui is a Franco-Algerian writer whose works address question of identity and homosexuality.

Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier was a reporter and photographer, a resistant and Communist politician. She came from a liberal bourgeois family, daughter of Lucien Vogel, editor of the magazine Vu, and of Cosette de Brunhoff, sister of the creator of Babar and of the editor of Vogue. A pioneer woman photographer, she travelled to Germany in 1933 and was the first to photograph the camps of Oranienbourg and Dachau. She met a friend of her father, Paul Vaillant-Couturier, editor of communist newspaper L’Humanité, and became his partner, marrying him shortly before his death in 1937. During the war, she contributed to clandestine publications and worked as a messenger for the resistance. She was arrested in 1942 and deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau and then Ravensbrück. She returned to France in June 1945, testified at the Nuremberg trials in 1946 and became a Communist member of parliament. She has been the subject of two biographies :

• Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier : une femme engagée, du PCF au procès de Nuremberg / Dominique Durand, Balland, 2012.
• On l’appelait Maïco : Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier, la révoltée / Yseult Williams, Bernard Grasset, 2021. C206.d.8481

Uyaïnim, or Albertina Nanchijam Tuwits, from the Awajun / Aguaruna people (part of the Jivaroan peoples) in Peruvian Amazonia, became a spokeswoman for indigenous rights and the defense of women. Her memoirs are written through a collaboration with ethnologist Hélène Collongues. They speak of years of pressure put on the land and Amazonian indigenous people by the farmers and colonisers; the suspicion towards and failure of development projects; as well as the discrimination and deculturation faced by native people through educational missions. The narrative also exposes issues within patriarchal indigenous societies, from internal divisions and warfare to exploitation of and violence against women, also highlighting the corruption brought by the introduction of money and greed within these communities.  

• Uyaïnim, Mémoires d’une femme jivaro / Hélène Collongues, Arles : Actes Sud, 2022, C219.c.2205

Nina Bouraoui was born from an Algerian father and a Breton mother. Her novels deal with questions of memory, identity, homosexuality, and nostalgia for Algeria, where she lived until she was a teenager. She was distinguished as Commandeure de l’ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French ministry of Culture in 2018, and since the 2010s has been the subject of a number of critical studies.

Selected novels:

• Beaux rivages, JC Lattès, 2016, C204.d.9787
• Tous les hommes désirent naturellement savoir, JC Lattès, 2018, C206.d.1617 (All men want to know / Nina Bouraoui ; translated by Aneesa Abbas Higgins. London : Viking, 2020 & 2021, LSF)
• Otages, JC Lattès, 2020, C206.d.6938
• Satisfaction, JC Lattès, 2021, C206.d.7485

Critical studies :

• Rabiaa Marhouch. Nina Bouraoui : la tentation de l’universel. Rennes, Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2023, 739:47.c.202.1 
• Belgacem Belarbi, Nina Bouraoui, une nouvelle sensibilité littéraire, Sarrebruck, Editions Universitaires Européennes, 2022, C219.c.4993
• Myriam-Naomi Walburg. Zeit der Mehrsprachigkeit : literarische Strukturen des Transtemporalen bei Marica Bodrožić, Nina Bouraoui, Sudabeh Mohafez und Yoko Tawada. Würzburg, Ergon Verlag, 2017, C213.c.7656
• Rosie MacLachlan. Nina Bouraoui, Autofiction and the search for selfhood, Oxford ; New York, Peter Lang, 2016, 735:44.c.201.92
• Kirsten Husung. Hybridité et genre : chez Assia Djebar et Nina Bouraoui, L’Harmattan, 2014, C209.c.4543
• Mokhtar Atallah. Études littéraires algériennes : Albert Camus, Nina Bouraoui, Boualem Sansal, Ahmed Kalouaz, L’Harmattan, 2012, C207.c.1905

Irene Fabry-Tehranchi

‘Memoirs of Russian, East European, and Eurasian Women’ online collection : the September 2021 Slavonic item of the month

This short (and slightly late) September Slavonic blog celebrates a new open-source collection of women’s memoirs from the last 70-odd years of the Russian Empire.

A screenshot of some of the collection’s contents.

New French books at the UL to celebrate Women’s History Month

At the UL, we continually research and select newly published foreign language books to build and develop the Library’s excellent study resources. Since March is Women’s History Month, it presents the perfect opportunity to highlight some interesting recent acquisitions to the French-language history and history of art collections.

International Women’s Day

From Frauentag! Erfindung und Karriere einer Tradition

To commemorate International Women’s day today, and to follow up on the huge success of the University Library’s exhibition featuring women’s suffrage posters, in this blogpost we are going to showcase two diverse items that deal with the visual representation of women, their freedom, rights and role in society.

Frauentag! Erfindung und Karriere einer Tradition (C212.c.8465) was published in 2011 to accompany an exhibition entitled Feste. Kämpfe. 100 Jahre Frauentag, held at the Österreichisches Museum für Volkskunde. The exhibition marked 100 years since the first International Women’s Day was observed in 1911, when in Vienna women marched on the Ringstrasse, carrying banners. The exhibition (and book) focused in particular on the history of the women’s movement in Austria and included a whole section on the variety of posters relating to International Women’s Day.

Conduct literature for and about women in Italy: a new exhibition

“Lettere scritte da donna”, a book for women published in 1737. CCD.17.15

The  display cases outside the Map Department are hosting a new exhibition entitled ”Conduct literature for and about women in Italy: prescribing and describing life”.  The display  marks the conclusion of an 18-month Leverhulme Trust–Isaac Newton Trust co-funded project on the production of printed conduct literature for and about women in Italy, between 1470 and 1900. Undertaken by Principal Investigator Dr Helena Sanson and Research Associate Dr Francesco Lucioli, and providing a systematic study of women’s conduct books over a broad chronological span, the project is the first of its kind in the field of Italian studies. A conference on the subject is being held in Cambridge on 20 and 21st March, and more information can be found here.

Read more about the exhibition on the Special Collections blog.