Gender,genesis and generation: Colette and Germaine Beaumont’s journalism at Le Matin,1910–1924

Gender context

To appreciate the occupation these two women entered, consider the gender-typing of literary writing and journalism in France. In the first half of the nineteenth century, when a literary and philosophical kind of monthly review predominated, the distinction between literature and journalism was unclear. The term for a literary author and a journalist was ‘man of letters’, indicating that the two types of writer were interchangeable and that the reading public assumed that they were men. While this did not preclude women from writing, they and their successors in the second half of the nineteenth century were effectively limited to sentimental fiction and/or society and fashion columns in periodicals. With the exception of the novels of George Sand, women’s fiction was not recognised as real literature, and society and fashion columns were not considered serious journalism (Thérenty, 2009). Despite critical rejection of their contributions, the reality was that women could and did disseminate their writing, however limited in scope and recognition, in the press (Savoie, 2009: 19; Primi, 2011: 270).

As the mass-circulation daily press arose and the number of journalists doubled between 1885 and 1900, a new type of journalist emerged: the reporter who went out on assignment, described major or scandalous events from an eye-witness point of view, and interviewed participants in these events. Almost all reporters were men, because reporters operated in the public sphere, witnessed dubious behaviours and interviewed disreputable people, and newspaper editors, like the public, believed women should be domestic and unworldly (Chalaby, 2004). Newspaper reporters who claimed objectivity tried to distinguish themselves from fiction writers (Cambron and Lüsebrink, 2000). Nevertheless, most fiction writers continued to submit essays to newspapers, because France feted the public intellectual and because the pay was more certain than publishing elsewhere. Many French journalists continued to write fiction well into the twentieth century, long after the practice of combining journalistic and literary careers declined elsewhere. This combination was by no means confined to Colette and Beaumont or to women writers (Martin, 1989; Boucharenc, 2004).

After the humiliating French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1, which prompted a prolonged crisis of masculinity and exacerbated an already existing fear of depopulation, reporters and ‘little literary review’ writers insisted upon their virility. Once again, women were present but were effaced or marginalised. Histories of French literature published between the 1890s and the 1930s include only 91 women among the 1400 writers listed. Excluded from the canon were almost all of the women whose novels examined women’s lives and conditions. If these kinds of novels were mentioned, they were dismissed as popular or women’s novels, not truly literary works (Reid, 2010: 87ff).

Women did contribute to a popular new feature in newspapers: feuilletons or serial novels. Female readers especially enjoyed these novels. However, most of the serials signed by women ran for only 20 or 30 days, as opposed to the average of 110 days. Serial novels, especially short ones, were denied the status of real literature. Because a tenth of the female authors used a masculine nom de plume (Diebolt, 1979: 24), the best way to identify some of them is by consulting interviews with those who published books later in their lives. Germaine Beaumont is one such woman.

Very few women were hired as reporters who went out on assignment. Only eight of them became grand reporters between the two world wars. Grand reporters began as war correspondents, then became ‘special envoys’ and travelled to exotic places or sites of newsworthy events in order to write eye-witness accounts with interviews of participants. The results were published as series of articles called enquiries, appearing once or twice a week, over the course of a month or more. Most enquiries began on the front page above the fold (Martin, 2005). Roving reporters of this type inspired Marguerite Durand to argue that the advent of women in journalism was

one of the conquests of which feminism is justly proud. It has pushed and will always push women toward this career because it is one of those careers that oblige women to leave their homes, to see, write, observe, comprehend and judge beyond the restrained circle of their family, relatives, class and customs. ¹

Most women hired by newspapers after the First World War were assigned to a new inner page. The women’s page – with regular columns on fashion, furniture, food and family – was intended to make housewives accept having newspapers in their homes and thereby to increase the circulation of the newspaper (Harp, 2007). Advertisements for fashion, foods and household cleaners and goods on the women’s page also increased revenues. Most of the columnists on French women’s pages used pseudonyms, usually a familiar first name like Francine, which was often preceded by a familial appellation, like Tante, to simulate a close relationship with readers. They encouraged readers to write to them and they responded in their columns to questions from (usually unnamed and possibly invented) readers. Columnists tried to develop a rapport with readers by using the first- and second-person pronouns ‘I’ and ‘you’ to construct subject positions through synthetic personalisation, thus creating the impression that the writer knew the reader. Both the subject matter of their columns and their ostensibly familial or friendly relationship with readers symbolically confirmed that these women were essentially domestic, though they worked for pay. These columnists are almost as hard to identify as their unnamed readers. The exceptions are a few who subsequently acquired by-lines and were interviewed later in their careers. Beaumont is a case in point.

The gendered status of newspaper journalism helps explain why Colette, Beaumont and other women of the second and third generations entered journalism through family connections and why they rarely had reporting duties. More information is necessary to understand the attitude of Colette and Beaumont toward their start in journalism and fiction writing, their families’ contributions to their writing careers, and their relations with their mothers and with one another.

Genesis

Born in 1873, Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette was a generation older than Germaine Beaumont. When, at the age of 37, Sidonie-Gabrielle was hired by Le Matin, she had been writing freelance musical and theatre reviews for monthlies or weeklies for over a decade. In 1908, she had published the first collection of her journalistic pieces, Les Vrilles de la vigne. After this, she was occasionally called a ‘woman of letters’. Julia Kristeva’s biography of Colette characterises Vrilles as a ‘kaleidoscope of fragments’ written in ‘a sparkling, succinct style’ that enriched her fictional output (Kristeva, 2004: 74). I would add that this brief, fragmentary and lively style more immediately appealed to newspaper readers. Vrilles can be seen as the earliest public recognition of Colette’s literary status, though it would take more than a decade to consolidate her standing among the literati. Two novels published while she worked at Le Matin, Mitsou (1919) and Chéri (1920), consolidated her literary reputation, though her work was still measured against the corpus of ‘women’s literature’, not literature tout court (Poskin, 2000).

Many of Colette’s fin-de-siècle musical and theatre reviews were co-signed or corrected by her first husband, Henry Gauthier-Villars, an established cultural reviewer (Galliari, 2004: 8–11). Moreover, five of her published novels, the Claudine novels, had been written while confined to a den by her husband, who published her (and other ghost writers’) novels under his own pen name, Willy. While Willy clearly exploited Colette, he did introduce her to writing, both journalistic and fictional. After four years of separation, they divorced shortly before she joined Le Matin. Subsequently, Colette would insist upon reissuing the Claudines and many of the early reviews under her name alone. Generally, she denied Willy’s role in her coming to writing. Marriage to an older and unscrupulous man at barely 20 years of age, exploitation by that man and humiliation over his blatant serial infidelity account for her denial of Willy’s contribution to her career. On the other side of the equation, this disastrous marriage gave birth, late in her writing life, to a series of novels and films about young women who were not powerless in relationships with older men. In effect, Colette rewrote the narrative of her early life, giving young female characters agency. Her Claudine novels are considered integral to the twentieth-century trend to allow girls and young women characters some control over their fate. Beaumont identified this trend in a literary review (Gale, 2010; Fau and Beaumont, 2005: 21–3). Her own novels were also part of this trend.

Late in 1910, Colette was hired to work on Le Matin’s weekly column, ‘Mille et un contes’. The column consisted of a distilled short story or vignette, some written by Colette, others by authors that submitted work to the column. The 12-page limit on the length of the text imposed by this column shaped some of Colette’s fiction. For instance, each instalment in La Femme cachée, published just after Colette left Le Matin, was exactly 12 pages long (Kristeva, 2004: 104). Colette’s comfort with the limits of journalistic writing distinguishes her from her nineteenth-century predecessor, George Sand, who was as prolific and diverse a journalist as Colette, but chafed against journalistic constraints (Thérenty, 2011: 15–16).

Colette’s first five contributions to Le Matin were not signed. Clearly she had difficulties signing her work, but the reason had changed since she left Willy. At Le Matin, her reticence was due to her scandalous reputation. Since leaving Willy, she had been flamboyantly part of the Paris lesbian community, involved in a scandal about a passionate on-stage kiss with one of her lesbian lovers and touring France with a theatre troupe as a mime artist who often wore revealing costumes. Adding to the publicity, she had published an obviously autobiographical novel, La Vagabonde, about her barely disguised experiences on that tour. Patricia Tilberg (2009) has argued that La Vagabonde presented the music hall not only as ‘a space of social liberation’ but also as a site of the bourgeois republican values of work and personal hygiene. However, contemporary readers and critics responded more to the message about freedom from conventional married and domestic womanhood. But those who read the sequel, L’Entrave (1913), learned that that the protagonist ultimately renounced vagabondage for a more familiar, familial role. Melanie Collado (2003) contends that Colette and two contemporary female novelists who featured modern (meaning emancipated) heroines (Lucie-Delarue-Mardrus and Marcelle Tinayre) continued to be attracted to the feminine domestic ideal. After the Great War, many authors – male and female – constructed cautionary tales about modern women who eventually settled down to marriage and motherhood. This literary fad responded to post-war anxiety about depopulation and fears that modern women would renounce their reproductive role (often referred to as their reproductive responsibility) (Roberts, 1994).

Given the insouciant style of Colette’s contributions to ‘A Thousand and One Tales’, many readers realised who she was. Soon she was signing her work as Colette Willy, and by 1913 she had dropped the Willy: the column was subtitled ‘Colette’s Journal’. In 1912, she married the publisher of Le Matin, Henri de Jouvenal, and after the death of the previous editor of ‘A Thousand and One Tales’, she took over as editor of the column. After her second marriage ended in a bitter divorce in 1924 – both spouses had cheated, Colette with her own stepson! – she ceased writing for Le Matin. But she wrote for the press to the end of her life in 1954.

Colette paid tribute to (and may have exaggerated) a maternal influence on her writing. In the highly autobiographical novel Sido (1929), she attributed her writing skills to her mother’s ‘gifts of acute perception and description, and her power of trenchant observation’ (Colette, 1953: 140). Scholars laud Colette’s visual and sensual perceptions and descriptions. Among many others, Beaumont praised how Colette ‘always looked at everything with new eyes’ (Dugast-Portes, 1999: 92–6; Beaumont, 1951a: 6). These accolades were directed to her fictional production, but note that vivid eye-witness descriptions are part and parcel of print journalism as practised then and now. Of the six other women whose origins in journalism I have examined, only one paid such a glowing tribute to their mother’s influence.

Colette also acknowledged the role of her father’s love of books and habit of writing in the genesis of her writing career. The women journalists I study also pay homage to the literary or journalistic ventures and encouragement of fathers, grandfathers or uncles. But Colette’s relationship with her father differed dramatically from their relationships with successful older male relatives. After his death, Colette discovered that his habit of retreating to his den to write in his journals had been a pretence, for his journals were filled with blank pages. Her mother told her that she (the daughter) was fulfilling her father’s dreams (Colette, 1953: 182). Like other scholars before me, I see in her autobiographical account evidence of splitting with a bankrupt masculine literary tradition in favour of a more feminine tradition. I consider this break essential to Colette’s extraordinary literary career. Although writing feminine fiction no doubt delayed the establishment of her literary reputation, it also allowed her to set the terms for a new, modern kind of literature about women with agency.

In 1919, when Beaumont entered Le Matin, she was a 29-year-old, soon-to-be divorced woman, but she was not as experienced a writer as Colette had been when she was hired. Beaumont had one autobiographical novel on her résumé; it had run as a serial in L’Œuvre, a weekly where the literary director was her mother and the editor was her mother’s lover. Later in her life, Germaine did not claim this novel or tell anyone how much her mother, who had published seven novels under the pseudonym Annie de Pène, helped her write it. Annie de Pène further enhanced Germaine’s career prospects by introducing her to her good friend, the now-influential columnist Colette.

Initially, Germaine was respectful of her mother’s role in her writing life. She signed her first column at Le Matin with the same pseudonym – Rosine – as her mother had used at a moderate feminist weekly, La Femme de France. Germaine placed short stories and feuilletons in that weekly for years after her mother’s death. She shared her mother’s commitment to feminism, which distinguished both of them from Colette, who did not identify herself as a feminist and ridiculed suffrage feminists. Germaine’s column began in response to the French Senate’s rejection of a bill in favour of women’s suffrage that helped delay the vote for women until 1945 (Rosine, 14 March 1920). Along with conventional women’s page topics like fashion, her column covered a fifth ‘f’: feminism. She regularly reported on feminist political successes abroad, usually adding that France lagged behind other advanced countries (Rosine, 8 April 1920, 13 September 1921 and 30 June 1922). She used her column to advocate feminist changes in the French Civil Code for married women (29 May 1921). Although she supported equal rights in the early 1920s, when there was some hope of achieving them, she was primarily a maternal feminist. For instance, several of her columns tried to reassure readers that feminism would not mean the end of marriage and maternity (17, 22, 24 March, 1 and 23 April 1920 and 30 November 1922). Often she moderated radical egalitarian proposals, such as when she insisted, during the phoney war of 1940, that women should only be inducted into non-combat services of the armed forces’. ² This kind of moderation conformed to the reformist trend in interwar feminism, when ongoing campaigns for the vote and other egalitarian measures gained little purchase (Bard, 1995: 235ff).

Once in an interview, Beaumont publically conceded that it was ‘important that I belonged to a family that … included a major journalist, a bibliophile, [both men] and the charming writer who was my mother’. She further acknowledged that her literary vocation ‘was born with her (mother)’. When the interviewer asked about her mother’s influence on her work, she responded tersely that they were interested in similar subjects (Lefèvre, 1936). Her biographer, Hélène Fau, draws the obvious conclusion: Beaumont struggled with her literary parentage. Other female novelists also expressed discomfort with their mothers (Marrone, 2000). So did female journalists, although their conflicts were over maternal resistance to their pursuing an occupation that thrust them into the public realm and was defined as masculine. This was definitely not the reason for Beaumont’s reticence about maternal influences.

The main reason for Germaine’s ambivalence about modelling her writing career on her mother’s was that her mother had left her husband and young children, including eight-year-old Germaine, to pursue a writing career in Paris, without offering her children any explanation. In the divorce, Annie de Pène lost custody of her children as well as visiting rights. Only 13 years later, in an autobiographically based novel, did she offer a public explanation: ‘I was no longer a lazy and useless bourgeois lady; I was going to create an intelligent, working life, earning my living’ (quoted in Fau, 2006: i). Despite Germaine’s sympathy with her mother’s aspirations, she clearly had conflicted feelings about her desertion. While she resembled her mother in her pursuit of a career in letters and she married twice, she never had children. She also maintained good relations with the lesbian circle around Natalie Barney and won that circle’s Renée Vivien Prize several times.

Generations

Another reason why Beaumont underestimated her mother’s role in her writing career was that Annie de Pène’s oeuvre was not as brilliant as that of Beaumont’s mentor, Colette. Shortly after Annie de Pène died in the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918, Colette hired Germaine as her secretary. Germaine watched and copied Colette as she modelled good work practices in that office. Later, Germaine paid tribute to ‘the regularity of her work hours, the order that reigned in her office, and the care with which she read the stories that it was her job to choose for “A Thousand and One Mornings”’ (1951a: 25). Colette gave Germaine’s career a boost by including some of Germaine’s stories in her popular column. ³ More decisively, she introduced Germaine to her husband, the publisher of Le Matin, who hired Germaine and tasked her with a new column, ‘Le Petit Courrier des femmes’, to run on the second page of Le Matin twice a week. As the title suggests, this column often took the form of advice in response to readers’ questions, but it also allowed Beaumont to make observations about fashion and domestic issues other than children (on which she was nearly silent). The popularity of her column led to her appointment as editor of the women’s page and her editorial competence led to editorship of the magazine page.

Beaumont also placed feuilletons in Le Matin. ⁴ After a serial version in Le Matin, she published her first successful novel, Piège, in 1930. Two years later, Colette published Ces plaisirs, subsequently republished and translated as The Pure and the Impure (1941). Both novels dealt openly with sexual transgressions like homosexuality and transvestism. Piège won a national literary prize, but Ces plaisirs, essentially a series of interconnected vignettes, is the text that is still taught. Over a decade after Colette had definitively arrived, during her Matin years, Beaumont, who was still employed at the newspaper, attained the status of a literary figure, if not a woman of letters like Colette.

In the six years Colette and Beaumont worked together (1918–24), the mentor became the literary mother. Colette began to call Germaine ‘her chosen daughter’ (Colette’s relations with her biological daughter, born during her marriage to Henri de Jouvenel, were distant and tense). For many years, Germaine joined Colette at her vacation home, where Colette gave her advice about writing, such as eliminating the superficial, but also gave her life lessons like subordinating pleasure to work. In an apparently innocuous but actually very revealing remark, Germaine told readers that Colette taught her the names of flowers: ‘because she shared with my mother a botanical science applied to rustic species that she encountered along roads, on embankments, on stream beds’ (1951a: 12–13). Colette’s collected writings on flowers and gardens include pieces from Le Matin; flowers also feature in Germaine’s novels (Phelps, 1989; Beaumont, 1935a). In short, the literary mother taught Germaine things her biological mother might have taught her, but did not.

Beaumont fully and repeatedly recognised Colette’s assistance. When she became a successful novelist, she dedicated two of her novels, La Roue d’infortuné and Silsauve to Colette. To the former dedication, she added ‘who placed a star upon my head’. In the second, she acknowledged: ‘to whom I owe everything’. Most other members of the third generation of women in the dailies were less fulsome in their praise but they too publicly thanked their mentors, male and female, in the press.

Feminine protagonists and perspectives

Even though Colette and Beaumont’s subgenres and styles diverged, they both addressed women’s topics in their journalism and chose women as principal characters in their fiction. More importantly and unusually, they treated these topics empathetically and endowed their characters with agency. Because of their feminine focus and perspective, they earned less public acclaim in their lifetimes, although Colette did win national popular and critical acclaim in the decade before her death in 1954, largely due to her indomitable writing during the German Occupation of much of France from 1940 to 1945.

One of Colette’s collections of articles, Dans la foule, and one of the posthumous compilations, Contes des mille et un matins, include contributions to Le Matin before and during the Great War. More recent publications continue to excavate her wartime journalism. Her coverage ranged from witty and penetrating music, theatre and film reviews, through first-person tales of balloon and other flights and about her driving automobiles, to impertinent political reporting from the Chamber of Deputies and an eye-witness account of the capture of a band of criminals on the streets of Paris (1918: 8–15, 42– 67; 1970; 1924). Although as a columnist she did not get assignments, her stories about political meetings and criminal encounters resemble reporting. The adventurous pieces flirt with the ‘plucky’ girl reporter persona of contemporary American journalism (Lutes, 2006). But there were differences: Colette’s stories did not appear on the first page; she did not travel far or surreptitiously enter institutions to reveal abuses; and her tone was never outraged. Indeed, she was given to mocking, especially politicians she considered to be pompous, or suffrage feminists she found to be self-important. Becoming a journalist one generation after Colette, Beaumont never postured as a girl reporter, probably because of the nature of her column but possibly also because this kind of conduct was no longer so remarkable.

Perhaps the most impressive examples of Colette’s journalism in these years involve trial reporting. There is no hint of the ‘sob sister’ or weepy approach to sensational trials common in American newspapers and to a lesser degree in French ones. After Colette’s death in 1954, Beaumont paid tribute to her habit of describing secondary characters like witnesses and court audiences. She lauded ‘her marvellous ability to notice, in a human being, what escaped other observers. I think that I am correct in saying that the series of articles on trials will remain a model in this difficult genre’ (Beaumont, 1956). Anne Freadman, who has studied Colette’s early journalism, agrees that observations of secondary participants, notably women witnesses, without imputing motives or drawing conclusions, distinguish her trial reporting. Freadman correctly extends the argument to Colette’s attentiveness to the crowd at other public events, including sports meets. (Freadman, 2006; 2008). In this, Colette had successors. Several of the women who reported on the sensational trials of wives killing or inveigling lovers to murder husbands who returned from the trenches after the war – a troubling phenomenon after the massive loss of men during the Great War – adopted Colette’s dispassionate approach, eschewing emotive rhetoric.

Colette covered ‘feminine’ subjects like fashion in Le Matin, which was unusual for columnists outside the women’s pages, even in France, where haute couture was a major business. Some of her coverage reflected current (and feminist) hygienic criticism of women’s underwear and garments as too constricting and debilitating. A 1913 article entitled ‘Martyrologie’ (on ‘the traits of feminine heroism … endurance, sadism, humility’) targeted head-hugging cloche hats that impeded circulation and made the wearer nauseous; high heels that hurt and deformed the feet; and corsets so tightly laced and confining that they inhibited breathing and caused constipation. But she did not criticise dressmakers, corset-makers or ladies-wear saleswomen: quite the contrary, she paid tribute to the ‘feminine dignity’ of those among them who left husbands who beat them – a subject rarely discussed in newspapers at that time. ⁵ After she published Cheri (1920) to great acclaim, she was asked to write articles on haute couture and attend the seasonal collections. Although she still criticised ‘unhealthy’ or ‘frivolous’ (encumbering or excessive) styles, she was favourably impressed by the collections, which, she reported, were a mix of beautiful clothing and orderly display. Consequently, in her opinion, they were ‘art, not fantasy’ (Colette, 1991: 23). Most of her post-war fashion commentary appeared in magazines, notably Vogue (December 1924 – December 1925). She welcomed the lower, looser waistline of the new garçonne look, but expressed concern about the ‘flat, geometric’ silhouette, which suppressed the ‘smooth curves, assertive breasts, and succulent hips’ of the female body. As in her earlier coverage of fashion, she did not confine herself to surface appearances, but researched and reported on mannequins’ poor working conditions and payscales. ⁶

Because dailies had to reduce the size of their issues during the war, some of Colette’s best pieces from those years appeared in other periodicals. Her observations of the injuries to soldiers in the trenches and, more particularly, the collateral damage to family members on the home front were published during and shortly after the war, and many were included in another posthumous publication (Colette, 1918; 1924; Cahiers Colette, 1996).Instead of speculating about the strategy, tactics or heroism of warfare (and speculation was the only option, given the war ministry’s control over reporting on the war), she focused on the human costs of war. She had direct experience of those costs, because she had turned her country house into a hospital for wounded soldiers, which gave her insight into the human suffering associated with trench warfare. Colette’s attentiveness to the suffering as opposed to the successes of wartime (reports of failures were censored) presaged the approach of many women reporters, even those Americans and British women who finally got to the front during the Second World War. ⁷

Cultural studies scholars who examine Anglo-Saxon journalism have identified the empathetic approach as a distinctly feminine characteristic. Liesbet van Zoonen identified different journalistic styles in male and female reporters, with men emphasising fact and sensationalism, while women stressed compassion and consequences. Stuart Allen suggests that these distinctions operate to privilege male reporters as more truthful and serious. ⁸ According to my research, the same gendered approach was present in the French daily press and in their readers’ reactions.

At 20–30 lines apiece, Beaumont’s ‘Le Petit Courrier des femmes’ was a much shorter column than Colette’s ‘Mille et un matins’. Although the space allotted offered no scope for short stories or reflective essays, it permitted Beaumont to take stands on a variety of women’s issues. The column was sympathetic towards single and working-class women coping with post-war devastation, in particular the plight of single working women in the difficult post- war housing and job market. When correspondents wrote about their difficulties finding adequate housing, jobs or opportunities to socialise, she advocated proposals to allow women to obtain mortgages, establish women’s industries and form working women’s clubs (Rosine, 10–30 March 1920). She went against the interests of many readers when she responded to correspondents who complained about the dearth of domestics and the high wages they expected after the war, with suggestions about setting legal limits on working hours, establishing a minimum wage that included domestics, and ameliorating working conditions (13 and 31 May 1920). These suggestions were definitely not what her correspondents had in mind. Her positive attitude towards peasant and working-class women, and towards women in occupations that were coded masculine, was more fully expressed in the survey of French women that she conducted and published in 1935 (Beaumont, 1935b).

Like Colette’s journalism, ‘Le Petit Courrier des femmes’ was ambivalent about the controversial topic of the modern woman. At the beginning, the editor promised readers that the column would ‘treat feminine life’ from the point of view of ‘the woman of today’. The topics to be covered included women’s sports (then considered very modern) but not women’s paid employment (similarly modern) as opposed to their volunteer work (more traditional). ⁹ Beaumont dealt with the mixed mandate by expressing limited support for the modern. She approved of the shocking new phenomenon of single women wearing makeup, as long as it was discreet, and the equally disturbing trend of women participating in sports, as long as the sports were ladylike individual ones, like tennis, not rugged contact or team sports (Rosine, 10 March 1920 and 27 October 1921). She wrote little about gymnastics, one of the newly acceptable physical pursuits for women, and one that Colette practised enthusiastically. Beaumont made fun of the short hair, or bobs, which incited so much cultural outcry about women looking like men and, in the opinion of the primarily male critics, virtually becoming men in the early 1920s. Colette had shorn her famously long hair as early as 1902. Beaumont initially criticised the equally contentious garçonne style, including features that Colette acclaimed (3 May and 7 September 1921, 24 June 1922). Although Beaumont was ultimately reconciled to the straight silhouette, she remained sceptical about radical changes in women’s clothing and any extreme or impractical features of new styles. Precisely because of the moderate feminism of the interwar years, Beaumont’s column promoted more circumspect clothing and lifestyles than Colette’s columns did. This circumspection surely reflected the preferences of her editors and readers, but also mirrored her personal lifestyle. Beaumont, unlike Colette, did not engage in public displays of affection or semi-nudity; nor did she share her romantic affairs, as Colette had.

Beaumont ceased to write the women’s column in 1930 but edited Le Matin’s women’s page until 1940. When she placed stories and essays in Le Matin, they were assigned to ‘Mille et un matins’ or the magazine page (where the literary column and Germaine had relocated). ¹⁰ After a two-year stint as a fashion columnist on the weekly, Les Nouvelles Littéraires, she wrote longer essays for a column called ‘Disques’ from 1925 to 1935. Selections of these essays were published as collections, first in the 1930s (Beaumont, 1930) and again in 2005 (Fau and Beaumont, 2005). The first edition won another national literary award. These essays are more substantial than her columns, and many resemble essays in Colette’s ‘Mille et un matins’. One of them compared the representation of single women in literature to the treatment of ‘the good negro’ in literature. The same essay complained that a woman without a man was suspected of having designs on men (and therefore being shunned by suspicious married women) or of being prey to gigolos. But, she continued, literature failed to notice that a single woman could dress for her own pleasure, go where she chose or read in bed all day without having to account for her activities or idleness to a husband. Recognising that literature needed a victim type, she cheekily proposed that fiction writers consider depicting married women as victims (Fau and Beaumont, 2005: 25–7). The observations represent her personal satisfaction with single life after her second marriage; the proposal about married women echoes her mother’s and her own experiences of marriage.

Beaumont’s early life affected her fiction more obviously than her journalism. Ten of her 20 novels involved mothers who failed or deserted their daughters; in the words of her biographer, she was ‘infinitely reconstituting the original abandonment scene’ (Fau and Beaumont, 2005: i). In an interview for a series of articles on women writers, she answered the question: ‘What brought you to writing?’ with this poignant statement: ‘The sentiment of being alone in life. Literature, for me, is life.’ ¹¹ Many of her protagonists are single women; others are wives without spousal or family support. They are not ‘modern women’ in the 1920s sense of the term, which is to say, urban, employed, independent and mobile. Beaumont set most of her stories in relatively isolated rural homes or provincial towns, and wrote about timeless situations or past times, when petty-bourgeois women did not have many opportunities for employment or independence from husband and family. But the protagonists are not passive; they cope with situations that seem ominous. Several novels hint of crimes or malfeasance in the past that foretell danger in the present. These plots follow the protagonists as they untangle what happened in the past and learn that they are more capable than they had thought. Usually the heroine escapes the prison of the past and is better able to handle the present.

With the exception of the gender of the protagonists, this kind of novel fits the classic puzzle or enigma mystery plotline as popularised in France by nineteenth-century translations of Edgar Allen Poe. In a review of Beaumont’s novels, Colette described them as: ‘police procedurals without cops, mysterious and literary’. Another reviewer contended that Beaumont had invented a genre ‘tied to the psychological novel’. ¹² Explorations of isolation and vulnerability in the heroine’s psyche bore little resemblance to the newly popular romans noirs, with contemporary private eyes who dealt with urban crimes in a violent or at least action-packed way (Pouy, 2008: 12–14). Well into the 1990s, literary French private eyes were all men and the only response to feminist criticism of the genre was to introduce female assistants to male detectives (Charest, 1997: 303).

Both of these authors used their pen to probe and understand women’s lives, including their own. Feminine preoccupations like cosmetics, fashion and corsets in their journalism, which many commentators dismissed as frivolous, and feminine desire and agency in the female characters in their fiction, which many critics deemed improper or imaginary, help explain the late recognition of Colette and Beaumont. Beaumont faced other hurdles. During her lifetime, the genre of the mystery novel was not considered literary enough for scholarly attention. When the genre did interest scholars after her death, they focused on romans noirs, whose hard-nosed detectives and gritty urban settings differed radically from Beaumont’s petty-bourgeois women in villages and towns unravelling a personal or family enigma (Gorrara, 2007; Rzepka and Horsely, 2010).

Conclusions and prospects

Despite Colette’s unique literary genius, this article has demonstrated that comparing her journalism and literature to those of another woman with a similar, if not as brilliant, career produces some useful observations about families of origin, mentorship by other women and the reception of authors and journalists who wrote about feminine subjects from a modern feminine point of view. Colette, a member of the second generation of women in the masculine world of newspaper journalism, helped the career of Germaine Beaumont, a member of the following generation of women. My research on reporters has found that other successful members of the second generation helped younger colleagues, mainly by creating positions for them on the women’s pages and encouraging them to cover more ‘serious’ – meaning general political and economic – topics there. Like Beaumont, these third-generation journalists publicly acknowledged their female mentors’ assistance. Finally, in addressing the old question of how a ‘feminine’ subject matter and standpoint hinder literary and journalistic recognition, this article has added to the evidence that exceptional ‘feminine’ writers and journalists like Colette could transcend the condescension of the literary and journalistic cognoscenti with little concession to mainstream criticism. It also suggests that less transcendent women writers, like Beaumont, could be sidelined in their lifetime, if they chose to write about women from a feminine perspective in resolutely macho genres. Hopefully, these writers will get posthumous recognition as more scholars recognise their literary contributions.