Chantal Savoie , Associate Professor
Center for Interuniversity Research on Quebec Literature and Culture
Department of Literature
Université Laval
At the turn of the 20th century, the women’s pages of major daily newspapers became one of the places that contributed the most to shaping the emergence of a literate female view of the world and of culture. As an extension of our work on the women’s pages of daily newspapers and women’s periodicals of the first decades of the 20th century, we wish to measure the evolution of women’s gaze on the world and on culture by magazines by focusing on the chronicle “What we are talking about” by Lucette Robert in La revue populaire (1944-1947). While the world of print underwent a decisive change during the Second World War, how did the modernization of society and the redeployment of the media space in general and the specific space of magazines in particular, is it transformed by this evolution? How did the feminine social culture present itself at the end of the war? Lucette Robert’s column, tackling the failures of socialite, literary and artistic circles, while the columnist herself embodied a new model of literate woman and citizen of the world in a popular magazine, proves to be a privileged example which makes it possible to probe the connection of the different cultural spheres (media and culture, at the confluence of popular culture and middle culture) at a pivotal time.
