'Une Belle Manifestation Féministe': The Formation of the Union des Femmes Professeurs et Compositeurs de Musique

Hamer, Laura (2025). 'Une Belle Manifestation Féministe': The Formation of the Union des Femmes Professeurs et Compositeurs de Musique. In: Hamer, Laura and Minors, Helen Julia eds. The Routledge Companion to Women and Musical Leadership: The Nineteenth Century and Beyond. New York: Routledge, pp. 79–91.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003024767-8

Abstract

Writing in Gil Blas in December 1911, René Simon described the formation of France's first all-woman orchestra by the Union des Femmes Professeurs et Compositeurs de Musique (Union of Women Music Teachers and Composers, hereafter U.F.P.C. 1 ) as ‘a beautiful feminist demonstration’ (‘une belle manifestation féministe’). 2 Given the fin-de-siècle French press's tendency to describe all public, professional activity amongst women as acts of feminism – regardless of whether or not the individual women concerned were actually aligned with the feminist movement – it is not surprising that Simon chose to characterise the Orchestra of the U.F.P.C. in this way. In the case of the U.F.P.C., however, the ‘feminist’ label was indeed apt, as it was a pro-suffrage and feminist organisation. Although by the outbreak of the First World War the U.F.P.C. counted around 800 members and was one of the most active music societies in Paris, it has now become an extremely obscure organisation. It has been very under-researched and, beyond a few passing references, is virtually absent from even the scholarship on women musicians in fin-de-siècle France. 3 This chapter seeks to redress this by throwing fresh light upon the U.F.P.C., questioning the motivation for its formation, and surveying its activities throughout the early years of its existence (from 1904 to the outbreak of the First World War). Why so many women musicians felt the need to join an organisation designed to protect their interests is considered through a discussion of the institutionalised discrimination they tended to face. The establishment of the U.F.P.C. is also contextualised within both the development of fin-de-siècle French feminism and the concomitant emergence of ‘femmes nouvelles’ (‘new women’), which many of the individual members seemed to embody. That so many women musicians participated in the significant work of this avowedly feminist trade union constitutes a greater involvement in feminist politics than has previously been acknowledged.