Following the success of the first large collections of archives, devoted to the First World War and then to relations between Africa and France, and after the presentation of the report by Françoise Thébaud, historian of feminism, Audrey Azoulay, Minister of Culture and Communication, announces that a new Grande collecte d'archives will be organized in November 2017 around the place of women in French society.

The unifying theme chosen for this first Grande collecte d'archives de femmes, is “work”, understood in a broad sense: intellectual, manual, domestic.

The archives that could be collected will therefore be of a very diverse nature: private correspondence, diaries or autobiographies evoking life at work, books of accounts or recipes, photographic and audiovisual archives of workplaces, various documents of business leaders or peasants, oral testimonies, union and association funds, private archives related to social struggles in the company, iconographic archives representing the image of women at work (postcards, albums, etc.), etc.

French women and French women who have documents from - or about - their mothers, grandmothers and grandparents will be invited to give them away or to deposit them in the archival institutions in November 2017.

If this Great Collection is of undeniable scientific interest, both for the archival institutions which thus consolidate their holdings but also for the researchers who will find there material to write history, it is also part of a citizen and democratic horizon: on the one hand, it raises awareness of the value that their private archives represent for history and collective memory; On the other hand, it invites all citizens to participate and to reconsider their common heritage.  

In view of this Great Collection, on March 8, International Women’s Rights Day, two symposia are organized under the aegis of the Ministry of Culture and Communication. «Archives de femmes: donner et collecte» is organized in Paris in partnership with the National Archives. In Lyon, a day of study on this theme is organized by the departmental archives of the Rhône and the metropolis of Lyon, the Diderot Library of Lyon and the Laboratory of Historical Research Rhône-Alpes.