Marguerite Pichon Landry

Early years

Marguerite Landry was born in 1878 to a family of radical socialist intellectuals. Her mother was Aglae Meuron (1836-1925). Her great-grandfather Francois-Timothee Landry (c. 1769–1805) was a naval officer. Her father Timothee Landry (1841–1912) was a lawyer who became prosecutor in Paris towards the end of his career. Of her brothers, Eugene Landry (1872–1913) was a man of letters, and the demographer Adolphe Landry (1874–1956) was a government minister several times. Her sister Lasthenie Thuillier-Landry (1879–1962) was a doctor of medicine. Thuillier Landry founded the Association of Women Physicians (Association des femmes medecins). Her sister Marie Long-Landry (1897–1968) was also a medical doctor and was the first woman to head a clinic.

Marguerite Landry studied at the College Sevigne. In 1903 she married the lawyer Adolphe Pichon. Charles-Adolphe Pichon was the secretary of Raymond Poincare. They had one daughter, Amy (1905–92), who married Jean Bernard (1907–2006).

Feminist leader

During World War I (1914–18) Marguerite Pichon-Landry was in charge of the information office for dispersed families. From 1914 to 1927 she chaired the Legislation section of the National Council of French Women (CNFF: Conseil National des femmes francaises). She joined the French Union for Women's Suffrage (UFSF: Union francaise pour le suffrage des femmes), and was vice-president of the UFSF until the end of the 1930s. The Musee social was an organization of prominent upper- and middle-class social reformers. Its Section d'Etudes Feminines (Section of Women's Studies) was founded in 1916. Pichon-Landry and Cecile Brunschvicg both joined.

In January 1919 a 38-member extra-parliamentary committee on girl's secondary education ignored the objections of most of its six women members and recommended retaining the "feminine" features of girl's secondary education. In May 1919 the French Chamber of Deputies voted for unrestricted woman suffrage by 344 to 97. Women assumed they would soon get the vote. Cecile Brunschvicg and Marguerite Pichon Landry, leading members of the CNFF and UFSF, brought the women's objections to the education commission to the attention of government ministers. Pichon-Landry and Henry Hebrard de Villeneuve of the Council of State surveyed the postwar hiring practices of administration. Pichon-Landry reported in March 1920 to a joint meeting of the legislative and women's sections of the Musee. Pichon-Ladry made the point that the "sedentary" and "regular nature of administrative work allowed women to combine a job with familial duties." With the economy struggling to recover from the effect of the war, she said, "since everyone, today, recognizes the need to increase production, the reservation of positions to men should not divert some men from more directly productive careers." The members of the Musee social endorsed full equality of the sexes throughout the administration.

In mid-1922 the Senate refused to ratify the decision to give women the vote. Pichon-Landry became general secretary of the CNFF in 1929, and was president from 1932 to 1952. She replaced Avril de Sainte-Croix as CNFF president. Through the connections of her brother, the government minister Adolphe Landry, she had privileged access to the political elite. The CNFF stated that it had 150,000 members in 1929, 300,000 in 1936 and 200,000 in 1939. These figures are probably exaggerated.

In 1935 the CNFF had 300,000 members and the UFSF had 100,000. These two organizations combined with fifteen other organizations to take unified action in response to any threat to the right of women to work. In February 1936 Pichon-Landry and Brunschvicg, representing the CNFF and UFSF respectively, addressed premier Albert Sarraut and met Jean Zay, his under-secretary. They asked that the general rules for hiring for all ministries be based on professional merits rather than sex. They conceded that there could be special cases, such as the defense ministries, where gender distinction could be justified. On 3 July 1936 the Council of State ruled that women had the "legal capacity" to compete for administrative positions, despite not having the vote, but the government could decide "whether the interests of a service necessitate, within a ministry, restrictions on the admission and advancement of female personnel." This waiver could be used by the War ministry to reserve the higher-level positions for men.

Pichon-Landry helped found the Federal Union of Consumption (Union federale de la consommation), now the Federal Consumer's Union (Union federale des consommateurs in 1951. She received the Resistance Medal and was made a Knight of the Legion of Honour. She became head of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women. Marguerite Pichon-Landry died in 1972.