Gisèle Joannès

Origins and early life

Gisèle Joannès was born Raca Golda Nusbaum at Warsaw on 28 July 1918, in a Polish working-class family of Jewish culture, and died at Groslay on 6 September 1992, at the age of seventy-four. She left school after the primary certificate and became a dressmaker, one of thousands of Jewish immigrant women in the Paris clothing trade. She joined the militant wave of the Popular Front in the 1930s, was dismissed in 1938 for taking part in a strike, and married Victor Joannès that same year; their son was born in 1940.

Work and career

During the war she served as a liaison agent of the Resistance, carrying messages that could not be trusted to paper. After the liberation she became a journalist, writing for Femmes françaises and then for Antoinette, and she belonged to the CGT from 1945 to 1972. She founded La Revue des travailleuses in 1952 and Antoinette in 1955, two papers addressed to working women at a time when almost no one wrote for them, and she was secretary general of the clothing federation of the CGT from 1952.

She sat on the central committee of the French Communist Party from 1956 to 1967 and represented her federation at the Economic and Social Council from 1960 to 1972. She withdrew from public life after the death of her husband in 1972 and resigned her last office in 1976.