It’s official. Nice will have an avenue Reine-Elizabeth II, in the district of Cimiez, “where history has been marked by the royal presence”, announced the mayor Christian Estrosi in the municipal council. The proposal to “honor the memory” of the recently deceased Queen was approved. An opportunity to “inflate” the statistics of the Côte d’Azur capital in terms of the feminization of routes, all types combined.
Only 5% of the 1,324 streets, avenues or other places had a female odonymy according to data compiled in 2015 by Nice morning. The city would therefore be at the bottom of the ranking of major cities in France, just above Lille (3.2%) and tied with Toulouse (5%).
Cities that have made efforts in recent years
However, the municipality ensures that “as soon as he took office in 2008, Christian Estrosi wanted to accelerate the principles of parity, particularly during the commissions for the naming of roads and public spaces” to “increase the share of female names”. Before pressing: “Many sites have thus been baptized in the name of illustrious women like Simone Veil, Olympe de Gouges, Mother Teresa”, without communicating figures. For information, avenue Simone Veil was the 75th street in the city bearing the name of a woman… In November 2013.
In June, the elected officials had also refused to allocate a street to Gisèle Halimi because she “defended members of the National Liberation Front” in the post-war context of Algeria, reported Nice-Press at the time of the facts. A detail that did not bother the municipality of Nantes, which recently granted a boulevard to the lawyer and feminist activist. Since the beginning of the mandate of Johanna Rolland (PS), in 2014, between 70% and 80% of the new names of streets or places bear a woman’s name. Thus, more than 120 new female surnames have been assigned, i.e. 8% of the total of Nantes’ odonymies.
Rennes and Lyon are two cities that are also pursuing a policy to “reduce inequalities in recognition between men and women” and “accelerate the process”. The Breton capital has registered twelve new streets this year and registers 14% of its streets with women’s names. In Lyon, a new place Simone Veil and rue Frida Kahlo have made it possible to increase to 11% the share of streets bearing female names.
words and deeds
In general, each major city today claims to take this issue to heart and promises to make efforts. But in fact, or rather, figures, they are far from realizing them. In Bordeaux, the municipality explains “to carry the will to make street names and buildings the mirror of our society” by attributing, for example, in May 2022, women’s names to 46 new roads and public spaces. The municipality thus goes to 5.4% of female odonymy. Until then, this was the case for only 59 streets and squares (out of nearly 1,950).
In Montpellier, elected officials also launched “a wave” of names last year with twelve streets that took the name of twelve women who marked history to “find the path to gender equality in our public space. “, according to the mayor, Michaël Delafosse (PS). At that time, 1,437 routes bore the name of a man, against only 187 that of a woman, indicates The Marseillaise. As for Marseille, the city has undertaken to “assign women’s names to at least 50% of all municipal buildings under construction or soon to be inaugurated as well as to newly named streets”, relates News.Fr.
Actions to feminize the streets
In Paris, 12% of the streets have women’s names and 66% men’s names. Even if this percentage remains low, it has doubled in five years. The designer Alcatela had also created the map of “feminine Paris” to show the lack of representation of women in the capital while highlighting all the same the work carried out recently.
Other civic actions have been undertaken in response to this observation. In Nice, the Artemis collective had made a request to the town hall for Anita Conti and Françoise Sagan streets. Without success. In Strasbourg, in 2018, the Copines Strasbourg collective did not wait for permission and renamed around sixty streets in the city to “protest against the invisibility of women in our society”.
Asked by Raw on this subject, Christine Bard, historian and specialist in the history of women, affirms: “We could decide to have parity in the names of streets. It’s not enough to have a Joan of Arc or a queen or a politician or an artist from time to time. It is the mass of women that counts. It’s half of humanity after all. At the national level, 6% of the routes bear the name of a woman.