La Barbe: France’s Bearded Feminists

A group of French feminists have been using an unusual form of protests – fake beards – to protest what they think is a male-dominated society.

Host Marco Werman talks with Colette Coffin from the group La Barbe, which means beard.

Read the Transcript
The text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

Marco Werman: In France some women who think society is too male dominated have come up with a novel way to protest. They’re wearing fake beards in public.

[Speaking French]

Werman: As you just heard there, the group calls itself La Barbe. That means ‘The Beard’ in French but it’s also a colloquial expression meaning enough is enough. Colette Coffin is with the group. She’s in Paris. Colette, just how male dominated is French society these days?

Colette Coffin: Well, it looks special because we recently had a new [00:00:34] with the equality, women and men, but we do have a president, prime minister is man, and then the head of parliament is a man. All the power is given to men even in [00:00:50] sports, everything – we still are very male dominated.

Werman: Why resort to protest though? I mean that usually indicates that the situation is so negative that it’s futile to fight through other means.

Coffin: We talk to some men, you see. We use irony and we congratulate them because they don’t seem to change whatever happens.

Werman: Describe for us an intervention by La Barbe. Do you pick an event where there are a lot of men and then a group of women from La Barbe put on their beards and just enter the room? Is that how it works?

Coffin: We just sit down quietly and wait for the people to speak. We stand up one by one and then we are up we just walk on stage and wait until we are invited to speak and we read the speech we have prepared before, always congratulating men, you know, with certain…wonderful, you’ve been only between men for the last couple of years, don’t change anything. Or we tell them beware you’ve just elected a woman in your midst and so now you’re not so male minded. You have to stay between you and that sort of thing.

Werman: Does each member of Le Barbe have her own beard or do you have like a big bag of beards that you just hand out at meetings?

Coffin: We all have our own beard. Personally I have two beards because if you ever try to speak with a fake beard you will see it’s very difficult because you get all the fluff in your mouth. So I’ve got a special one which is very wide open around the mouth to speak easily. That’s funny but the thing is it is very serious – women pretending to be men. Women are not visible so we want to show them out there but in fact it’s a very serious problem.

Werman: It is a very striking form of protest. You’ve put up some videos of your protest with beard on YouTube, one of them set to this very appropriate piece of music.

[Music]

Werman: We’ve got links to some of those videos as well on our website at theworld.org. Colette Coffin, thank you very much for your time.

Coffin: Thank you.

[Music]

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.