Evelyne Sullerot

Évelyne Sullerot, née Hammel, was born on October 10, 1924 in Montrouge. Commandeur de la Légion d'honneur and Grand-Officier de l'ordre national du Mérite for her feminist combat.

From a Protestant family, she was the daughter of André Hammel and Georgette Roustain. Her father, a doctor, made one of the first pyschiatric clinics in France. He was Chevalier de la Légion d'honneur. Her mother died of hunger and cold at Valence station in 1943. Both, very religiously committed to Protestantism socially and politically, were given the posthumous title of Righteous among the nations, for having saved eleven Jews during the German occupation.

Évelyne Hammel, during her year of philosophy, was arrested then judged in Nimes by the Vichy police force for “antinational propaganda and hostile remarks about the Head of the State” (Pétain). Returning to the German zone of occupation, she entered the resistance and joined the OCMJ (Military and Civilian Organization of Young People). She married François Sullerot, with whom she would later have four children. Evelyne Sullerot is the cousin of the resistant Elisabeth Rioux-Quintenelle and the great niece of one of the initiators of the feminist movement in France, Louise Massebiau-Compain.

Fight for Feminism

* In 1955, she proposed along with the gynaecologist Marie-Andrée Weill-Halle to found an organisation to promote birth control. This would be the Maternité Heureuse, which became the French Movement for Family Planning two years later.

* Thereafter she wrote many successful feminist works.

* In 1967, at the Université Paris X Nanterre, she created the first course in the world based on studies devoted to women: the place of women in political life, while passing by Sociology and Women in the Workplace.