If you’ll learn this, you nearly certainly know the French phrase for a professionalfessional automobile driver. That’s as a result of we use the similar phrase in English: chauffeur. French nouns, in contrast to English ones, are available masculine and femi9 varieties, and that –eur finishing unmistakably indicates probably the most former. What, then, to name a lady who works at the back of the wheel? Chauffeuse will be the natural possibility, if it didn’t already confer with one of those fireplaceaspect living room chair. One may just additionally feminize cocher, another phrase for driver, however cochère, too, is already taken via an arched accessmethod (which architectural element, significantly, meets the vehicular realm within the type of the porte-cochère).
As continuously, the difficulty of pinning down the suitable time period right here displays the scarcity of the belowlying concept. In a lot of the sector these days, driving isn’t considered probably the most femi9 of occupations. That used to be even more true within the Paris of the early twentieth century, when the primary lady to get her taxi license made history — or fairly, when the primary girls to get their taxi licenses made history. A 1908 dispatch from the Motor-Automobile Journal’s Paris correspondent describes a certain Mademoiselle Gaby Pohlen as having “acquired her driver’s license to drive a motor taxicab from the Prefecture of Police.” Even on the time of writing, “her examinationple has already been followed via Madame Decourcelle.”
According to Jeroen Booij at PreWarCar.com, however, “3 girls supposedly started an apprenticesend in 1906 to drive a motorized automotiveriage within the Town of Mild. A girl named Madame Dufaut-Charnier supposedly were given her level as early as February 1907.” However Madame Inès Decourcelle “is thought to be the primary to obtain her complete taxi licence in April 1908, making her the primary lady in history to drive a taxi within the streets of Paris. The reality is that she changed into the subject of a number of daily informationpain line with articles declareing this, as she used to be observed on such a lot of submitplaying cards from Paris naming her the primary ‘femme chauffeur.’ ” After seeing one such story in Le Journal, another lady “wrote to the paper in a particularly irritated method, declareing that now not Madame Decourcelle however she, Mademoiselle Gaby Pohlen, earned the name,” having get starteded driving again in 1906.
The commenters at PreWarCar.com have put some idea towards clarifying the matter. Given the technology, when the carmobile itself used to be nonetheless a novelty, one in every of them suspects confusion about “whether or not all the ones named had been authorized horse-drawn or motor cab drivers,” give an explanation foring that Pohlen and Decourcelles “each recordedly acquired licenses to drive motor taxi-cabs in spring 1908.” Whilst the photogenic and a fewwhat eccentric Pohlen could have get starteded out first, “Mme. Decourcelles’ declare to reputation used to be that she used to be the primary to get “diplomas” as each a horse ‘cochère’ and a motor ‘chauffeuse.’ ” This, another commenter provides, used to be “an incredible reachment on the time,” no matter which phrase — or phrases — the Académie Française approves to explain it.
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Primarily based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and extensivecasts on towns, language, and culture. His initiatives come with the Substack newsletter Books on Towns and the e book The Statemuch less Town: a Stroll via Twenty first-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facee book.
