Jacqueline Coutras

Jacqueline Coutras (born in 1942) is a French geographer who is a researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). A pioneer of gender geography in France, she, along with Jeanne Fagnani, took part in the institutionalization of international feminist geography.

In her 1996 book Urban crisis and gendered spaces she addressed the issue of sexual spatial asymmetries, and showed that if women have expanded the space to which they were traditionally confined through access to paid work and car driving, they nevertheless were not able to achieve full access to all spaces of socialization. Cities remain unequal spaces.

Biography Coutras defended her post-graduate thesis in 1975 under the direction of Jacqueline Beaujeu-Garnier, on "economic activity zones and development in the western part of the Paris region". She holds the academic title agrégée in geography. at the Institut de recherche sur les sociétés contemporaines (Iresco).

Work in the field of feminist geography Coutras published feminist studies on women, their urban practices and spatial behaviors as soon as the end of the 1970s.

Feminist geography Coutras attempted to found a feminist geography along with Jeanne Fagnani while still remaining in the social geography field.

During the national colloquium "Women, Feminism and Research", which brought together nearly a hundred people in Toulouse in December 1982, Coutras moderated and synthesized a debate entitled "Women and Spaces". In 1982 she also intervened at the colloquium of Lyon of social geography, on the issue of "the city from a feminine perspective" during a session titled "the behavior of the social groups". she took advantage of the urban crisis in France to explore the question of sexual spatial asymmetries. She explained that, thanks to paid work and access to driving women had pushed back the limits of the spaces traditionally devoted to them in residential space to conquer the functional city, without however managing to access the socializing city. City spaces remain unequal, and public policies privileges the needs of men.

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