Thérèse Clerc

Thérèse Clerc (1927–2016) was a French militant feminist who was active principally in the city of Montreuil. A member of the Movement for Freedom of Abortion and Birth Control (Mouvement pour la liberté de l'avortement et de la contraception, MLAC), she performed clandestine abortions for women in difficulty in her small Montreuil apartment until 1975, when abortions were legalized under the Veil Law. In 2000, she founded the Maison des Femmes: a cultural, social and feminist center for women who had been the victims of violence, later renamed Maison Thérèse Clerc. For many years, Clerc fought for the establishment of a self-managed home for elderly women in Montreuil, finally succeeding with the Maison des Babayagas in 2013.

Biography Born on 9 December 1927, Thérèse was brought up in a middle-class home in the city of Bagnolet where her father worked for a bookmaking company. After entering the hatmaking trade, she married an industrial cleaning entrepreneur when she was 20. With four children to care for, she became a housewife. As a catholic, she was selling the weekly journal named « Témoignage chrétien » and meeting priests workers back from military service in Algeria. « I met Marx in the church on Charonne street » as she said.

Thérèse Clerc died in Montreuil on 16 February 2016.