Jeanne Lapointe

Jeanne Lapointe (September 7, 1915, Chicoutimi - January 7, 2006, Quebec City) was a Canadian academic and intellectual.

In 1940, she was the first female professor of literature in the Faculty of Arts of the Laval University. Her essays and actions contributed to the advent of literary modernity in Québec,^[1] thanks to her intellectual debates published in the journal Cité Libre (1950) and its influence on major Quebec writers such as Marie-Claire Blais, Anne Hébert and Gabrielle Roy,^[2] for whom she played the role of mentor. Her actions as Commissioner on the Parent Commission and Bird Commission during the Quiet Revolution gave a political forum for progressive ideas about education in Quebec and the status of women in Canada. It was then that her words were defined ironically against the discourse of domination and sexual inequality, rhetoric she developed in psychoanalytic literary analysis (1970) and feminism (1980-1990).^[3] Correspondence filed with Library and Archives Canada,^[4] documents communication with many intellectuals as well as Quebec and European writers such as Jean Le Moyne, Louky Bersianik, Pierre Gélinas, Judith Jasmin, Félix-Antoine Savard, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Driss Chraïbi, Nathalie Sarraute, and others.