Meet Madame Inès Decourcelle, One of the Very First Female Taxi Drivers in Paris (Circa 1908)

If you can read this, you almost cer­tain­ly know the French word for a pro­fes­sion­al auto­mo­bile dri­ver. That’s because we use the same word in Eng­lish: chauf­feur. French nouns, unlike Eng­lish ones, come in mas­cu­line and fem­i­nine vari­eties, and that -eur end­ing unmis­tak­ably indi­cates one of the for­mer. What, then, to call a woman who works behind the wheel? Chauf­feuse would be the nat­ur­al option, if it did­n’t already refer to a kind of fire­side lounge chair. One could also fem­i­nize cocher, anoth­er word for dri­ver, but cochère, too, is already tak­en by an arched entry­way (which archi­tec­tur­al detail, notably, meets the vehic­u­lar realm in the form of the porte-cochère).

As often, the dif­fi­cul­ty of pin­ning down the right term here reflects the scarci­ty of the under­ly­ing con­cept. In much of the world today, dri­ving isn’t con­sid­ered the most fem­i­nine of occu­pa­tions. That was even truer in the Paris of the ear­ly twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, when the first woman to get her taxi license made his­to­ry — or rather, when the first women to get their taxi licens­es made his­to­ry. A 1908 dis­patch from the Motor-Car Jour­nal’s Paris cor­re­spon­dent describes a cer­tain Made­moi­selle Gaby Pohlen as hav­ing “obtained her dri­ver’s license to dri­ve a motor taxi­cab from the Pre­fec­ture of Police.” Even at the time of writ­ing, “her exam­ple has already been fol­lowed by Madame Decour­celle.”

Accord­ing to Jeroen Booij at PreWarCar.com, how­ev­er, “three ladies sup­pos­ed­ly began an appren­tice­ship in 1906 to dri­ve a motor­ized car­riage in the City of Light. A lady named Madame Dufaut-Charnier sup­pos­ed­ly got her degree as ear­ly as Feb­ru­ary 1907.” But Madame Inès Decour­celle “is believed to be the first to receive her full taxi licence in April 1908, mak­ing her the first woman in his­to­ry to dri­ve a taxi in the streets of Paris. The fact is that she became the sub­ject of a num­ber of dai­ly news­pa­per arti­cles claim­ing this, as she was seen on so many post­cards from Paris nam­ing her the first ‘femme chauf­feur.’ ” After see­ing one such sto­ry in Le Jour­nal, anoth­er woman “wrote to the paper in a par­tic­u­lar­ly irri­tat­ed way, claim­ing that not Madame Decour­celle but she, Made­moi­selle Gaby Pohlen, earned the title,” hav­ing start­ed dri­ving back in 1906.

The com­menters at PreWarCar.com have put some thought toward clar­i­fy­ing the mat­ter. Giv­en the era, when the auto­mo­bile itself was still a nov­el­ty, one of them sus­pects con­fu­sion about “whether all those named were licensed horse-drawn or motor cab dri­vers,” explain­ing that Pohlen and Decour­celles “both report­ed­ly obtained licens­es to dri­ve motor taxi-cabs in spring 1908.” While the pho­to­genic and some­what eccen­tric Pohlen may have start­ed out first, “Mme. Decour­celles’ claim to fame was that she was the first to get “diplo­mas” as both a horse ‘cochère’ and a motor ‘chauf­feuse.’ ” This, anoth­er com­menter adds, was “an incred­i­ble achieve­ment at the time,” no mat­ter which word — or words — the Académie Française approves to describe it.

via Messy­Nessy

Relat­ed con­tent:

Beau­ti­ful, Col­or Pho­tographs of Paris Tak­en 100 Years Ago—at the Begin­ning of World War I & the End of La Belle Époque

Paris Had a Mov­ing Side­walk in 1900, and a Thomas Edi­son Film Cap­tured It in Action

The Time­less Beau­ty of the Cit­roën DS, the Car Mythol­o­gized by Roland Barthes (1957)

Take a Vir­tu­al Dri­ve through Lon­don, Tokyo, Los Ange­les & 45 Oth­er World Cities

Robert De Niro’s Taxi Cab License Used to Pre­pare for Taxi Dri­ver (1976)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.