Bernadette Le Loarer was born in Brélévenez, Côtes-d'Armor, February 25, 1899. [1] Her parents were Jean Marie Le Loarer, a railwayman, and Marie Ollivier, an illiterate peasant. Her family was Breton-speaking and Catholic but it was a teacher who awakened Cattaneo to socialist ideas. She trained as a seamstress before going to Paris in 1919 to do several odd jobs. There, she met Jean-Baptiste Cattanéo who, like her, was a pharmacy employee.[2] They married on October 10, 1922 and had two children.
At the end of 1923, Cattanéo joined the French Communist Party,[3] with an interest in issues affecting women.[2] She was fired from her job in a pharmacy for having organized a strike with her husband and found employment as editor of the newspaper La Nouvelle Vie Ouvrière in April 1925.[2]
After a reorganization of the PCF, she directed its 35th department and was a member of the party's women's commission.[2] At the same time, she joined the women's commission of the CGTU, of which she was appointed secretary in 1929,[2] and joined the confederal office[3] in November 1931.[4] During this time, she was on the editorial board of L'Ouvrière.[2] She traveled in France and Europe between 1925 and 1936 to follow the strikes organized by the CGTU.[5]
Cattanéo was also active internationally since she took part in the fourth congress of Profintern on April 5, 1928 in the USSR where she met Joseph Stalin.[2] She traveled there eleven times. Georgi Dimitrov made her responsible for setting up the World Committee of Women Against War and Fascism in 1934.[2] In this coordinated development, she was secretary of the International Women's Organizations' Joint Coordination Committee, where she represented the PCF and the CGTU[6] and associated with Gabrielle Duchêne and Maria Rabaté, herself a communist leader.[7] The magazine Femmes dans l'action mondiale (Women in Global Action) was created in this connection and was managed by these three women.[8]
_-_aout_1936_(cropped_2023).jpg)
