Based in the city of Nantes, western France, Anne Bouillon, 52, is a lawyer committed to supporting women who are victims of domestic violence and sexual assault. The daughter of teachers and the grand-niece of Joséphine Baker, she comes from a line of strong women. In her book, Affaires de femmes. Une vie à plaider pour elles ("Women's Matters: A Life Pleading for Them"), she recounts how advocating for their cause has become the fight of her life.

I wouldn't be where I am today if...

... If I hadn't learned to negotiate the turning points in my life, to bounce back from the imponderables, to turn painful moments into blessings. It's something my parents explicitly taught me, particularly in my teens, when I was sick, tearful and revolting against the whole world. "You have a right to be angry," they said. "But you have a duty not to stop there. From what happens to you, you'll make a strength."

Well, it boosts. It propels. So I've built myself up with the idea that: Okay, that's the way it is, and it's not so bad, it's up to me to make something interesting out of it. I've come to realize that what the tutelary women who have surrounded me have in common is that they were able to transcend their condition...

Introduce them to us!

First of all, my mother, from a very modest background, and fatherless, was hired at the age of 14 as a typist. A victim of sexual harassment at work, she had an abortion while she was still a minor, in secrecy. Then she passed her baccalaureate, took a series of diplomas and became a high school teacher, by dint of her own strength, determined not to depend on a husband or a boss. Sarah, my maternal grandmother, extremely important in my life, whose parents and two little sisters were exterminated at Auschwitz, and whose husband died very young of tuberculosis, worked as a laborer at Citroën car maker, paid by piecework while raising her two children alone.

Jeanne, my paternal grandmother, an Italian from Piedmont born into abject poverty, was saved by her talent as a cellist, which led to her joining the National Orchestra of France, where she met my grandfather. And then there was Joséphine Baker, my great-aunt, whose energy and path to emancipation have always fascinated me. You see? I wouldn't be where I am today if I hadn't understood, like all these women, that you can accept the blows of fate, turn them into strength and move forward.

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