A 1970s feminist tract on fixing a broken toilet seat is published in French
Written in the early 1970s by Anya Berger, translator and companion of John Berger, a short, funny account of a domestic repair job has been translated into French by her daughter, with a preface by Mona Chollet.
According to Le Temps, the book "Comment je me suis sortie de la merde" collects a text written by Anya Berger (1923-2018) at the start of the 1970s. Berger, a Russian-British intellectual, was a translator of Marx and of Le Corbusier, and worked alongside John Berger as his collaborator and companion.
The story it tells is domestic and small in scale: a toilet seat has broken under the weight of the man of the house, who leaves without repairing it. Left alone to raise two children, the woman of the house decides to replace it herself — a job she calls, per Le Temps's account, "typiquement masculin", and one she takes on partly because of it, as a member of the MLF, the French women's liberation movement, at the dawn of the 1970s.
Le Temps describes what follows as an ordeal recounted with humour and anger: a woman who says she always saw herself as more Marie than Marthe, more intellectual than manual, buying a new seat, enlisting a neighbour and a hardware seller, then wrestling for a Saturday afternoon with layers of grime, stuck screws, wrong tools and sticky oil, all under her children's astonished gaze. The account ends, per the summary, in triumph over the ordeal — and over the gender roles behind it.
The French edition has been translated from the English original by Berger's daughter, Katya Berger Andreadakis, and carries a preface by the essayist Mona Chollet. Le Temps illustrates its piece with a photograph, credited to Dorothée Thébert for art&fiction, of Katya Berger Andreadakis in Geneva on 3 December 2025, holding a photo of her mother.
Sources
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