Paris 1975 Françoise Giroud (b/w photo)

Léa France Gourdji, known as Françoise Giroud, born September 21, 1916 in Lausanne, Switzerland, and died on January 19, 2003 at the American Hospital in Paris, in Neuilly-sur-Seine, is a French journalist, writer and politician. Her pseudonym Françoise “Giroud”, almost an anagram of Gourdji, invented for her by Maurice Diamant-Berger to work in radio around 1938, officially became her name by a decree published in the Official Journal on July 12, 1964. Vice President of the Radical Party and the UDF, she was Secretary of State twice and was a major personality in the French press. A decree of 23 July 1974 created the State Secretariat for the Status of Women. Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, newly elected President of the Republic, who had wanted it created, appoints the famous journalist Françoise Giroud as its head.