Eliane Morissens

Eliane Morissens (10 August 1927 – 9 December 2006) was a Belgian teacher and activist.

Raised as a feminist, she was active as a trade unionist and socialist.

Morissens studied to become a chemical engineer, but was employed as a teacher, as there were few other options for women in her era.

Eliane Willie Fernande Morissens was born on 10 August 1927 in Etterbeek, Belgium.

From a young age, Morissens knew she was a lesbian and it was not an issue with her parents.

They counseled her to be independent and did not pressure her to marry.

Her mother was a feminist and Morissens later said that for herself if you were a lesbian, you were a feminist.

She studied to be a chemical engineer, but chose to be a teacher as it was one of the few career paths open to women.

She was involved in trade union organizing and in the early 1950s joined the Socialist Party of Wallonia.

Because neither the trade unions nor the socialists involved women in positions of power, she pressed both organizations to allow women's inclusion in administrative and leadership positions.

Morissens was active in the struggle against police and security service repression.

There were no support groups for homosexuals in Wallonia and only a few in Flanders, but she did meet LGBT activists with whom she was open about her sexuality.

In 1957, Morissens began teaching chemistry at the provincial technical college in Saint-Ghislain, a village in the province of Hainaut in the Wallonia region of Belgium.

She did not disclose her lesbianism to her employer, and because of the conservative environment and predominance of Catholicism in the country, she typically hid her sexuality from her colleagues and her students.

Morissens had a vacation home in the south of France.

She said that she could only truly be herself for four months of the year when she was there.

She actively picketed in the 1960 general strike in Wallonia, although most women provided only support services, bringing refreshments for the participants.

The student protests in 1968 gave rise to a new generation of feminists with whom she began interacting.

During the course of her career, she received several promotions, eventually becoming the assistant headmistress at the school.

She worked her way up to assistant headmistress of a provincial technical college but in 1977 was denied a promotion to become the head of the school.

In 1977, she applied to become the college's headmistress and was denied the promotion.

Though the reason was not explicitly stated, non-public information led Morissens to conclude that it was because a lesbian could not be in charge of a girls' school which had over 1,000 girls and 200 boys.

When asked in 1980 to appear on a television broadcast about lesbians, she decided to participate.

During the broadcast, she stated that she had been denied the promotion because of her lesbianism.

She commented on the irony of the school board being unwilling to put a lesbian in charge of girl students, but having no concern about appointing a man for the post.

Morissens was terminated from her job without pay two days after the broadcast.

The school board denied that the decision was based on her sexuality.

The board claimed their decision was rooted in professional misconduct, since she had questioned their authority on the television program.

In 1980, Morissens was approached by a women's group from Brussels and asked to appear on a television program discussing homosexuality.

Morissens said she agreed because she was tired of hiding, wanted to help her students, and sought to be open about her involvement in LGBT activism.

She asked for a review of the case by the provincial appeals committee, which upheld the decision in 1982, but allowed her limited compensation under early retirement.

She then appealed to the Council of State, the highest court in the country.

Embarrassed by the international attention, the Flemish Socialist Party introduced a measure in 1982, which passed in 1985, to repeal article 372bis of the Belgian Penal Code, which set a higher age of consent for homosexual relations.

That year, Morissens filed an appeal with the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France.

In 1984, the court upheld her termination and denied that her freedom of expression had been violated.

Her plight became a cause célèbre in the LGBT community throughout Europe and the Americas, garnering international press coverage and demonstrations.

The international LGBT community raised funds for her personal use and legal fees, campaigned for her reinstatement, lobbied legislators and teachers' unions, and continued with protests on her behalf.

In 1988, the court dismissed her appeal, but acknowledged her freedom of expression was abridged; however, they found the curtailment justifiable because as a teacher she was required to maintain a professional demeanor.

The European Union adopted legislation in 2000, to prohibit employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation following recommendations by the Legal Affairs Committee of the European Parliament, which had reviewed legal challenges of discrimination including Morissens' case.

She died in southern France in 2006 and is remembered for bringing the issue of employment discrimination against homosexuals to worldwide attention.