[1] She was the daughter of a railroad worker, trained as a teacher, and was employed by a private school in the working-class district of Montmartre, Paris.

[1] While a single mother raising two sons, she wrote a handbook for homemakers that conveyed very traditional values about a woman's work at home.

[4] The Federation's main task had been defined as preparing a Cahier des doléances féminines (List of women's grievances).

Valette founded the weekly tabloid L'Harmonie sociale which first appeared on 15 October 1892 as a means of making contact with working women to understand their concerns.

[4] However, the contributors to the journal, who included Eliska Vincent, Marie Bonnevial and Marya Chéliga-Loevy (Maria Szeliga), were more interested in feminism than socialism.

The journal serialized August Bebel's Woman under socialism and published various texts and resolutions of socialist congresses, although it was not always accurate and was far from Marxist.

After this she was an advocate of "sexualism", a theory in which she claimed that evolutionary biology demanded that women and children should receive greater support from society than men.

[9] In April 1898 Valette went to Arcachon, to the south of Bordeaux, in the hope that warm weather and mineral water would cure her tuberculosis.

Women were not unionized, were not represented on the conseils de prud'hommes that resolved labor disputes, did not have the vote and often received starvation wages.

[11] Valette agreed with Karl Marx that women were economically oppressed, but argued that the community should support mothering as the most important, and therefore highest status, of all occupations.