A history of European women's professional activities and organizational roles between 1789 and 1914.

This history of professional women in positions of administrative responsibility illuminates women's changing relationship to the public sphere in France since the Revolution of 1789. Linda L. Clark traces several generations of French women in public administration, examining public policy and politics, attitudes towards gender, and women's work and education. Women's own perceptions and assessments of their positions illustrate changes in gender roles and women's relationship to the state. With seniority-based promotion, maternity leaves and the absence of the marriage bar, the situation of French women administrators invites comparison with their counterparts in other countries. Why has the profile of women's employment in France differed from that in the USA and the UK? This study gives unique insights into French social, political and cultural history, and the history of women during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It will interest scholars of European history and also specialists in women's studies.

This first book-length study of girls' primary education in France gives a concrete picture of how Frenchwomen were, and are, prepared for their roles in society. Until the 1960s, the primary school provided the only formal education for the majority of French children. Long recognized as a major inculcator of patriotic and moral values, the French primary school also played the vital role of preparing girls for their expected adult lives. Linda L. Clark describes in detail this socialization process. By analyzing a wide variety of documents from 1870 to the present--textbooks, curriculum materials, students' notebooks, examination questions, inspectors' reports, and teachers' memoirs--she has uncovered not only what was taught to girls, but the social and political assumptions that lay behind the primary school's messages about feminine personalities and activities. The book goes on to establish the relationship of feminine images to important aspects of French social, economic, and political life. A chapter on the preparation of girls for the world of work, for example, reveals the discrepancy between formal teaching about "femininity" and women's actual participation in society.

In Third Republic France (1870-1940), the directrice of a normal school (cole normale) for training women teachers was the most important woman representative of public primary education in each department. This study of 313 normal school directrices between 1879 and 1940, an important group of professional women not previously studied, explores the challenges they encountered and their responses. 'Women and the Politics of Education in Third Republic France' deftly examines the history of these women and their contributions to French society.