A collective biography of France's first generation of female secondary schoolteachers, this book examines the conflict between their public and private lives and places their new professional standing wtihin the political culture of the Third Republic. Jo Burr Margadant charts the responses of women who attended the nornmal school of Sevres during the 1880s to their roles as teachers and subordinates in the public school system, their plight as outsiders in the social community, and their gains toward educational reforms. These women emerge as pioneers struggling to forge careers in an elite profession, which was separate and inferior to its male equivalent and also controlled by men. Margadant explains that the first women teacher in girls' colleges and lycees were expected to project an intellectually assertive presence in the classroom while maintaining a maternal solicitude toward students and a modest, self-effacing style with superiors. Many who succeeded progressed to administrative jobs and, in some cases, filled official posts left vacant by men during the First World War. The author shows how these achievements led to the transformations of girls' secondary schools into replicas of those for boys and to equal treatment for women and men in the teaching profession. Jo Burr Margadant is Lecturer in History at Santa Clara University. Originally published in 1990. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

An increasing number of middle class families were taking the education of their daughters seriously in the first part of the nineteenth century, and boarding-schools were multiplying on both sides of the Channel. Schoolmistresses - rarely, in fact, the 'reduced gentlewomen' of nineteenth century fiction - were not only often successful entrepreneurs, but also played an important part they played in the development of the teaching profession, and in the expansion of secondary education. Uncovering their careers and the experiences of their pupils reveals the possibilities and constraints of the lives of middle class women in England and France in the period 1800-1867. Yet those who crossed the Channel in the nineteenth century often commented on the differences they discovered between the experiences of French and English women. Women in France seemed to participate more fully in social and cultural life than their counterparts in England. On the other hand, English girls were felt to enjoy considerably more freedom than young French women. Using the development of schooling for girls as a lens through which to examine the lives of women on either side of the Channel, Educating Women explores such contrasts. It reveals that the differences observed by contemporaries were rooted in the complex interaction of differing conceptions of the role of women with patterns of educational provision, with religion, with the state, and with differing rhythms of economic growth. Illuminating a neglected area of the history of education, it reveals new findings on the history of the professions, on the history of women and on the relationship between gender and national identity in the nineteenth century.

In France's Third Republic, secularism was, for its adherents, a new faith, a civic religion founded on a rabid belief in progress and the Enlightenment conviction that men (and women) could remake their world. And yet with all of its pragmatic smoothing over of the supernatural edges of Catholicism, the Third Republic engendered its own fantastical ways of seeing by embracing observation, corporeal dynamism, and imaginative introspection. How these republican ideals and the new national education system of the 1870s and 80s - the structure meant to impart these ideals - shaped belle époque popular culture is the focus of this book. The author reassesses the meaning of secularization and offers a cultural history of this period by way of an interrogation of several fraught episodes which, although seemingly disconnected, shared an attachment to the potent moral and aesthetic directives of French republicanism: a village's battle to secularize its schools, a scandalous novel, a vaudeville hit featuring a nude celebrity, and a craze for female boxing. Beginning with the writer and performer Colette (1873-1954) as a point of entry, this re-evaluation of belle époque popular culture probes the startling connections between republican values of labor and physical health on the one hand, and the cultural innovations of the decades preceding World War I on the other.