"Women Teachers and Popular Education in Nineteenth-Century France is a study of the network of women's teacher training schools, known as the ecoles normales primaires, that were gradually created in France during the nineteenth century. Although this study focuses on the recruitment of teachers, their pedagogical and social instruction, and the teachers' professional formation as part of a corporate group, the book also ties these teacher-related issues to the universal development of public primary education in France. Based on numerous national and departmental archives, the study also explores the social values inherent to public education in modern France through the corporate model of the women's normal schools."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

In Third Republic France (1870-1940), the directrice of a normal school (école normale) for training women teachers was the most important woman representative of public primary education in each department. Her role was central to the republican educational project designed to bolster the establishment of a stable democracy after the Franco-Prussian War. The laicization of public education figured prominently in republican efforts to combat the old alliance of "throne and altar" favoring monarchy and religious instruction in public schools. Although laymen taught most boys in public schools by 1870, many nuns staffed separate girls' public schools. Thus an 1879 law mandated new departmental normal schools to train lay women teachers. 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. Often the target of political hostility, they defended republican schooling as they interacted with local notables and authorities. In an educational system divided by social class as well as by gender, they trained teachers for "children of the people" attending free primary schools, separate from the elite and less numerous secondary schools. Directrices were expected to be role models for women teachers and to emphasize women's duties as wives and mothers, yet their careers exemplified an alternative to domesticity at a time of much debate about women's appropriate roles. Eventually some pushed against the boundaries of prevailing gender norms as they also joined professional, philanthropic, and feminist associations and sometimes publicly supported women's suffrage. Women and the Politics of Education in Third Republic France deftly examines the history of these women and the nature of their contributions to French society.

Nineteenth-century France was a society of apparent paradoxes. It is famous for periodic and bloody revolutionary upheavals, for class conflict and for religious disputes, yet it was marked by relative demographic stability, gradual urbanisation and modest economic change, class conflict and ongoing religious and cultural tensions. Incorporating much recent research, Roger Magraw draws both upon still-valuable insights derived from the 'new social history' of the 1960s and upon more recent approaches suggested by gender history , cultural anthropology and the 'linguistic turn'.

This is a revolutionary reinterpretation of the French past from the early fifteenth century to the establishment of the Third Republic, focused on public challenges and defenses of masculine hierarchy in relations between women and men. Karen Offen surveys heated exchanges around women's 'influence'; their exclusion from 'authority'; the increasing prominence of biomedical thinking and population issues; concerns about education, intellect, and the sexual politics of knowledge; and the politics of women's work. Initially, the majority of commentators were literate and influential men. However, as more and more women attained literacy, they too began to analyze their situation in print and to contest men's claims about who women were and should be, and what they should be restrained from doing, and why. As urban print culture exploded and revolutionary ideas of 'equality' fuelled women's claims for emancipation, this question resonated throughout francophone Europe and, ultimately, across the seas.

The author looks at boarding-schools for girls in 19th-century England, exploring the emergence and expansion of private schooling for girls, the recruitment and training of schoolmistresses; the lives of schoolgirls, and the instruction they received; and the experiences of pupils and teachers who crossed the Channel.

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.

The Routledge History of Women in Europe since 1700 is a landmark publication that provides the most coherent overview of woman’s role and place in western Europe, spanning the era from the beginning of the eighteenth century until the twentieth century. In this collection of essays, leading women's historians counter the notion of ‘national’ histories and provide the insight and perspective of a European approach. Important intellectual, political and economic developments have not respected national boundaries, nor has the story of women’s past, or the interplay of gender and culture. The interaction between women, ideology and female agency, the way women engaged with patriarchal and gendered structures and systems, and the way women carved out their identities and spaces within these, informs the writing in this book. For any student of women’s studies or European history, The Routledge History of Women in Europe since 1700 will prove an informative addition to their studies.