The Rise Of Professional Women In France

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.

French Women and the Empire is the first book-length investigation of colonial gender politics in Third Republic France, using Indochina as a case study. Its departure point is the interrogation of the dramatic change in the French colonialist view of the empire as an exclusively male preserve where women feared to tread. At the turn of the century, a reverse discourse emerged in the metropole, forcefully arguing that colonial female emigration was essential to " colonisation. The study begins by analysing the highly complex web of interconnected factors underlying this radical transformation in the representation of the empire from being a " into a " Then, drawing on a large body of hitherto little examined sources, the study continues by reconstructing the experiences and activities of French women in Indochina from the fin-de-siècle to the interwar era. The most significant finding from this study is that contrary to the image propagated by promotional literature of the colonial woman as essentially a bourgeois homemaker, the class and ethnic make-up of the French female population in the Asian colony was in fact remarkably heterogeneous, with a sizeable contingent of them, married or single, actively engaging in a variety of paid employment outside the home. By thus foregrounding the diversity and complexity of colonial female experiences, French Women and the Empire seeks to move the story of French women and the empire beyond the narrow confines of the imperial family romance to the wider arena of the colonial public sphere.

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.

A magisterial reconstruction and analysis of the heated debates around the 'woman question' during the French Third Republic.

This is a book about life, how to make the most of it, how to find your balance when you are working long days and trying to be happy and fulfilled. Mireille Guiliano has written the kind of book she wishes she had been given when starting out in the business world and had at hand along the way.She draws on her own experiences at the forefront of women in business to offer lessons, stories, helpful hints - and even recipes! - that can make the working world a happier and more satisfying part of a well-balanced life. Mireille talks about style, communication skills, risk taking, leadership, etiquette, mentoring, personal relationships and much more, all from a perspective of three decades in business. This book is about helping women (and a few men, peut-etre) feel good about themselves, being challenged and engaged in our working lives, and always looking for pleasure in every single day.

— Matthew Brown developed this project through his founding of TableTopOpera, a group of scholars and performers committed to performing multimedia projects promoting classical music to general audiences. TableTop's production, a reductionist fantasy based on Ariane et Barbe-bleue, played an adaptation of Paul Dukas's original score while panels of P. Craig Russell's popular graphic novel Ariane and Bluebeard, Op. 26 streaked across the auditorium screen. Brown wrote the score and the show was called "a miracle of collaborative creation" thanks to "all editing decisions made in regard not only to Brown's profound knowledge of the epoch and Russell's passion for the opera but of the demanding virtuosos who would be playing it, for the multimedia skills it would require – and for a strong commitment to the integrity of the original score." Th. Emil Homerin produced the show. This book, based off the performance project, already is being marketed through TableTopOpera. Contributors to the volume include an opera singer and instructor from the Metropolitan Opera's production of Bluebeard's Castle, the celebrated comic and graphic artist P. Craig Russell, and scholars in classics, religion, history, women and gender studies, and rare books. — Although the premier of Ariane et Barbe-bleue is frequently lauded as a landmark in operatic history, there is at present no book devoted solely to its history, structure, reception, and cultural implications. — This book will stand out on our music list and contribute to our reputation for publishing books on multimedia topics by touching on such diverse subjects as opera, comic books, and animated movies. Further, it contributes to our list of significant works on women and gender studies. — Our target audience includes students, scholars, and readers interested in musicology, particularly Paul Dukas, French music, and multimedia opera. Other related interests include histories of print, multimedia, and comic works, philosophical discussion of Plato and mysticism, and French symbolist literature.

Women workers and the revolutionary origins of the modern welfare state

How a nation educates its children tells us much about the values of its people. From the Salon to the Schoolroom examines the emerging secondary school system for girls in nineteenth-century France and uncovers how that system contributed to the fashioning of the French bourgeois woman. Rebecca Rogers explores the variety of schools--religious and lay--that existed for girls and paints portraits of the women who ran them and the girls who attended them. Drawing upon a wide array of public and private sources--school programs, prescriptive literature, inspection reports, diaries, and letters--she reveals the complexity of the female educational experience as the schoolroom gradually replaced the salon as the site of French women's special source of influence. From the Salon to the Schoolroom also shows how France as part of its civilizing mission transplanted its educational vision to other settings: the colonies in Africa as well as throughout the Western world, including England and the United States. Historians are aware of the widespread ramifications of Jesuit education, but Rogers shows how French education for girls played into the cross-cultural interactions of modern society, producing an image of the Frenchwoman that continues to tantalize and fascinate the Western world today.