Description
Book SynopsisExamines the secondary school system for girls in nineteenth-century France and uncovers how that system contributed to the fashioning of the French bourgeois woman. This book 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.
Trade Review“From the Salon to the Schoolroom makes an important and original contribution to the literature on France and French women. Rogers shows that girls’ education was not so much about girls as about women and the role presumed proper for them. It was about the family and the hopes and anxieties that French men and women placed on the family to reconstruct the nation in the post-Napoleonic era. It was also about men and men’s roles in public and private life; about nation and nationalism; and about race and the ‘civilizing mission.’”
—Claire G. Moses,University of Maryland
“In this lively piece of writing, one appreciates the interplay between general theoretical considerations and archival investigation. Rebecca Rogers excels in describing how the structure of schools and their network relates to the formation of social and individual identities.”
—Alain Corbin,University of Paris, Panthéon Sorbonne
“Rogers fills an important gap in French women’s history between Old Regime salons and the establishment of universal public education for both girls and boys under the Third Republic.”
—D. A. Harvey Choice
“Rogers presents her beautifully demarcated argument in three chronologically arranged parts. . . . scholars of girlhood in any nation should find Rogers’ insights helpful and can appreciate her interweaving of bourgeois girls’ history with national development.”
—Laureen Tedesco Nineteenth Century Studies
“This is a well-written, well-researched, and well-argued work. Rather than a narrowly conceived institutional history of particular establishments, Rebecca Rogers has produced a far broader, more ambitious analysis of social and familial change during the course of the nineteenth century, as made manifest by changes in the schooling of bourgeois girls.”
—Sharif Gemie American Historical Review
“Rebecca Rogers’ well-crafted and deeply researched study of the educational institutions available to bourgeois girls in nineteenth-century France intersects with a number of current debates about gender norms and the place of women in public life.”
—Denise Z. Davidson European History Quarterly
“The book is impressively and imaginatively researched.”
—Jennifer Heuer French Politics, Culture & Society
Table of ContentsContents
List of Abbreviations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I: Reconstructing Girls’ Education in the Postrevolutionary Period (1800–1830)
1. Defining Bourgeois Femininity:Voices and Debates
2. Schools, Schooling, and the Educational Experience
Part II: Women, Schools, and the Politics of Culture (1830–1880)
3. Debating Women’s Place in the Consolidating Bourgeois Order (1830–1848)
4. Independent Women? Teachers and the Teaching Profession at Midcentury
5. Vocations and Professions: The Case of the Teaching Nun
6. Boarding Schools: Location, Ethos, and Female Identities
Part III: National and Political Visions of Girls’ Education
7. Political Battles for Women’s Minds in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century
8. Beyond the Hexagon: French Schools on Foreign Soils
Conclusion
Appendix 1: The Women Pedagogues
Appendix 2: The Professions of Fathers and Husbands of Parisian Headmistresses
(1810–1880)
Notes
Select Bibliography
Index
