Suchergebnisse

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

Abstract: Although recent historians of women reformers' contributions
to the development of welfare states have underscored the importance of
maternalist arguments for opening new roles to women in the public sphere,
French examples of women filling such roles have been neglected. The
careers of inspectresses general Pauline Kergomard and Olympe Gevin-Cassal
provide case studies that illustrate the link between maternalism and
women's access to positions of responsibility in public administration in
pre-World War I France. Kergomard, an inspectress general of nursery
schools, and Gevin-Cassal, an inspectress general of children's services
for the Ministry of the Interior, utilized maternalist discourse to defend
their positions and advocate new professional opportunities for other
women. Their secular outlooks suited the anticlerical Third Republic but
differentiated them from Catholic women. Gender-specific assignments
gave women a place in some inspectorates before 1914 but their numbers
were restricted.

Described as "a golden age of pathogens", the long fifteenth century was notable for a series of international, national and regional epidemics that had a profound effect upon the fabric of society. The impact of pestilence upon the literary, religious, social and political life of men, women and children throughout Europe and beyond continues to excite lively debate among historians, as the ten papers presented in this volume confirm. They deal with the response of urban communities in England, France and Italy to matters of public health, governance and welfare, as well as addressing the reactions of the medical profession to successive outbreaks of disease, and of individuals to the omnipresence of Death, while two, very different, essays examine the important, if sometimes controversial, contribution now being made by microbiologists to our understanding of the Black Death. Contributors: J.L. Bolton, Elma Brenner, Samuel Cohn, John Henderson, Neil Murphy, Elizabeth Rutledge, Samantha Sagui, Karen Smyth, Jane Stevens Crawshaw, Sheila Sweetinburgh