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.
Contents
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
“The book is impressively and imaginatively researched.”
—Jennifer Heuer, French Politics, Culture & Society
