From the Salon to the Schoolroom: Educating Bourgeois Girls in Nineteenth-Century France.

From the Salon to the Schoolroom: Educating Bourgeois Girls in Nineteenth-Century France. By Rebecca Rogers (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005. xvi plus 335 pp.).

This significant contribution to a still relatively understudied area of French women's educational history is rich in insights into French culture and society as well. Previous scholarly studies have focused primarily on the period since 1880 when the Third Republic launched reforms in both primary and secondary education, in the process imposing more uniformity on public educational institutions. Rogers here highlights the decades between 1800 and 1880, drawing extensively from archives in Paris and some provincial departments and also from published primary sources. Her "Introduction" effectively positions the study in relation to the existing historiography. Another major strength is the presentation of multiple perspectives on the educational experience: what pedagogues wrote, what school inspectors saw and heard, what public officials and religious leaders wanted, what parents expected, what girls experienced, and who the teachers were.

One of Rogers's major goals is to challenge stereotypical images of nineteenth-century private girls' schools as merely frivolous in their emphasis on traditional feminine "accomplishments" or as intellectually inferior, especially if run by religious orders. Instead, her data on schools, teachers, and students' attitudes toward the educational experience suggest that instruction in middle-class girls' schools was "complicated and multifaceted" (p. 2) and often more serious in curricular ambitions than critics contended. By the second half of the nineteenth century, she also argues, both French and foreign observers saw something distinctively "French" about offerings in the private schools in question, regardless of whether they were run by lay women or by religious orders. Private schools are Rogers's focus because, with the exception of the several Legion of Honor schools started by Napoleon I, there were no public secondary schools for girls until Victor Duruy launched an experiment in girls' secondary courses in 1867 and the Third Republic passed the Camille See Law creating public secondary schools for girls in 1880.

The word "bourgeois" in the subtitle indicates the centrality of social class in Rogers's study. She is not investigating what public primary schools offered to daughters of "the people" (le peuple). Prefigured by differences between "petites ecoles" and more elite schools under the Old Regime, France's nineteenth-century structural and administrative separation between primary and secondary education began under Napoleon I and continued well into the twentieth century. Rogers explains that she uses the term "secondary" as contemporaries understood it, equating "secondary" with a "middle class" clientele more than with a distinctive age group (p. 79). Many of the schools studied actually offered primary-level classes to their middle-class students before these students advanced to something truly post-primary. The growth in numbers of middle-class girls' schools also demonstrates that they often attracted more than one segment of the middle class, from higher to lower.

The model middle-class women in Rogers's study were moral, competent, and oriented toward domestic responsibilities benefiting husbands and children, yet such women home managers also took an interest in some public or social issues and could converse about them. This role model was, in effect, a post-1789 synthesis of select aristocratic models and Rousseau's well-known anti-salonniere model. For young middle-class women, the school functioned as an "intermediate social space" (p. 10) between the private home and public political and economic arena, helping to break down commonly articulated notions of a sharp divide between private and public spheres.

The teachers in middle-class girls' schools fell into three categories. On the one hand, religious orders were intensively involved in providing instruction, and Rogers, like Sarah Curtis (Educating the Faithful, 2000), seeks to correct longstanding facile generalizations about religious schools' inadequacies by offering detail on specific orders and their schools and curricula. On the other hand, Rogers also underscores lay women's extensive involvement in private middle-class girls' schools, especially in urban areas. What may seem surprising, however, is the longstanding presence of a third type of teacher, the lay man. During the later eighteenth-century religious leaders encouraged the opening of girls' day and boarding schools, in order to avoid the mingling of the sexes in schools, but many did not object to male instructors. In the absence of qualified women teachers, men continued to teach in many private girls' schools well into the nineteenth century, although their presence began diminishing after about 1850. When the Second Empire's liberal education minister Duruy introduced public secondary courses for girls, religious leaders condemned both the state entry into girls' secondary schooling and the teaching of such courses by men.

Rogers's general argument that French girls' schooling offered something with deep and uniquely French cultural roots helps account for some similarities between behavioral messages offered to middle-class girls in private schools and pupils of humbler origins in the more numerous public primary schools. For example, Anne Quartararo's treatment of departmental normal schools for training women primary schoolteachers (Women Teachers and Popular Education in Nineteenth-Century France, 1995) and my study of curricular materials (Schooling the Daughters of Marianne, 1984) have underscored the use in nineteenth-century French primary schools of middle-class domestic models and values, even as public primary institutions cautioned pupils and their teachers that most should not expect to rise beyond humble origins. Expectations relayed in middle-class girls' schools diverged most notably from those familiar in girls' primary schools with regard to social settings where the educated middle-class woman might function or express opinions and also with regard to acquisition of certain aspects of general culture, or cultural capital, such as modern foreign languages.

Rogers concludes her study with a summary of the post-1880 history of girls' secondary schooling, already familiar thanks to Francoise Mayeur (L'Enseigne-ment secondaire des jeunes filles sous la troisieme republique, 1977) and Jo B. Margadant (Madame le Professeur, 1990), and then adds a suggestive discussion of French influences on girls' schooling elsewhere. Examples of French schooling for girls in Algeria and West Africa, along with the offerings of certain religious orders in England and the United States, are presented to underscore the theme of the distinctiveness of French girls' schooling.

In sum, Rogers's impressive and well-written study recovers a hitherto neglected period in French girls' education. Enhanced with material from the American and English settings, the book offers much to scholars and students of comparative education and comparative women's history.

Linda L. Clark

Millersville University of Pennsylvania