The Gender of History: Men, Women, and the Historical Practice & The Rise of the Professional Woman in France: Gender and Public Administration Since 1830. (Reviews) .

The Gender of History: Men, Women, and the Historical Practice. By Bonnie G. Smith (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1998. viii plus 306pp. $17.95/paperback).

The Rise of the Professional Woman in France: Gender and Public Administration Since 1830. By Linda L. Clark (Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. xiv plus 324pp. $64.95/cloth)

Bonnie Smith begins her investigation into "the gender of history" with the metaphor of the mirror [pp. 2-3]. "Held up to the past, the mirror supposedly reflects bygone events more accurately than any other tool, showing nothing fanciful or imaginary." The image of the mirror's pure objectivity contradicts what we understand of the way history is written by a "knowing subject," whose own cultural perspective determines what gets written about the past, and yet this idealized image of "value-free" history continues to be the model. Since the 1970s, "historians of both women and people of color have assumed that their scholarship would eventually fit into the field of history as a whole." [p. 1] Male historians welcomed the arrival of women's history and research on gender until, in the mid-1980s, some began to argue that historical research about women had gone far enough, lest history's claims to the transcendence of bias be undercut, and to argue that the history of women and blacks threatened to "politiciz e" the field. The historian, as Lucien Fevre claims, sees nothing in history but history. [p. 2] As Smith suggests, when the historian has been a woman, "her self-regarding has appeared ... indicative of her vanity" [p.3] so that the feminist historians' claim to contribute a distinctive perspective seems to stand for "self-regard" rather than the idealized "invisibility" of the omniscient narrator. It is because "the mirror of history resists some efforts to reach gender neutrality," writes Smith, that she has attempted to reevaluate the role of women in the historical profession and the place of feminist historiography in the writing of history. Particularly for those who are tempted to think that little more can be gained by examining the gendered practice of history, Bonnie Smith has written a provocative and significant book, her goal not only to rescue the forgotten women historians of the 18th and 19th centuries, but to ask historians to take another look in the mirror.

History, writes Smith, quoting Jack Hexter, "has been mostly stag affairs." [p. 3] Even historians who entered the profession in the 1970s recall a male dominated profession in which both practitioners and students were overwhelmingly male. My own experience in a graduate program in which only one member of the graduate faculty was female and in my first years of teaching students who were three-quarters male confirmed this. But there were certainly many women historians before the 1970s, and reaching back into the nineteenth century, Smith uncovers many examples of women who were considered "amateur" historians, writing for a large, popular audience on wide-ranging topics. Smith cites examples such as Ricarda Huch whose history of the Thirty Years' War and whose biography of Garibaldi are shelved in libraries under "fiction" [p. 161]. In spite of the virtual exclusion of women from the ranks of professional historians, such "amateurs" often were performing the "unladylike" work of supporting their parents an d siblings. Women writers, writing for a popular audience, created a believable and resonant version of the past, often investigating topics considered too trivial by professional historians of the time. Another group of historians were the female half of "author-teams" such as Anthenais Michelet who through twenty-six years of marriage to Jules Michelet "did research and reported on it, wrote sections of Jules's book, discussed projects and recorded details of their daily conversations on topics for book, and offered her judgments on the work that was published under his name." [p. 87] So much was her marriage to Jules Michelet a literary relationship, that Jules recorded that after eight years of marriage, their best sex was on a date in 1850, "'near the end of the fourth volume of the Revolution'." [p. 88] Jules himself acknowledged Athenais' contribution to his work but after her death, her role as researcher, editor and co-writer, was disparaged and largely dismissed.

Smith also credits women "amateurs" with the creation of some of the archives of women's history. An example is the work of suffragists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, The History of Women's Suffrage. Crammed with primary documents and 5000-pages long, The History of Women's Suffrage is hardly an unbiased investigation of the movement, but it is an invaluable source of documentation on the pioneers and their long campaign for women's rights. Cady Stanton and Anthony's publication of the records of their movement provided the material out of which the history of feminism would later be written. Smith's book is filled with fascinating stories of these women, such as the Frenchwoman Marie Louise Bougle, very much an amateur, to whom so many recent historians of women are indebted. Bougle, a typist and cashier, devoted her life and meagre resources to hunting for documents and compiling a small women's library, which was bequeathed to the city of Paris after her death in 1936. [pp. 181-2] The contrib utions of these amateur historians, even when failing to provide a fully critical analysis, contributed to the accumulation of historical documents, the preservation of historic homes, the creation of historical societies, the establishment of historical sites, and the development of a popular audience for history. Because of their interest in the everyday aspects of the past and in the drama of everyday lives, Smith contends, these amateurs were "the intellectual avant-garde of a general historical project to reach the past." [p. 184]

In contrast to their "amateur" sisters, women professional historians posed A different problem for the profession, suggests Smith, constituting a kind of "third sex". [p. 185] These women could not be dismissed as "amateurs" and yet their role within the historical profession was ambiguous. In the half century between 1890 (the founding of the modern discipline of history) and 1940, women historians constituted a kind of "hinge swinging between amateur and professional versions of the past, sometimes translating amateur work into a bit more professionalized and thus palatable language." [228] One example of these early professional women was Lucy Maynard Salmon. Teaching at Vassar College, Salmon trained generations of students in research methods and wrote a prize-winning study of the American president's powers of appointment. But her second book, a historical and sociological survey of domestic service in America, was considered unworthy of a professional historian because of the lowly subject--domestic s ervants. [206] Yet, Smith argues, Salmon found archival treasures in cookbooks and "with all the absorption of a Proust, she summoned and categorized the recipes." [230] If Salmon's work was undervalued by contemporaries because it was oblivious to the hierarchical dynamic of the profession, her legacy was important to social historians a half-century later. These early women historians were "prodigious," writes Smith, "prodigiously prim, hardworking, experimental, committed, and confident in facing the adventure of women's scholarship. At the same time, they further muddied the epistemological waters, bringing to historical science the concerns and even some of the wide-ranging methodological practices of amateurs." [211] Both personally and historiographically, they seemed to constitute a "third sex."

What Smith has attempted to do in this book is more than it appears, and therefore difficult to summarize readily. Not simply a history of largely-forgotten or undervalued women historians, The Gender of History debates the essence of historical explanation. Smith takes on "the towering and seductive male authorial subject--the historian of historiography," for as she notes, "although the rest of the historical field may be crowded with heterogeneous characters, historiography is not." [p. 238] Smith's work is an ambitious attempt not only to reevaluate the contributions of women historians, both amateurs and professionals, but also to integrate a feminist perspective into historical theory and practice.

The history of women professional historians is an interesting complement to the study of professional women written by another historian of France, Linda L. Clark. In The Rise of the Professional Woman in France, Clark examines the lives and the work of pioneering women professionals in a number of fields affected by the growth of government services. In doing so, Clark eschews the more conventional literary lens of the New Woman, and builds her analysis on the French government's own documentation of the expansion of social services and of the educational bureaucracy, both of which were agents of tremendous change for women.

Clark's subjects are the inspectors in the national educational system, in the social services, and in the system of labor inspection created by the French government between the 1830s and World War I. Women administrators carved out a place for women professionals within the government bureaucracy well before such positions were available to women elsewhere. Thus, France's first inspectresses were true pioneers compared to women in school inspection or prison administration in many other countries. [39]

Clark's theme is that the general, though slow, movement of women into administrative positions was accomplished because of (rather than in spite of) a firmly rooted paradox: women had an important role to play because of their differences, not because of their equality with men. Women's "maternal" qualities were advanced as the argument for the recruitment of women for such posts through the 1950s. In the mid-19th century, notes Clark, even socialists of the Saint-Simonian variety cited the value of mothering to justify their goal of equality between the sexes, and Clark concludes that maternalist arguments served a political purpose across the political spectrum.

The special cadre of nursery school inspectresses began with the appointment of Eugenie Chevreau-Lemericer in 1837. Using religious language, Chevreau-Lemercier described her job as "an apostolate" to justify her position in early childhood care. [p. 20] Little progress was made for a generation after Chevreau-Lemercier, but with the gradual expansion of women's education in the Second Empire (1852-70), women expanded their administrative presence in nursery schools, where state oversight provided some uniformity in a system that was largely run by nuns or had religious teachers.

Clark emphasizes that most inspectresses of these first generations were true professionals and, once hired, worked until they reached retirement age, died, or were forced out when the Third Republic, after 1879, removed many appointees of previous regimes. [31] Almost half of these women served for 20 years or more, others resigned or retired only because of ill health. Well-educated, with the equivalent of teaching certifications in many cases, these women clearly regarded their work as a career.

In spite of the conventional historical view that the expansion of women in adminstration came with the transition to a secular, more bureaucratic state under the Third Republic, this change was already in place before 1870. The Third Republic did significantly expand women's administrative role as women's educational opportunities grew after. Women like Pauline Kergomard, an important national figure in education, continued to select traditional terminology to justify seeking what many people would have considered an untraditional role. Kergomard spoke of "the mother and the woman" who could contribute special insights when representing the interests of children and women educators with the government bureaucracy. In France as in England, maternalist rationales celebrated feminine traits to maintain and extend women's place in school inspection.

By 1900, a new cadre of inspectresses for children's welfare were helping to share the development of social work as a profession for women. Women administrators were appointed to supervise the system of child welfare services to "enfants assistes" and the regulation of wet nurses. Women administrators in the section of "enfants assistes" increased 140% between 1870 and 1900.

The period of World War I was an important stage in this process because of the obvious need for women in government ministries, but progress remained slow and resistance to the full equality of women very high. Widespread skepticism continued to greet women with professional ambitions. Gender quotas and the depressed economy continued to provide obstacles to women's administrative advancement in the years after World War I. Married women civil servants in the 1930s often bowed to public disapproval of women "competing" for men's jobs by leaving work. At the same time, French government policy on maternity leaves and family allowances extrapolated since the war facilitated long-term employment for French women by making it easier to combine work and motherhood than for women in the United States or Germany. [pp. 198-99] In the interwar period, women administrators in government service were slightly older, and enjoyed relatively long careers which "clearly diverged from the generally held notion that married women belonged in the home." [p. 199]

As women administrators stuck it out in civil service, they began to aspire to higher rank and more competitive salaries. Thus, while they may have entered government service with the ideal of promoting women's distinctive contributions, they confronted obstacles to the performance of their professional responsibilities because their roles remained restricted. The objections the women met to their demands for better treatment and the expansion of their responsibilities were increasingly contested in the 1920s and 1930s, until both political and economic circumstances vitiated the government's commitment to improving women 's status.

The 1940s could have represented another stage of regression in this process. The Vichy government's enacted conservative family legislation and attacked the principle of women's equality. Intending to return women to the home in 1940, "Vichy damaged some women's careers but eventually hired more women and promoted others," [p. 271] Clark contends. Vichy contributed to women's politicization, promoting a postwar change in women administrators' status.

After the Second World War, the establishment of the Ecole nationale d'administration realized the possibility of gender equality in government service. Young women could now be trained and compete openly for administrative positions. Some women who had been active in the Resistance during the war earned promotions and these were soon followed by other women. But gender equality was not easily achieved, and it was not until the early 1970s that equality was mandated by French government policy. Clark notes that not all women administrators believed that women administrators had been kept back by discrimination and many never sought the highest positions for a variety of reasons.

Clark is a careful and thorough historian. The history of the emergence of professional women in the French civil service is extensively researched in administrative files and government personnel records, in letters, memoirs and personal interviews. Clark's work will be useful to other scholars of women's history and of the professions in the 19th and 20th century, and her work makes an important contribution to the intriguing paradox that long before the granting of the full rights of citizenship, Frenchwomen were moving into the higher levels of government service, creating a tradition of professional careerism, and achieving greater gender equality.