La place des femmes dans l'histoire : the social life of a feminist textbook

Submission date: June 15, 2018

11240857 Supervisor: Marguerite van den Berg

massilia.ourabah@gmail.com Second reader: Sarah Bracke

Master’s Thesis

La Place des Femmes dans l’Histoire:

The social life of a feminist textbook

Introduction

Methodology

A case study research 7

Research design 8

Data collection and analysis 9

A note on ethics 11

Chapter 1 – A story of individuals and institutions

The story of La place des femmes dans l’histoire: first version 14

Individual initiatives and opportunities for action in institutional contexts 14

Networking across institutional contexts 24

Chapter 2 – Interlude

The book as an Actor-Network 31

Chapter 3 – A story of translations and materiality

Some clarifications on the concept of translation 39

The story of La place des femmes dans l’histoire : second version 40

The significance of materiality 49

Translation, materiality and education 49

Material translations in institutional contexts 53

Conclusion

Ultimately, the achievements of women history, although considerable within research, are much more often transmitted through the media and the market than through the institutional channel of schools and even universities, which remain, in that regard, hesitant or oddly reluctant.

Michelle Perrot, Les femmes ou le silence de l’histoire, 1998

It is important to us that all the actors in the school textbooks chain take action; that is to say the people who make them – so publishers and authors, but also the people who buy them – so local institutions and schools – and most importantly the people who use them and choose them – so teachers, parents and even pupils. Djénéba Keita, president of the Centre Hubertine Auclert for equality between women and men, 2013

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Introduction

In 1975, the French Secretary of State for Women Condition Françoise Giroud ordered a study on the representation of women in children textbooks. The study concluded that school manuals conveyed a stereotypical image of economically unproductive women, an image that misrepresented the situation of women in the 1970s (Bousquet, 1975). This report inaugured a long tradition in France: the fight against sexist stereotypes and the denunciation of the invisibility of women in both school textbooks and in the national curricula, the programmes (Gauthiez-Rieucau, 2017). In the past thirty years, many more studies, reports, and commissions have scrutinised the content of textbooks and programmes (e.g. Mang, 1995; Rignault & Richert, 1997; Février & Rouquier, 1999; Berton-Schmitt, 2004; Sinigalia-Amadio, 2011). And although the goal has remained the same over the years, the focus of analysis has evolved. Notably, the focal point has been decentred from misogynist stereotypes to gendered representations at large; while the linguistic invisibility of women has been a growing concern (see Bousquet et al., 2016). Despite efforts to eradicate the most caricatural gendered representations, what emerges from decades of textbooks and programmes scrutiny is the persistence of an important gender-imbalance and tenacious stereotypes. For instance, the latest study shows that only 3% of biographies in history textbooks are about female figures and that female scientists or artists are mostly described as wives or muses of their male contemporaries (Centre Hubertine Auclert, 2011).

This unsatisfying situation was the starting point for the writing of the book La place

des femmes dans l’histoire: Une histoire mixte (2010), literally “The role of women in history:

A diverse history” – although “diverse” is only the closest translation of the French word mixte which lacks an English equivalent. This book is the object of the present case study. La place

des femmes dans l’histoire (LPFH) is a history textbook centred on women and gender. It was

produced by the association Mnémosyne, an association “for the development and promotion of gender and women history.” Some of the historians from this association have been quite influential in importing this historiography into French academia; a historiography which started flourishing on the other side of the Atlantic in the late 1960s but took a few more decades to gain momentum in French universities. Notably, the International Federation for Research in Women’s History was founded in 1987, but Mnémosyne, the French section of the IFRWH, was only created in 2000. Therefore, the idea of a gender/women history textbook for secondary education was only possible once this historiography had acquired enough

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legitimacy within French academia, once this academic field was sufficiently diverse and prolific, and once Mnémosyne historians had formally organised into an association. It then took a few more years to develop the project and to produce the textbook, which led to its publication in 2010.

The academic legitimacy of women and gender history was difficulty obtained, both in France and in the US, for this discipline has often been reduced to its feminist activist roots (Wieviorka, 2004). Initially, women history grew out of the women’s movement of the 1960s (Lewis, 1981), which grounds the origin of this scholarship in feminist activism. As Joan Kelly-Gadol argues, “women’s history has a dual goal: to restore women to history and to restore our history to women.” (1987: 15) In both the US and France, the growth of this historiography was only possible because a generation of female historians had gained access to academia. Yet the historians who followed their footsteps realised that to understand long-lasting inequalities and the construction of femininities and masculinities, they needed to go beyond “Women Studies” and to explore the much wider field of “Gender Studies” (ibid.). Fundamentally, women history and gender history are complementary. Thus, the association Mnémosyne works for the development of both scholarships; a double target which is reflected in the content of the book La place des femmes dans l’histoire.

The 400-pages-long textbook covers the totality of the secondary education

programmes. Therefore, 33 historians were mobilised to treat the very broad historical period

that the book tackles, from the birth of Egyptian and Hindu mythologies to the early 21st century. Some of these historians are women historians, others are gender historians, and the editors of the book deliberately wanted both “women” and “gender” chapters and case studies. For instance, the case studies “Gendered roles in agrarian calendars” (11th_-15th _{century), “Men} and women in slavery” or “Masculinity and femininity in Nazi ideology” tend towards the gender side of the spectrum; while “The status of women in the Malian empire” (13th-14th century), “Joan of Arc, history and myths” or “The emancipation of women in the 1830s” tend towards the women side. Moreover, as these case studies suggest, LPFH offers both a social history of women and gender, and close-ups on remarkable, yet often forgotten, historical female figures. This double-focus is, on the one hand, representative of the work of women and gender historians and, on the other hand, motivated by a pedagogical impetus: social history breaks away with the invisibilisation of women and the essentialisation of gender, while the spotlight on female historical characters introduces new role models for pupils (Dermenjian, et al., 2010).

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The book was a relative commercial success: since its publication in 2010, around 8000 copies were sold. As it covers the national history syllabus, the manual is mostly targeted at teachers of middle school (four years, from sixième to troisième) and high school (seconde,

première, terminale) who are eager to introduce a gendered and feminised dimension to their

lessons. But it can also be used by primary school teachers, university students or just read as an entry into women and gender history for anyone interested in this topic. The present study, however, focuses on the educational purposes and uses of the book in the context of the

Education Nationale (the French educational system, higher education excluded).

A few words about the Education Nationale are therefore required. France is the typical centralised system (Anderson & Savoie, 2012); particularly when it comes to education. Since (at least) the birth of the Third Republic at the turn of the 20th century, public education has had a crucial role in the building of the French nation-state (Johnson & Morris, 2012). This legacy remains in the “strong conception of the role of school in the nation” (Falaize, 2011: 87). Thus, decisions concerning the content of the programmes are highly centralised. As Limage explains, “the syllabus for each year of schooling is strictly decided by the Ministry of Education and teachers’ choice is limited to selecting the books that their pupils must purchase for their classes” (2000: 77). It is in this space for action that the book navigates – although Limage’s statement should be nuanced, as French teachers apply the ill-defined principle of pedagogical freedom to more than the mere choice of textbooks (see Frackowiak, 2008).

La place des femmes dans l’histoire has no equivalent in other disciplines; even though

the observation about the lack of gender-inclusiveness in history textbooks has been made about other school subjects (see Centre Hubertine Auclert, 2012 & 2013). This is not incidental, for the teaching of history holds a very special position in the Education Nationale. The “strong conception of the role of school” is even more pregnant in the case of the history curriculum, for it is thought to be the locus of the construction and transmission of the roman national (literally “national novel”); as evidenced by the incorporation of civic education courses to the history-geography syllabus (Johnson & Morris, 2012). Tellingly, the introduction of the

seconde history programme states that this discipline is the “necessary foundation for a

citizenship which becomes effective in high school” (Ministère de l’Education Nationale, 2010). The initiators of the LPFH project were well-aware that the teaching of history can be a vector of civic education. During a workshop in which she presented the book, a Mnémosyne board member explained that “the book takes on a civic purpose as it allows pupils to better analyse the social mechanisms that produce inequalities and offers girls new role models.” In line with the feminist roots of women history, the historians who produced LPFH conceived it

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as an act of academic activism in favour of gender equality. Mnémosyne members are quite involved with the promotion of gender and women history within academia, but they reckon that their action is not complete until this discipline reaches primary and secondary education. Such was the intention behind La place des femmes dans l’histoire.

The aspiration to make women and gender history accessible to school pupils is grounded in the principles of feminist pedagogy, or, more accurately, feminist pedagogies. The plural is appropriate here, for there are virtually as many versions of feminist pedagogy as there are versions of feminism. So, while formulating an exhaustive definition of feminist pedagogy is a difficult task, it can nonetheless be noted that feminist pedagogues share two basic assumptions: the need for feminist emancipation and the power of education for social change. Evidently, feminist pedagogues are first and foremost politically-engaged feminists. Just as it was the case for women history, feminist pedagogies emerged from the 1960s women’s movement in the US. Thus, as Kathleen Weiler explains, “feminist pedagogy is based on assumptions of the power of consciousness raising, the existence of oppression and the possibility of ending it, and the desire for social transformation” (emphasis added; 1991: 455). According to feminist pedagogues, this social transformation can come about through education. A few decades ago, Dale Spender noted that:

Feminists are among those who are . . . beginning to assert that all educational institutions embody a particular way of viewing the world, that all educational institutions require their students to adopt this worldview and that it is a limited, distorted and destructive framework for making sense of the world. (author’s emphasis; 1982: 1).

Feminist pedagogues have questioned the idea of a politically-neutral knowledge and emphasised how it is always imbued with power relations (Jackson, 1997: 459). Because of this man-made knowledge, feminist pedagogues argue, “many of the legitimate meanings of our culture are false and misrepresentative” (Spender, 1980: 58). This argument is particularly relevant in the French context where the content of public education is conceived and celebrated as “universal;” yet “the universal is merely a half-universal” (Wieviorka, 2004: 4) – a criticism here circumscribed to gender, but which would be even more relevant from an intersectional perspective.

Therefore, the goal of LPFH was to offer a perspective on the national history

programmes that questioned their alleged universalism by adopting a gendered and feminised

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as it was previously noted, the content of the book is quite diverse, and this diversity embodies the common roots, as well as the porous frontier between women history, gender history, and feminism. Secondly, there is no consensus among the participants of this study about what the book is and does. For instance, while the editors describe it as the product of academic activism, the publisher stresses that it is not an activist but an academic book (suggesting that these categories are mutually exclusive). As for the history teachers who use the book, some of them are very careful not to let their pupils think that teach women history, otherwise, boys tend to feel discriminated. Therefore, these teachers insist on the gender-balance of the material they draw from the book.

Despite the lack of consensus, all these actors contribute to the social life of the book, which the present study aims to explore. The concept of the social life is borrowed from Appadurai’s Social life of things (1988) and his idea that “in many historical societies, things have not been so divorced from the capacity of persons to act and the power of words to communicate.” (ibid.: 4) Tracing the trajectory of a “thing” is an efficient way to study “society in the making” (Callon, 1987). Thus, the social life of LPFH is an entry into understanding this “capacity of persons to act:” from the exploration of how the LPFH project came about, how the book was produced and the journey it pursued, broader conclusions can be drawn about the possibility (or not) to teach a more gender-equal curriculum. Thus, I took Appadurai’s advice “to follow the things themselves” (1988: 5) and traced back the social life of the book: from the people who instigated the project to the readers and users of the book – a methodology which will be detailed more extensively in the following section. Yet in the present paper, the story of the social life of LPFH will not be told once, but twice.

There is a well-known cinematographic trick that consists of chronicling the same events from the perspective of different characters. In these multiple-perspectives films, the point of view of a new character allows for understanding aspects of the situation that remained invisible to other protagonists. The juxtaposition of the different characters’ perspectives enables the spectator to have a better, more complete, idea of the situation. The present paper aims for the theoretical equivalent of this cinematographic technique.

Thus, the first version of the story (Chapter 1) is grounded in the institutionalist sociology, more specifically, in the “inhabited institution” approach. This version aims to identify the actors involved in the social life of the book, to understand how they operate and how the book travels. The other version of the story (Chapter 3) is told from a radically different theoretical perspective: the sociology of translation (or Actor-Network Theory). This chapter should specify what exactly happens to the book during its social life through the concept of

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translation and, particularly, material translations. As for Chapter 2, it is a theoretical interlude that builds a bridge between these two versions of the story through the concept of the network.

To anyone familiar with these scholarships, it may seem like an odd endeavour to associate them, for they appear quite antithetical. And indeed, they are. But just as in a multiple-perspectives film, one theoretical version of the story allows for understanding aspects that were left unaccounted for by the other version, and vice versa. Therefore, the combination of both scholarships allows for a more thorough understanding of the social life of LPFH. Consequently, they emphasise different – yet complementary – implications of this case study for the broader topic of feminist educational change.

So, next to the conclusions that can be drawn from the story of LPFH about the feminisation of education, the present paper argues for the possibility and the benefits of building bridges between institutionalism and ANT. Both scholarships will be described extensively in this paper – including their contradictory assumptions and points of friction. But prior to this theoretical discussion and before getting into the two versions of the story, some methodological clarifications are required.

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Methodology

Methodological inspiration

The methodological trigger for this research was Appadurai’s concept of the Social Life of

Things (1986). In the introduction to his seminal edited volume, Appadurai explains that “from

a methodological point of view it is the things-in-motion that illuminate their human and social context” (author’s emphasis; ibid: 5). My starting point was therefore to consider the book as a “thing-in-motion,” a material entry into the study of the feminisation of education in France. However, the Appaduraian methodological inspiration does not go much further than this idea of a social life. This is mostly because his theoretical concerns (with things as commodities and the problem of value) are not the topic of interest of this specific case study. However, I found in different trends of the sociological “material turn” (Bennett & Joyce, 2010) other methodological inspirations more suited for the present purpose.

Specifically, actor-network theorists are among those sociologists who have taken seriously the focus on material objects. Apart from its theoretical contribution – which will be discussed at length elsewhere – a key reason for turning to ANT is methodological. ANT considers the inanimate world to be part and parcel of sociological analysis since, as Law explains, “I cannot imagine what a purely social relationship would look like: arguably, there is no such thing” (1991: 186). Consequently, Actor-Network Theory has developed into a field methodologically well-equipped for studying non-human actors (to stay faithful to ANT terminology). Grounded in Science and Technology Studies, ANT has often looked into the development of scientific and technical innovations – for instance the bicycle (Pinch & Biker, 1987) or the electric vehicle (Callon, 1986) – which, according to Latour, are ideal subjects of inquiry for producing narratives (1991: 11). This is a distinctive aspect of ANT: its capacity for story-telling. The narrative approach to this research has been largely inspired by the ability of “actor-network theorists [to] take mundane objects (such as the onions in a burger) and spin them into dense and complex tales” (emphasis added; Mutch, 2002: 483).

A case study research

But what is a tale good for? This is a legitimate question to ask; so legitimate indeed that it has been the basis for one of the recurring criticisms made against case study research: its inability to produce anything else than anecdotic knowledge; in other words, colourful stories (see Flyvbjerg, 2006). There is no point in arguing that case study research is not story-telling since,

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fundamentally, “cases are stories with a message” (Herreid, 1997: 92). On the contrary, this is where the relevance of case study research lies: here, the goal is to tell the story of a specific book which “approach[es] the complexities and contradictions of real life” (Flyvbjerg, 2006: 237) and, through that story, to look at how educational change can come about. However, another, and arguably more admissible criticism made against case study research is that it is an ill-defined methodological concept that could describe virtually any sort of sociological research (see Tight, 2010). Therefore, I turned to the work of Appadurai and ANT scholars to get a more substantial idea of how to conduct the case study of a “thing.”

Before getting into the specifics of methodology, a word about case selection is required; so why this book? The starting point for this study was not the book itself, nor the association Mnémosyne (which I did not know when I started prospecting). The starting point was a general interest in feminist activism in education. It just so happens that if you look for feminist educational initiatives in France, you very quickly encounter this unique textbook – which already says something about the level of gender-inclusiveness of the French educational field. So La place des femmes dans l’histoire appeared like an ideal entry into this topic, and particularly adapted to the sort of case study methodology I was interested in.

Research design

The narrative approach to this project is not confined to its end-product; it was also part and parcel of the research design. The study was constructed narratively in the sense that, during fieldwork, I followed the chronology of the story that I intended to tell. I took Callon, Law and Rip’s advice to “‘follow the actors’ [as] this is the methodological cornerstone of the approach” (1986: 228); in my case, I “followed” the book around. But to give credit where credit is due, here Appadurai’s idea of the social life prevailed: I started fieldwork with the actors involved in the “birth” of the book – the editors and authors whose names and contact details were easily accessible. They were a crucial help for the following stages of fieldwork since they allowed me to get acquainted with other informants through a snowballing strategy. In that sense, the unfolding of my fieldwork heavily relied on the very network that I was studying. So, following the chronological trajectory of the book, I was then able to reach out to other actors involved in its production – the publisher and graphic designer. Finally, I focused on the distribution, promotion and use of the book – working with elected officials from local governments who bought the book for schools in their districts schools, teachers who use it (or not) in the classroom, teacher trainers and even a recreational reader of the book. Therefore, this research

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relates a story that began in the past, years before the publishing of the book in 2010, and ends in the present, in the classroom, with teachers and pupils. This study is also based on a multi-sited fieldwork. As Mary Hamilton notes:

“ANT’s preferred methodology is ethnographic and it is especially sympathetic to what Marcus (1995) calls a ‘multi-sited ethnography’ that links data across different geographical spaces and times rather than focussing on a bounded local context” (2011: 58).

So the idea to “follow” the book is not just a metaphor; it sometimes took on a very concrete geographical meaning. While most of the four months of fieldwork were spent in Paris, I occasionally travelled to various parts of France; mostly to conduct participant observations (which I will come back to shortly).

Data collection & analysis

A convenient aspect of drawing methodological inspiration from ANT is its methodological flexibility. As Callon explains “the choice of method obeys no epistemological imperative, since it is entirely dictated by the state of the network,” confirming that often “it is better just to tell a story!” (1991: 152). So, to construct a story as complete as possible, I borrowed as much as I could from the sociologist’s toolbox.

First, I conducted 23 semi-structured interviews with the above-mentioned research population. Since I had a very specific research interest (the social life of the book), structuring the conversations was absolutely necessary. Yet I had to balance this need for structure with enough flexibility so as not to excessively constrain my informants; therefore the choice of semi-structured interviews, particularly well-suited to provide such balance (see Morse, 2012). Following McIntosh and Morse’s idea that semi-structured interview guides should be constructed around categories, each of them comprising various items (2015: 5), I built the guides around two axes: occupational and chronological. I made one standard interview guide per occupation (or position in the network) – one for the editors, one for the authors, one for the teachers, and so on – which was adapted to the information I had about my specific informant and modified as I gained knowledge and experience (for instance, I could already tell after my first interview with an author which questions were completely irrelevant to authors in general). Quite often, my informants occupied two positions in the network of the social life of the book – typically if they wrote a chapter but also use the book as teachers. So within each standard interview guide, occupation was also a structuring category (with

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questions targeting the different occupations of my informants). Another structuring dimension was chronology. The interview guides followed as much as possible the chronological unfolding of the social life of the book through factual and specific questions about the process, but also open-ended questions in order to elude the stories I was interested in.

There were various interview settings. When possible, I conducted face-to-face interviews wherever it was most convenient to my interlocutors – often in cafés or in their offices. However, the multi-sited fieldwork did not always allow for face-to-face interviews, as some interviewees lived quite far away. Therefore, some interviews were conducted over the phone, which at first made me worry that it would impoverish our conversations. It did not prove to be so problematic though. The eight telephone interviews lasted between thirty minutes and one hour and a half – which comes very close to the face-to-face interviews (from thirty minutes to two hours) – and provided equally meaningful insights. Overall, the balance between the resources spent and the quality of the interviews turned out to be quite satisfying during our telephone conversations – certainly because semi-structured and targeted interviews are adapted to this interviewing method (McIntosh & Morse, 2015).

All the interviews were recorded and fully transcribed. Since they were conducted in French, I decided to fully translate them into English as I transcribed them. I opted for this solution for two reasons. First, because I did not want to have disparate pieces of translated transcripts as I was not certain, and especially not during these early research stages, of the content that would prove most relevant to my research needs. Therefore, I needed to have a translation strategy that could provide “holistic rather than piecemeal data” (Halai, 2007: 350). The second reason is a more pragmatic matter of time management: even if it was highly time-consuming, translating my interviews fully in the course of fieldwork meant saving precious time during the writing stages. With the help of the software Atlas.ti, a content analysis of the transcripts was then conducted based on several rounds of systematic coding and a constant comparison approach (see Leech & Onwuegbuzie, 2007 and Dumez, 2015).

Although my fieldwork heavily relied on interviews, this was not the only type of material that I collected. As I mentioned before, I did some participant observations: one in a history class of a high school close to the south-eastern mountain range, one during a historiographical workshop for teachers in the centre of the country and another one in a high school history class in a former industrial Parisian suburb. Participant observations were an ideal tool for triangulation since, for each of them, I had also conducted interviews with the teachers there; so I could compare the two types of material. My only problem with participant observations was that I was only able to do three. This is certainly my main fieldwork

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frustration; although the fact that it proved so difficult to find occasions to witness the book “live” is a triangulation tool in and of itself. It is evidence of the difficulty to change the content of the history curriculum, as even the teachers who said during interviews that they used the book in class – or at least wanted to use it – never managed to do so in the four fieldwork months.

I also collected a variety of first-hand documents, either accessible online or that my informants were kind enough to share with me. To name but a few, this material includes emails exchanged between editors and authors, drafts of chapters, the contract between the publishing house, the editors and the association, letters sent to public authorities, history lessons, presentations to promote the book, videos of conferences, and more. Gathering a variety of material was an important research goal since different types of material can provide different sorts of insights. Just as for interview transcripts, these documents were imported into the Atlas.ti platform (when the format allowed it) and analysed using content analysis.

A note on ethics

As I have explained a few lines above, I approached the social life of the book LPFH as a specific entry into the feminisation of education; a very specific entry indeed, too specific to guarantee the anonymisation of some of my informants. However, a widely shared feeling among them was pride and satisfaction in the work accomplished, so none of them were particularly eager to remain anonymous. Consequently, my ethical approach cannot, and does not, rely on anonymisation. I am primarily concerned with making sure that none of the material included here can harm my informants. Most importantly, I wish to do them justice since, from the very beginning, I approached them with an “empathetic” stance (McIntosh & Morse, 2015: 2) towards the work they did and are still doing. I can only hope that the present study can contribute to the promotion of that work. This would be a humble way to thank my informants for their enthusiastic and helpful contribution.

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Chapter 1 – A story of individuals and institutions

The first version of the story of La place des femmes dans l’histoire is grounded in the institutionalist sociology. The aim of this version is to identify the actors of the social life of the book, how they operate and how the book travels. First, some theoretical clarifications about institutionalism are provided. Then comes the story of LPFH, with an emphasis on individual initiatives and opportunities for action in institutional contexts. Finally, the focus of the story is on the constitution and use of network ties across various institutional contexts.

Some elements on institutionalism

Providing a clear and comprehensive definition of an institution is not an easy task. Certainly because “sociologists find institutions everywhere, from handshakes to marriages to strategic-planning departments” (Powell & DiMaggio, 1991: 9). So, in the introduction to their seminal edited volume on the New Institutionalism (1991), Powell and DiMaggio turn to the work of Zucker for clarifications:

. . .institutionalization is both a process and a property variable: it is a phenomenological process by which certain social relationships and actions come to be taken for granted, that is part of the "objective situation", while at the same time it is the structure of reality defining what has meaning and what actions are possible. (1983: 2)

Zucker’s elements of definition are broad enough so as to encompass the diversity of institutional thoughts. For there is no such thing as institutionalism; only a variety of scholarships loosely connected by the fundamental assumption that institutions are a key component of human societies and, therefore, should be the focus of sociological analysis.

First, it is possible to distinguish between the “old” and the “new” institutionalism. The “old” institutionalism – the institutionalism of Parsons or Selznick – tends towards the “action side” of the institutionalist spectrum while the “new” institutionalism – that of Powell and DiMaggio – is on the “structure side” (Hirsch & Lounsbury, 1997). More explicitly, this means that “old” institutionalists pay greater attention to the “guts” of institutions; that is the people working within such institutions (Stinchcombe, 1997).

This is the sort of institutionalism that is of interest here. Specifically, that of the descendants of the “old” institutionalism (see Bechky, 2011) and notably Hallett and Ventresca (2006) who have appropriated and elaborated Scully and Creed’s concept of “inhabited

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institutions” (2001). They make their filiation with the “old” institutionalism explicit by paying tribute to the “old” conception of institutions as “composed of people who act, at times in concert and at times in conflict, within the confines of an immediate working context, and within a larger environment.” (2006: 214) This emphasis on the “embeddedness” (authors’ emphasis; ibid.: 231) of individuals within institutions is a central aspect of Hallett and Ventresca’s version of institutionalism. It is also this specific aspect that is relevant to the present case. The shared goal of institutionalists, old and new, is to understand the workings of institutions: how they come into being, how they sustain themselves, reproduce themselves, how they change and evolve, how they die and make room for new institutions. This is not the aim of the present study. Here, the focus is on individuals, those who “inhabit” institutions since – as it will be explained in more details later – they are the engine of the social life of LPFH.

However, the focus on individuals should not be synonym with an individualistic frame of analysis. As Powell and DiMaggio explain, the renewed interest in institutionalism is:

. . . a reaction against the behavioral revolution of the recent decades, which interpreted collective political and economic behavior as the aggregate consequences of individual choices. (1991: 2)

Consequently, Powell, DiMaggio, and other neo-institutionalists have opposed to the behavioural model a highly structuralist one. So structural at times that this model can resemble a sort of “disembodied idealism” (Hirsch & Lounsbury, 1997). On the contrary, institutionalist frameworks such as the “inhabited institution” have the benefit of aiming for a middle ground. They show an acute interest for people and their interactions while considering that “institutions inevitably involve normative obligations [which] enter into social life primarily as facts” (Meyer & Rowan, 1991: 42) that people need to take into account.

The “inhabited” institutionalism takes root in Strauss’s “negotiated order” (1978), also appropriated by Fine, who summarises the approach:

In observing organizations from a distance, we may believe we see a stable, unchanging system of relationships. Yet, the negotiated order approach has sensitized researchers to the fact that these relations are ultimately dependent upon the agreement of their

parties and that they are constructed through a social, rather than entirely policy driven, process. (emphasis added; Fine, 1984: 243)

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Again, the present paper does not have the ambition to map out the functioning of organisations (and more broadly institutions) as the above-quoted passage suggests. It only takes inspiration from “this research [that] centers on work activities as a kind of ‘agency’ within institutional contexts.” (Hallett & Ventresca, 2006: 215). A major goal of the institutionalist project is therefore to analyse the influence that the institutional context holds over individuals. The conclusion that these institutionalists have come to, is that the “embeddedness” of individuals in institutional contexts makes for an ambiguous situation: “institutional shaping is a double-edged process. Institutions both enable and constrain.” (Kuipers, 2015: 989). It should be noted that this conclusion derives from qualitative and agent-centred research. This is of importance because, contrarily to other neo-institutionalists whose quantitative and regression analyses have led to “higher levels of abstraction” (Hirsch & Lounsbury, 1997: 410), inheritors of the “old” institutionalism have opted for a more ethnographical methodology in “an effort to get closer to empirical reality” (Hallett & Ventresca, 2006: 228). No doubt that the methodological affinities between this version of institutionalism and the present study contribute to the input that institutionalism can provide to the exploration of the social life of LPFH.

These few explanatory elements should help to better understand the first version of the story of the social life of La place des femmes dans l’histoire, a story of individual initiatives and institutional contexts. However, as the story runs its course, more aspects of institutionalism will be discussed.

The story of La place des femmes dans l’histoire: first version

Individual initiatives and opportunities for action in institutional contexts “So this textbook thing, do we make it or what?”

Pascale – author and former president of the association Mnémosyne – recalls that when she got into the board, in the mid-2000s, Annie would always take the floor during annual general assemblies to bring up the topic. Annie is one of the editors of the book. Everyone agrees that she played a crucial role in the project. Yet she was not the only one. She needed the other three editors to orchestrate this enterprise with her:

One day [Annie] came to a meeting, I can’t remember which one it was, and she said it would be nice to make a book . . . and she said “who would be interested? We would need people to coordinate etcetera” and so...Françoise, Irène and I agreed to devote our time to this. . . .The four of us committed to this, I did this on top of my own work;

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everyone did it in addition to their ongoing work, we did it because we could feel the relevance of the project. (Geneviève, editor and author)

LPFH is the product of volunteer work. The four editors decided to devote a significant amount of time and energy to the production of the book because they shared the same deep conviction: “the relevance of the project.” Although they do not have the same profession – university professor and researcher, high school history teacher, educational inspector, researcher and textbook author –, they have all been trained as historians and have some knowledge of secondary education. Most importantly, they are well-aware of the critique made against the lack of gender-inclusiveness of school programmes. Some of them have even contributed to this critique and formulated recommendations to the Conseil Supérieur des Programmes – the institution in charge of drafting the national syllabi:

Now the [former] history general inspector is retired, but Annie knew him well and when we asked the history general inspector to introduce a women dimension in the

programme formulations he responded two things; the first one was “it’s not necessary

because now it goes without saying” which is false, and the second one was “yes but you understand that if I put women, I’ll also have to include Black people, homosexuals, Jewish and Muslim people and so it’s dangerous” which are two arguments...you know, both equally stupid… (Irène, editor and author)

Confronted with the impossibility to substantially change the programmes, the Mnémosyne board opted for another channel of action. Action. This is a key dimension of the project: LPFH is the outcome of the collective work of a few motivated individuals who made the same observation – the invisibility of women and gender in the historical narrative taught in schools – and decided to take action, to do something about what they considered to be a problem. As mentioned in the introduction, the historians who initiated the project conceived it as academic activism:

It’s true that now we have done a lot of things to criticise the representation of women in textbooks but really we should also do things to help teachers do something else. . . It’s true that...it cheers me up to think about how we can change things, and not always just denouncing what is wrong. (Arlette, author)

In order to do something, they decided to make a thing, a book, a textbook for primary and secondary education:

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So there was a whole reflection which bloomed and eventually we thought “well of course, there needs to be a textbook in which women are really there...fully there.” (Mathilde, author and former board member)

In these early stages of the social life of the book, they did not have a publisher yet. They nonetheless decided to start working on the project and, to do just this, they needed funding. First, to cover their expenses; second, to have a solid financial advance to convince potential publishers to invest in the production of the book. So they turned the Conseil Regional of the region Ile-de-France, the government of the Parisian region:

We looked for subsidies and . . . we found a call for tenders from the region Ile-de-France about...I don’t know what were the terms exactly, a call for tenders which must happen every year for projects about equality of chances, or men-women equality or promoting equality, I don’t know what the term was. And so we applied...we replied to this call for tenders with our project of a textbook that promoted this equalitarian idea, the promotion [of this idea] etcetera etcetera . . . but these are always very boring forms to fill out you know….about the association, the project, you have to explain it with

terms that are valid to the funders, so you have to make guesses on what they expect to read. (Françoise, editor and author)

Françoise’s account introduces two major mechanisms of the social life of LPFH: the strategic

use of institutions and the reliance on opportunities for action.

First, the strategic use of institutions. Françoise makes clear that when they applied for the regional subsidy, they did not just present their project and hoped for the best. Instead, they tried to anticipate what the Conseil Regional would be more likely to finance. They tried to fit

into institutional guidelines. It is perhaps even more evidently illustrated in the opening of the

letter that Françoise wrote to the president of another region (this time as she was promoting the book):

Re: Action in favour of men-women equality in secondary education (distribution of a

mixte history textbook)

Here, Françoise purposely introduced her letter with terms that fitted the official regional policy – the fight against men-women inequalities. The strategic use of institutions is part and parcel of the way individuals deal with the institutional context. As Fligstein notes:

New institutional theories emphasize the existing rules and resources that are the constitutive building blocks of social life. I want to add that the ability of actors to

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skilfully use rules and resources is part of the picture as well. (emphasis added; 2001:

107)

Some of the editorial choices are also the product of this “ability of actors to skilfully use rules and resources;” in particular, the use of the programmes to structure the book. In the preface,

programmes are described as “both a chance and an obstacle” (Dermenjian et al., 2010: 7); a

phrase that comes very close to the institutionalist idea that “institutions both enable and constrain social actors” (Fligstein, 2001: 107). I asked Françoise to expand on that:

Françoise: So a chance because the ministry guideline says, said, that women should be taken into account etcetera etcetera and a constraint because we had to... if we don’t follow the programmes, since teachers have the obligation to stick to them . . . they wouldn’t have enough time [to teach additional lessons]. So by sticking to the main

themes of the programmes, by emphasising this ministry guideline, we justified the book.

Me: And an obstacle?

Françoise: Obstacle because there are things that we didn’t mention and...hum...there are blanks of course . . . hum...yes I think it is about having to stick to themes that are not necessarily the [most relevant] themes...

How editors and authors made strategic use of the institutional guideline of the programmes is quite straightforward: they used programmes to ease the work of teachers as well as to “justify” the book; again, to fit into institutional guidelines. However, Françoise’s explanation is slightly more confused when it comes to the constraining aspects of the programmes. This was a recurring observation in the production stages of the book (and an observation that was contradictory to what I expected): in the production stages, programmes enabled more than they constrained. Whenever I would ask authors and editors how constraining programmes were in the writing stages, I would get frown eyebrows and unconvinced looks:

Me: Going back to the writing of the book, were programmes a constraint? Or at least a guideline to...

Arlette (author): Well actually I have to say that I didn’t look at all at what was written on slavery in the programmes. I know that there is probably not much about it and I’m not sure that they mention women in the history...of slavery! [laughing] . . . Here, since it is a much wider project, [primary and secondary] education as a whole, we didn’t have to worry too much about what was written precisely...

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What Arlette’s last sentence suggests is not so much that programmes were irrelevant, but that the comprehensive structure of the book – that covers the totality of the programmes – allowed for some distance with the specific guidelines. Yet this comprehensive structure is not incidental. It is an editorial choice that is also shaped by institutional constraints, but constraints from a different institutional field, the publishing field:

So I can’t remember when we started sending projects to publishers, and I think that from there on we knew that we would . . . make only one textbook; making seven textbooks [one per secondary education level] was really too much and first we said that we would make only one textbook in which we would include topics and themes which, in one way or another, whatever the phrasing, would eventually end up . . . in the programmes. We were in the midst of programmes reforms at the time. . . so first we said “let’s wait until all the new programmes are out” and then...eventually we thought “we have to go for it”. . . eventually we settled on a table of content and we said “yes programmes might change, but these chapters will always be useful.”

In the earliest stages of the social life of the book, Mnémosyne board members considered the option of making one book per middle and high school level. However, they were quickly confronted with the constraints of the publishing field: no publisher would make the highly risky investment of producing seven women and gender history textbooks. Thus, it is not so much that programmes were not constraining, but that the institutional constraints of the publishing field overtook those of the educational field. To the institutionalist assertion that “individuals shape their own actions in conformance with the structure, policies, and traditions of the social world around them” (Fine, 1984: 242), I would add that they also have to navigate and articulate between several sets of such “structure, policies and traditions,” that is to say between several institutional contexts.

One of the ways that people can make strategic use of institutions is through seizing

opportunities for action. This is how the book was chosen for publication:

It’s true that there was both, there was a real demand from teachers regarding...you know, how to...how to talk about...how to balance the historical discourse which is obviously very...very masculine and to see how...to both explain why it was masculine and also to offer different perspectives than the perspectives that are in school textbooks, so that teachers have more material, more resources. When I saw this project

that was sent by Mnémosyne, I thought this could be the occasion to...to do such a thing.

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The publisher saw in the Mnémosyne project an opportunity – the “occasion” – to concretise a project that his company already had; to respond to a market demand already identified. What is also interesting in Yves’s account is the use of the “I”: at the publication stage as well, the

social life of LPFH is fully dependent upon an individual initiative:

Me: Regarding the selection process of such a project, how does it work? Is it you who...?

Yves: Yes it’s quite simple. . . There was a discussion between the history team, the general management, the commercial department and me but it’s more about [technicalities]. But regarding the choice to publish it or not...only the publisher is in

charge of the decision.

Yves single-handedly made the choice to publish the book. To put it into institutionalist terms, he made skilful use of his institutional position as publisher to contribute to the social life of LPFH.

The same holds true for the elected officials who promoted the textbook. I talked to two of them: Nathalie who held a mandate in a Conseil Regional, and Brigitte, in a Conseil

Déparmental (in France, departments are the level of local governance between the

municipality and the region). I was able to talk to only two of them because, it seems, Nathalie’s region and Brigitte’s department are the only two who bought and distributed the textbook to their schools – high schools for the region and middle schools for the department. The only two, out of the 22 Conseil Régionaux and 98 Conseil Départementaux. And it would not even have been the case, had it not been for the individual initiatives of Nathalie and Brigitte:

Me: And so...how did it happen? Was it your decision?

Brigitte: Yes it was my decision . . . I did not ask for the president’s opinion. Because well it was an amount of money extremely insignificant to us . . . So I talked to the vice-president in charge of education about it, who agreed to this quite easily because he was a convinced man. And then he gave the instructions to his department, I did not do much more than this. As long as the political instruction is given the staff follows the order.

Me: Okay, so there weren’t any obstacle to this initiative?

Brigitte: No, no at all. No...I had enough...let’s say power to be able to impose this in

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not sure that [it would have happened] [laughing]. The political sensitivities of this or

that person are to be taken into account you know.

Nathalie’s experience is very similar to Brigitte’s. In both cases, the purchase of the book was the result of the individual decision of local officials who were sensitive to initiatives promoting gender equality, who could see the value of the book and who had the adequate institutional position to buy and distribute a copy for every school of their district. As Brigitte explained later in our conversation: “I was in the right position for making decisions and taking action.” This opportunistic use of institutional resources to advance a political agenda resembles the work of “grassroot activists in the workplace” that Scully and Segal (2002) describe. They have observed that these activists have “a piecemeal approach to change” (ibid.: 126), and that “the sources of piecemeal change are opportunistic moments that employees can

seize” (emphasis added; ibid.: 128); opportunistic moments such as the publication of a

gender-sensitive textbook for secondary education. Moreover, they make use of the institutional resources already at their disposal to advance their activist agenda (ibid.: 153). In our specific case, buying books is part of such institutional means of action. This aspect is even more obvious when it comes to the details of the purchase of the books:

You have to keep in mind that the department’s budget is 1.5 billion Euros – so spending three thousand Euros is really not a big deal. I had a 150 thousand Euros budget. Had the Youth department not agreed to take care of this, I would have, with my own budget, but since they accepted well it was very fine; it was more money for me to spend on something else! (Brigitte)

Once Brigitte decided that purchasing copies of LPFH was a valuable investment, she would have made use of any institutional means available – here, any budget available – to make the purchase. It was, overall, a very easy procedure. And an informal one as well:

Me: And in such cases, when you asked the Youth department to purchase it and everything, are there archives of that work or is it just...?

B: No I think it was done orally. I don’t think so...I didn’t have to...in my position I didn’t have to write a letter to my colleague. I just mentioned it, you know, in a hallway! [laughing]

Such informal encounters – that nonetheless result in concrete institutional outcomes – are modalities of action that institutionalists are familiar with (see O'Toole & O'Toole, 1981). They contribute to drawing proponents of the “inhabited institution” approach (and other

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institutionalists with similar views) to the conclusion that “institutions are not inert cultural logics or representations; they are populated by people whose social interactions suffuse institutions with force and local meaning” (Hallett & Ventresca, 2006: 226). Moreover, in this case, the ability of Brigitte and Nathalie to make strategic use of their institutional positions and resources largely counter-balances the institutional constraints that they could have been confronted with; they were in a position that exempted them from bureaucratic procedures and budgetary restrictions.

The mechanisms that are the engine of the aforementioned stages of the social life of LPFH are also crucial in the latest stages, the stages of the users and readers of the book. The teacher trainers I talked to, for instance, are quite aware of the possibility of making strategic use of one’s institutional position and do not hesitate to do so. This is the case of Fanny, a high school history teacher who also works as a trainer in an ESPE – the French training schools for teachers. She described one of the training sessions that she had been in charge of:

Fanny: And so that year the order was not at all...the order from the Education Nationale never goes in that direction [of gender and women history] [laughing]. The order was about differentiated instruction and possibly something about learning to learn. So personally, pedagogical aspects, only pedagogical aspects, I’m not really interested when it’s just this. So I suggested a big chapter on differentiation but applied to women in the Revolution. . .

Me: While these are not training sessions specifically about integrating women...? F: No no. But it’s true that you know [laughing] I extensively use the examples that...for instance Emilie du Chatelêt [a French physicist] I use her for a lot of different training topics at the end of the day.

M: Okay, so you spread [women history] through the training that you provide? F: That’s it, exactly, as soon as I can.

It is mostly through the individual initiatives of actors seizing the opportunities offered by their institutional positions that gender and women history spreads to secondary and primary education and, consequently, that the book travels. As Alice, author and high school teacher, confirms, “I often presented the book to other primary and secondary teachers during the training sessions I was invited to participate to.” Trainers like Fanny or Alice are typical of those “actors [who] can use existing institutions to found new arenas of action” (Fligstein, 2001: 107). In their particular case, Fanny and Alice used ESPEs as such “arenas of action.”

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The ability of actors to make skilful use of their institutional positions does not mean, however, that institutional constraints are always so easily circumvented. When it comes to history teachers, the weight of institutional constraints heavily increases. First, while producers of the book agreed that programmes were not too constraining, teachers would undoubtedly beg to differ:

Me: Okay, and so in the content of your classes do you try to integrate a gendered/feminised dimension?

Cécile (history teacher and Mnémosyne board member): So...how to answer. Yes it is an ever-growing concern for me to do it. But it wasn’t obvious in the beginning because...in history and geography actually we have one big issue which is the

programmes, the massive programmes. The first concern, I think for everyone, is . . .

how to manage to finish – knowing that we never do . . . – but how to do the maximum of what we are supposed to do. And it’s a constraint that is really strong and personally, for a long time, I thought that it was not possible to give myself an additional constraint by modifying the content of the programmes, because at the end of the day this is what it means. And so for a long time I did a radical distinction between my teaching in high school and my work as a [women history] researcher which was a bit schizophrenic [laughing] but that was it!

Despite the heavily constraining aspect of the programmes, Cécile eventually decided – as she gained teaching experience – to limit the schizophrenia and integrate women and gender into her high school lessons. In order to do this, she makes opportunistic use of the programmes. For instance, she decided to change the traditional outline of the seconde lesson on the Athenian society and to give it a gendered twist. Below is the alternative outline from her lesson:

Part I: The Athenian city, a civic community in which men and women share respective roles

A. The Athenian city and its spatial organisation

B. The citizens: a free population of men, women, and children Part II: The Athenians: a political group composed solely of men

A. Equality before the law B. A restrictive citizenship

C. Rights and duties of the citizens D. Democratic debates

Even though programmes are quite specific, the principle of pedagogical freedom allows teachers to approach guidelines as they please. It is in this institutional breach that teachers like

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Cécile can seize opportunities to teach a more gender-inclusive historical narrative. In the case of teachers as well, the social life of LPFH prospers in the articulation of individual initiatives, opportunities for action and institutional constraints. The principle of pedagogical freedom is, in the context of the French Education Nationale, the sort of freedom that Fine describes as he summarises the work of Crozier (1971; 1973): “he postulated that workers are social actors who have the freedom to operate strategically in organisational environments, despite real constraints” (Fine , 1984: 242).

But “opportunistic moments for enacting passion” (Scully & Segal, 2002: 147) cannot completely overthrow the burdening institutional constraints that programmes represent. Even more so, as the use of such opportunistic moments is entirely based on individual initiatives, which makes these opportunities very subjective. The Athenian lesson is a case in point for that matter. Some teachers, like Cécile, think that this chapter is particularly fit for the teaching of gender history, for instance Clémentine:

For [the Greek Antiquity] yes I’ll be able to...I have some documents precisely...I have the story of a priestess in Athens for instance, to talk about the role of women in religion and, precisely, showing that women are excluded from citizenship in Athens and in Rome; there is the possibility to do things about this.

On the other hand, Fanny finds this lesson unfit for the integration of women and gender. And for the very reason that Clémentine argues the opposite:

There are lessons for which it works out great, lessons for which it works out a lot less so I don’t have...I don’t manage for now to have a gendered dimension in all my lessons, in all my chapters. . . So now for instance about [the Athenian] citizenship, considering the fact that the lesson is really focused on...“why is the Athenian democracy pioneering at the time?” Since it creates the notion of citizenship and it gives power to a certain

part of the population, well consequently it’s not central at all to mention the status of women in Athens etcetera, so I just mention it a bit but....just a bit because...because the programme is what it is.

Clémentine, Cécile, and Fanny might not find opportunities in the same programmes chapters but they – and the other teachers I interviewed – all share Fanny’s conclusion: the impossibility to integrate women and gender to all their lessons. For some chapters, the programme guideline makes a gendered or feminised approach virtually unfeasible:

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And I try always...either the chapter is completely adapted to this . . . or I try to integrate the question “what about women in all this?” But it’s not always adapted to this. It has to remain coherent and should not be too artificial either. This is what I have to work on...when it’s really too artificial and I don’t manage to do it...I don’t try any harder. (Clémentine)

Clémentine’s account is a telling example of the institutionalist observation that “real constraints direct and channel the actions of individuals” (Fine, 1984: 246). In the case of teachers, programmes are real constraints that inhibit their efforts to infuse a feminised and gender-sensitive flavour to their teaching. So, if even highly motivated teachers struggle to include women and gender history, it seems logical then that the book LPFH only ends up in a small number of hands. Or, at least, that it is effectively used by just a handful of teachers. This is the saddening observation that Cécile made:

I see it quite clearly in my high school, we have one copy in the library and one copy in the history cabinet...it’s not used, they are not used.

The social life of La place des femmes dans l’histoire is an inspiring story of individual initiatives, but it is not a fairy tale. If individual initiatives are the engine of the story, they are also the very reason why the effect of this enterprise can only be limited in scope. LPFH is a drop in the ocean of the very masculine historical narrative taught in French schools. And yet a drop in the ocean that, all along its social life, necessitated the active work of a few motivated individuals.

Networking across institutional contexts

Since individual initiatives are so crucial to the social life of the book, a significant part of the success of this enterprise depends on the mobilisation of a network of social actors who can multiply these initiatives, a network as dense and diverse as possible. This is a major mechanism of the social life of LPFH that informs an aspect of the story that has been neglected so far, that is, how the book travels. It is through the constitution and mobilisation of a network of social actors across various institutional fields that this journey is possible.

Let us rewind the story and go back to the Mnémosyne board.

Making a textbook is a great idea. But now someone needs to write it. And since there are 36 chapters to be written, the editors turned to their network of women and gender historians for help. Mathilde, an author, recalls how she joined the project:

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So how...well it’s because I was part of the network of historians working on the topic of women, I was at the time a member of Mnémosyne, . . . , I know Françoise very well, we studied together a long long time ago, and so I was contacted...since they, they...the project had been built at Mnémosyne and then they started prospecting. And regarding religious issues there weren’t many people so I was quite...well immediately contacted . . . So...so that’s it, it’s through a network but actually it’s well-known, for such a collective book there is necessarily a network that is there and has the ability to mobilise, to ask, to prospect in order to find people to do the work. That’s it...

The reliance on a network of historians willing to contribute to the book was particularly crucial in this case since, for authors as well, it was volunteer work:

Me: Regarding the authors, contacting them, was it easy? Were there negative responses?

Irène (editor): Yes…no it was not difficult because often they were friends. For the most part, not always but for the most part they were members of the association Mnémosyne, so people who would accept to work knowing that they would not get paid…with deadlines very often…

One of the correlations of an institutionalist approach that takes the work of individuals seriously is the emphasis on interactions. Fine and Kleinman, staunch interactionists, note that “the interactionist perspective emphasizes that individuals participate in relationships, which provide them with opportunities for expression and action” (1979: 106). Here, the mobilisation of a network of historians willing to do unpaid work provides the editors with an opportunity for action in favour of gender and women history, that is, making an unconventional textbook. The interactionist approach is not restricted to network-building or network-mobilising activities. However, the focus on networks is in line with the interactionist perspective, as evident when Fine and Kleinman turn to Boissevain’s network analysis to support their argument:

Network analysis is thus first of all an attempt to reintroduce the concept of man as an interacting social being capable of manipulating others as well as being manipulated by them. The network analogy indicates that people are dependent on others, not on an abstract society. (1973: viii)

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And in the story of LPFH, people are indeed heavily dependent on others. It is the case for the constitution of a group of authors, it is also the case for the promotion of the book. The four editors and the president of Mnémosyne were well-aware of the fact that:

Occupancy of different social positions . . . gives people knowledge of different schemas and access to different kinds and amounts of resources and hence different possibilities for transformative action. (Sewell, 1992: 21)

They knew that various institutional actors could devote different resources to the promotion and distribution of the book. In other words, that the network had to extend across various

institutional fields. Therefore, they had to reach out to these institutions. As Fine explains:

Network connections allow for the interaction of parties who are variously situated in social worlds and therefore increase the possibility of collective action. To have successful interorganizational relations, one needs to know whom to contact and how to

contact them. (emphasis added; 1984: 254)

So Mnémosyne historians sent eloquent letters to various institutional actors. They shared with me some of this correspondence; among which are letters to the dean of the Inspection

Générale of history and geography, to the president of a Conseil Regional and to the Delegate

for Women-Men Equality of another region. Except for the letter to the dean – which was purely informative, to let him know of the publication of the book so that he could spread the word to educational inspectors –, the other two letters asked the elected officials to purchase and distribute copies of the books to high schools in their regions. These were failed attempts. The difference between these two regions and Nathalie and Brigitte’s districts in which the purchase was effectively made was, quite obviously, the presence of Nathalie and Brigitte. Most specifically, their relationship with Françoise, one of the editors:

And so by hanging out in these [feminist] circles well I met Françoise . . . and so right away I heard…Françoise came to me with this book and I pitched it to Ségolène [the president of the region] and said “it’s crucial, youngsters must have it in their schools.” (Nathalie)

Brigitte: So actually it’s. . . Françoise who participated to the edition of this book . . . she came to me, I was vice-president in charge, among other things, of men-women equality. And so she came to me and presented the book – that I found very interesting since...well I shared her opinion that women are forgotten in history – so I thought that her project was very important . . .