The Rise of Professional Women in France. Gender and Public Administration since 1830 (review)

Book Reviews261 circumstances. Rather than inculcate a moral, Kalilah and Dimnah incites reflection (50-51). Marie de France writes in the same spirit (62). Some ofher fables condemn liars and cheaters, while others praise them for their shrewdness. No single perspective dominates (Fables 29, 37, and 56-59). Fable 8, where King Lion adjudicates a dispute between the fox and the wolf, establishes that language alone cannot distinguish truth from falsehood . In the first fable, a rooster exhorts us to learn: in the last, a hen subverts his didactic project. Marie de France transforms didacticism into narration , sententiousness into ambiguity, and the pedagogue into a poet. She refuses to perpetuate the essentialist mode of earlier animal stories. She individualizes the characters and enriches the semantic field associated with each. Refusing to introduce her animals with definite articles, name them, or title her fables, she privileges situations over character. Several animals of the same species each have distinct personalities. Truth becomes a destination, not a point of departure. Chapter 4 explores the feminist implications of such open structures. Women are often shown as wise, and a male voice does not have the last word. Fable 53 demonstrates that a man in her place would have acted just like the Biblical Eve. Fable 94 depicts a woman who expresses her independent judgment even after her husband has cut out her tongue. In short, Marie de France "insuffle ... un dialogisme dans l'occident médiéval" (200). The impassioned conclusion argues that Eurocentric source-hunting has proved inadequate, and that a rigid polarization of East and West cannot be viable in Medieval Studies. One recalls the tradition of spiritualized love and philosophical speculation that passed from Plato's Greece through North Africa to Spain, Provence, and Italy, fostering the European Renaissance. I thoroughly agree with the conclusions of this important, admirable, intercultural work and heartily recommend it to anyone interested in Women's Studies before the modern period. Laurence M. PorterMichigan State University Linda L. Clark. The Rise of Professional Women in France. Gender and Public Administration since 1830. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. ISBN: 0-521-77344-X. Pp. xiv + 324. Linda Clark's present study builds on her extensive research on female education and employment in nineteenth- and twentieth-century France. Tracing the lives of female administrators from the July Monarchy to the Fifth Republic and contrasting them to those oftheir counterparts in other Western European countries and in the United States, she illustrates the benefits ofthe maternalist argument by which French women gained access to sectors that required "motherly "qualities oftheir administrators. The first part ofthe book, "Defining a Feminine Sphere ofAction, 1830-1914" documents women's gradual entrance into administrative posts ofresponsibility. The first inspectresses appointed were the ones for nursery schools, institutions that were in place to fulfill "the role ofsubstitute mothering" (19) for working-class children. 262Women in French Studies During the Third Republic, women became more visible as lower ranking civil servants, teachers, head mistresses, inspectresses and after 1918, as rédactrices. Clark carefully delineates how the educational and social politics of the Third Republic facilitated women's employment in the civil service. The presumed need to control and secularize female education as well as moral concerns with male supervision of girls furthered women's employment (albeit not uncontestedly) as inspectresses of female educational and correctional facilities. In addition, government officials and French feminists alike argued that female workers should be supervised by women as they understood better the plights and flaws of their own sex. Hence women also began working as inspectresses in the Ministry ofLabor. Clark illustrates that gender-specific entry exams and job assignments did not hamper equality in pay. These female administrators were among the first to receive the same pay as their male colleagues (110), while pay inequalities among the sexes continued in other European countries until well after World War II. Still, Clark shows that gender-specific job definitions were a two-sided sword that enabled women to take on new public roles as representatives ofthe state but also limited the extent oftheir responsibilities (129). Politicians' concern with France's depopulation made working women the object ofspecial legislations that would...