The Primary Education of French Girls: Pedagogical Prescriptions and Social Realities, 1880-1940

Abstract

WOMAN is the guardian of thefoyer. Her place is at home, in the house of her parents or husband. . . ; it is for the foyer that she must reserve all her grace and good humor. ... A woman who does not love her home, who has no taste for household duties. . . cannot remain a virtuous woman for long. Such were the instructions and warnings about the domestic mission of women which Madame Henry Greville offered to French schoolgirls in one of the most widely used textbooks for moral and civic education in girls' public primary schools during the late nineteenth century. (1) Greville's teaching conformed to the wishes of the Ministry of Public Instruction which ordered that primary schools should prepare boys to become workers and soldiers and initiate girls in the care of the household and ouvrages defemmes. (2) The statements by the Ministry and Greville indicate that some aspects of primary schooling for girls would differ from that for boys during the Third Repubic. It is therefore necessary to modify a generalization about the identity of boys' and girls' elementary schooling which Antoine Prost makes in his standard Histoire de l'enseignement en France. Prost states that the differences between the education of girls and boys evident on the secondary school level before World War I do not apply to the primary schools. Whereas the state secondary schools for girls sought to familiarize the future ladies of the republican bourgeoisie with domestic virtues and social graces as well as general culture, the primary schools, says Prost, served the children of the people and aimed to prepare both sexes for a lifetime of hard work. (3) It is true that boys' and girls' primary schools shared the same formal curriculum for academic subjects, drawing and singing and differed only in the short-lived requirement of military exer-