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

by Rebecca Rogers

How a nation educates its children tells us much about the values of its people. From the Salon to the Schoolroom examines the emerging secondary school system for girls in nineteenth-century France and uncovers how that system contributed to the fashioning of the French bourgeois woman. Rebecca Rogers explores the variety of schools―religious and lay―that existed for girls and paints portraits of the women who ran them and the girls who attended them. Drawing upon a wide array of public and private sources―school programs, prescriptive literature, inspection reports, diaries, and letters―she reveals the complexity of the female educational experience as the schoolroom gradually replaced the salon as the site of French women’s special source of influence. From the Salon to the Schoolroom also shows how France as part of its civilizing mission transplanted its educational vision to other the colonies in Africa as well as throughout the Western world, including England and the United States. Historians are aware of the widespread ramifications of Jesuit education, but Rogers shows how French education for girls played into the cross-cultural interactions of modern society, producing an image of the Frenchwoman that continues to tantalize and fascinate the Western world today.

352 pages, Hardcover

First published August 28, 2005

About the author

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Rebecca Rogers is Maître de Conférences in history at the Université Marc Bloch Strasbourg. Her first book, Les Demoiselles de la Légion d'Honneur: Les Maisons d'éducation de la Legion d'honneur au dix-neuvième siècle, was published in France in 1992.

Reviews

[Sol]

how tf am i supposed to rate a history textbook i read for class 😭 like yeah it was interesting but also painful to read cuz its a mandatory class reading