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SUMMARY:Ambition and Decorum: Women's Entry into the Professions in Belle 
 Époque France	 - Dr Felicia Gordon Senior Research Fellow\, Anglia Ruskin
  University
DTSTART:20111116T130000Z
DTEND:20111116T140000Z
UID:TALK34111@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Dr Elizabeth C Blake
DESCRIPTION:France\, a country which did not grant women the suffrage unti
 l 1945\, was in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries\, nevert
 heless at the forefront of progress in women’s education. From 1868 wome
 n were admitted into the Medical Faculty\, eleven years before the same ri
 ght was accorded to British women by the University of London.  Yet what m
 ight seem an easy progression for women’s educational and professional p
 rospects was seamed with contradictions. Women who wished to enter the pro
 fessions needed to finesse\, to some degree the powerful gender expectatio
 ns of the period which assumed women’s divinely ordained role in the dom
 estic sphere. In addition\, even the phrase ‘professional women’ (espe
 cially in French) carried with it the suggestion of the age old stigma att
 ached both to actresses and prostitutes\, ‘public women’. This paper w
 ill examine the strategies by which two women\, Madeleine Pelletier (1874-
 1939) and Constance Pascal (1877-1937)\, the first to gain a foothold in t
 he French state psychiatric system\, represented themselves in a hitherto 
 all-male profession\, examining their gender related choices in constructi
 ng an identity in the public sphere and the constraints\, real or imagined
  that they confronted.
LOCATION:Old Combination Room\, Wolfson College
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