28.04.2016 – 19:00

Women in Men’s Work (France, 1900-1920)

A Visual History of Gender and Work

Lecture by Juliette Rennes

My talk will focus on a collection of french postcards showing women working in traditionally male occupations between 1890 and 1920. Using these postcards as a starting point, I would like to show the connection between visual culture and the history of gender and work. I will discuss both the benefits and the limitations of this kind of visual document as a source of information about the history of feminization of trades and professions. I will then try to distinguish the socio-political phenomenon of women entering historically male professions from the visual event created by their emergence in public space and in pictures, such as those found on postcards, that were widely available.

Juliette Rennes

is Lecturer and Researcher at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris, France. She is Co-Director of the Masters Programme in Gender, Politics, and Sexuality at the EHESS. Her research focuses on the history of controversies concerning social struggles for equality since the 19th century in Europe, particularly in France. Among her publications are the following: ‘The French Republican Model and Women’s Access to Professional Work. Issues and Controversies in France from the 1870’s to the 1930’s’, Gender and History 23(2); ‘Analysing Controversy. The Contributions of Argumentation Study to Political Science’, in Simone Bonnafous and Malika Temmar (eds.) (2013) Discourse Analysis and Social Sciences (Bern: Peter Lang, 2013), pp. 95-112; “Legal distinctions or discriminations? 1Cairn.info “, Politix, 94 (2011); /Femmes en métiers d’hommes/, éd. Bleu autour (2013). In addition, she is an EditorialBoard Member of the following french journals: /Travail, Genre et Société/; /Clio. Femmes, genre, histoire/; and /Mouvements/