The Social Life of a Herstory Textbook

Bridging Institutionalism and Actor-Network Theory

Massilia Ourabah

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9789811543579
• eBook ISBN: 9789811543586
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice
• Index: Social Sciences

This book studies the possibility for feminist educational change by examining a case study on the social life of a French gender and women history textbook. Massilia Ourabah opens a unique and timely dialogue between two antagonistic sociological trends: institutionalism and actor-network theory (ANT), and more specifically the inhabited institution approach and the sociology of translation. The structure of the book is dual: it offers one version of the case study grounded in the institutionalist approach, and another version grounded in the translational approach. The goal is to show that through the introduction of institutional elements and the rejection of some of ANT's strongest assumptions, the critical value of ANT can be restored and prove a useful framework for studying sociomaterial networks in education. The book also engages with feminist pedagogy and discusses the implications of the case study for the prospect of a more gender-balanced educational curriculum.

© The Author(s) 2020

M. OurabahThe Social Life of a Herstory Textbookhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4358-6_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Massilia Ourabah¹

(1)

Faculty of Philosophy and Social Sciences, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium

Massilia Ourabah

Abstract

The introduction contextualises the case study on the textbook La place des femmes dans l’histoire (LPFH). It reflects on the development of women and gender history and notes that this historiography has seldom been incorporated into French primary and secondary educational curricula. It explains the goal of the textbook LPFH to offer a more gender-sensitive narrative to history courses in the context of the French Education Nationale. This ambition aligns with the principles of feminist pedagogy which are briefly discussed. The introduction also describes the “social life of things” and multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork approach. Finally, it presents the dual structure of the book which offers a version of the story grounded in the inhabited institution literature and another version grounded in actor-network theory.

Keywords

Gender and women historyFeminist pedagogyCurriculum reformSocial life of thingsActor-network theoryInhabited institution

End Abstract

What images do you like best on this cover?

This one, ‘cause I know her from TV, and that one, ‘cause she’s pretty.

—High school student about the cover of the textbook

La place des femmes dans l’histoire (2010)

Starting Point: The (Same Old) Representation Problem

I am baffled by my own ignorance. This was my exact thought when I first heard about the procès de Bobigny. The procès de Bobigny was the trial of an underaged girl and the four women who helped her get an abortion after she had been raped in 1971 by one of her schoolmates. That trial had a crucial impact on the decriminalisation of abortion in France, and although I was born and raised in France, I had never heard about it until I was eighteen or nineteen. I remain regularly baffled whenever I encounter a historical event or personality as critical to women’s history as they are unfamiliar to me. Yet I went to school, attended history classes, did my homework, and read the assigned literature. So what went wrong? Why is it that Robespierre has been part of my French Revolution imagery for so long, but Olympe de Gouges is only a recent character? My well-attended history classes had to bear some responsibility.

In 1975, the French Secretary of State for the Condition of Women Françoise Giroud commissioned a study on the representation of women in children’s textbooks. The study concluded that these texts conveyed a stereotypical image of economically unproductive women, an image that misrepresented the situation of women in the 1970s (Bousquet 1975). This report inaugurated a long tradition in France: fighting against sexist stereotypes and condemning the invisibility of women in textbooks and in the national curricula, the “school programmes”. In the past forty years, many more studies, reports, and commissions have scrutinised the content of textbooks and programmes (e.g. Mang 1995; Février and Rouquier 1999; Sinigalia-Amadio 2011). Although the goal has remained the same over the years, the focus of analysis has notably evolved. Particularly, attention has shifted from misogynist stereotypes to all kinds of gendered representations, and the linguistic invisibility of women has become a growing concern. Despite efforts to eradicate the most caricatured gendered representations, what emerges from decades of scrutinising textbooks and programmes is the persistence of gender imbalance and stereotypes. For instance, the latest study shows that only 3.8% of biographies in history textbooks are about female figures, and that female scientists or artists are mostly described as wives or muses of their male contemporaries (Centre Hubertine Auclert 2011).

This situation is not specific to France. The enduring under/misrepresentation of women is a shared characteristic of most educational curricula,¹ and it is reasonable to presume that gender disparities can be found in virtually all school curricula. Moreover, the well-known self-fulfilling prophecy of under/misrepresentations has recently fed growing concerns for equal and fair representation of all in a variety of public domains, from figurative representation in the arts to democratic representation in politics. And considering the significance of primary and secondary school for early socialisation and education, efforts to undo the gross gender imbalance in educational curricula deserve close examination more than ever. Such is the aim of the present book.

This book moves beyond the mere observation of the inadequacy of gendered representations in formal education in order to study an initiative whose goal is to effectively tackle the issue: a French history textbook focused on women and gender, La place des femmes dans l’histoire. Une histoire mixte (LPFH). In the form of a case study of the social life of this history text, this book explores a situated and material form of activism and considers the im/possibility for educational change in practice. In doing so, it asks the following questions: what levers of action can bring about educational change? How do various actors mobilise these levers in various institutional contexts ? What is the role of material practices in education?

Moreover, this book has an adjacent theoretical ambition. It approaches the case study from two different theoretical traditions: one grounded in institutionalist sociology, the other in actor-network theory . With this twofold theoretical approach, this book argues for the benefits of a dialogue between two distinct—oftentimes opposed—sociological traditions. The argument about feminist (academic) activism in education and the theoretical argument about institutionalism and actor-network theory are the two general aims of the present book, as presented in further detail in this introduction.

Herstory: Women History, Gender History, and Feminist Pedagogy

The choice to focus on the history curriculum in order to study gender in formal education is not incidental; it is to be understood in relation to the development of gender and women’s history. Initially, women’s history grew out of the 1960s’ women’s movement, thus grounding the origin of this scholarship in feminist activism. As Joan Kelly-Gadol (1987) argues, “women’s history has a dual goal: to restore women to history and to restore our history to women” (p. 15). Following this movement, the term “herstory ” was coined as a not-so-funny pun intended to offer a historical narrative free of masculine biases. Women’s historiography started flourishing in the US in the late 1960s but took a few more decades to gain momentum in French universities. Notably, the International Federation for Research in Women’s History (IFRWH) was founded in 1987, but Mnémosyne —the association which produced the textbook and French section of the IFRWH—was only created in 2000. On both sides of the Atlantic, the field has only attained academic legitimacy with difficulty, as the discipline has often been reduced to its feminist activist roots (Wieviorka 2004).

The emergence and growth of this scholarship is also to be understood through the profile of its practitioners: in various national contexts, the development of women’s history was only possible because a generation of female historians had gained access to academia. Yet the historians who followed in their footsteps realised that to understand long-lasting inequalities and the construction of femininities and masculinities alike, they needed to go beyond “women’s studies” and to explore the much wider field of “gender studies” (Kelly-Gadol 1987, p. 15). Fundamentally, women’s history and gender history are complementary. This complementarity is reflected in both the general aims of Mnémosyne —an association that states as its mission “the development and promotion of gender and women’s history”—and in the content of the LPFH textbook, as I shall explain later.

In parallel and in line with the development of women’s and gender history, the 1960s’ women’s movement also saw the emergence of feminist pedagogy or, more accurately, feminist pedagogies. The plural is appropriate here, for there are virtually as many versions of feminist pedagogy as there are versions of feminism. So, while formulating an exhaustive definition of feminist pedagogy is a difficult task, it can nonetheless be noted that feminist pedagogues share two basic assumptions: the need for feminist emancipation, on the one hand, and the power of education for social change, on the other. Evidently, feminist pedagogues are first and foremost politically engaged feminists. As Kathleen Weiler (1991) explains, “feminist pedagogy is based on assumptions of the power of consciousness raising, the existence of oppression and the possibility of ending it, and the desire for social transformation” (emphasis added; p. 455). According to feminist pedagogues, this social transformation can come about through education. A few decades ago, Dale Spender (1982) noted that:

Feminists are among those who are … beginning to assert that all educational institutions embody a particular way of viewing the world, that all educational institutions require their students to adopt this worldview and that it is a limited, distorted and destructive framework for making sense of the world. (author’s emphasis; p. 1)

Feminist pedagogues have questioned the idea that knowledge can be politically neutral and emphasised that it is always imbued with power relations (Jackson 1997, p. 459). It should be noted that the ambition of feminist pedagogues is significantly broader than merely changing the content of the lessons taught in school. Most of them advocate a radically different approach to education, for instance, one that blurs the teacher/student categories and values mutual development instead of competition, or one that promotes interdisciplinarity and team teaching. Yet the aspect of feminist pedagogy of most concern here is their critique of the supposed neutrality of “man made” knowledge (Spender 1980) and the corollary argument that “many of the legitimate meanings of our culture are false and misrepresentative” (ibid., p. 58). This argument is particularly relevant in the French context where the content of public education is conceived and celebrated as “universal”, yet “the universal is merely a half-universal” (Wieviorka 2004, p. 4); the criticism is here circumscribed to gender, but would be even more relevant from an intersectional perspective.

The Case: La place des femmes dans l’histoire and the Education Nationale

How can the contribution of gender/women’s history and the principles of feminist pedagogy reach the classroom in an educational system largely impermeable to gender-related matters? This is ultimately the question asked by the present book. It is also the starting point for the writing of LPFH, which makes this manual particularly fit as the object of the present case study.

The book, whose title translates to “The role of women in history: A diverse history” (although “diverse” is only the closest and imperfect translation of the French word “mixte”) is a history textbook centred on women and gender. As earlier noted, this book was produced by the association Mnémosyne and its publication has to be understood in relation to the historical development of the academic disciplines of gender/women’s history in France: t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. A Story of Individuals and Institutions, Lessons from Institutionalism
• 3. A Story of Translations and Materiality, Lessons from Actor-Network Theory
• 4. Conclusion
• Back Matter