The second sex in the front row

The challenge taken up by the historian Sylvie Schweitzer is substantial: summarizing in 200 pages more than two centuries of the history of gender equality in the professional and decision -making sphere on the scale of Western Europe. The bibliography used is therefore impressive and brings together work devoted to this object in French and English, under different disciplines (history, sociology, economics, anthropology, political science, etc.). In his previous work in the manifest title “ Women have always worked “, The author had already attached herself to undermining the received ideas presenting the entry of women into the labor market as a recent social fact. She returned backwards the magnitude and diversity of female work since the industrial revolution and insisted on the mechanisms manufacturing her invisibilization. It is a question here for the historian to prolong these analyzes by accentuating their comparative dimension and by being more particularly interested in the positions of power provided by the exercise of higher professions or by access to political spaces or central religious.

A history of resistance to professional equality

The history of professional equality between the sexes is considered more precisely as a long -term history of resistance to this equality, the way in which social representations of the feminine or the masculine reproduce, move or transform to justify The unbalanced and hierarchical sharing of activities between the sexes. The author chooses to insist on the main stages of this process, marked out by the lifting of legal prohibitions for access to training and then to the higher professions and prestigious positions to which they lead. Note at the outset: the bias of Sylvie Schweitzer is to insist on developments, feminist struggles, movements and malleability of sexual standards and assignments located in a changing structural context, more than on the mechanisms leading to reproduction male domination. And this attention paid to the historicity of the gender is fundamental: even when the persistence of the resistances she describes can provide in the reader a strong impression of stagnation or helplessness (quite demoralizing), the author applies to underline The major and undeniable progressions of women’s positions in these spaces, and to reveal the tricks of renewed speeches which legitimize the sidelining of women, often reducing them to their “ unsurpassable nature “, To their physiology (“ TOTAL MULIER IN UTERO »). Behind the incredible redundancy of “ ready -to -think »To differentiate the sexes to better preserve the positions of male power, the boundaries of inequalities are moving anyway.

Let us recall: in so-called old regime societies, women are very mostly excluded from knowledge and power, and this exclusion is generally not a problem as it goes without saying in a whole social order structured by the naturalization of inequalities social and sexual. The French Revolution, however, creates disorder in the justification of the sharing of economic and political power: if the boundaries between social classes appear blurred by the promises of republican egalitarianism, those separating women and men are hardened. The exclusion of women of political citizenship, the law to work, the investigation, the exercise of public functions (and for the wives of the property and management of property) is constructed and legitimized as a necessary concession has “ Nature And not as a contradiction to the universalist claims of democracy. Following other major political crises such as the revolutions of 1848, the differentiation of the feminine and the masculine moves: always excluded from political citizenship, women are recognized the monopoly of certain trades (teaching in kindergartens, care, etc. .), While the distinction public sphere – private sphere is strengthened, in particular through speeches insisting on maternity and/or the pathological weakness of women.

The slow feminization of higher professions

The author then distinguishes three major sequences during which the speeches which define the women and the places authorized to them are constantly reorganized. From the years 1860 to the 1920s, with slight temporal shifts depending on the country, higher education and some professions requiring high diplomas (medicine, bar, secondary education, labor or school inspection) open to women. As Juliette Rennes analyzed from the French republican controversy under the Third Republic, this “ History of transgressions Is complex and repetitive: taking advantage of a certain legal vacuum, a handful of women present themselves in the competitions giving access to medicine or the bar. Claiming to be republican and meritocratic values, they escape their place assigned in social order (being mothers, wives, possibly exercising “ Women’s trades ) To claim integration into officially unclean institutions. In response, the representatives of these institutions explicitly defend the non-mix of university or professional prestige in the name of the natural order of the sexes. These resistances are one to one to be reversed, and in the period which follows, between the years 1920 and 1970, women entered higher professions (magistracy, engineering, university education, high administration, etc.) in which their place remains restricted, however and disputed. Finally, in a third period, from the 1970s to the present day, the sexual division of labor was changed in depth while the “ legislative changes »Accompany this accelerated movement: professional diversity sets in all sectors, including the armies or the police studied for example by Geneviève Pruvost, while women become the majority in certain prestigious higher professions, such as medicine or magistracy, where they still come up against “ glass ceiling ». We cannot restore in detail the richness of the content of these different chapters which swarm precise and compared data on the evolution of gender standards, laws concerning family or sexuality, then on the gradual lifting of prohibitions hampering the Access to different positions of power.

The three stages of the entry of women into a profession

One of the original analyzes of Sylvie Schweitzer is to superimpose a finer chronology to this triple temporal sequence by profession which highlights the succession of three “ circles From active women, to profiles corresponding to the feminization state of the profession concerned. The first circle, that of the scouts, designates the first to open, in small numbers, the doors of a professional sector and to face violent resistances in question their very capacities to exercise this profession. In response, they most often deploy feminist attitudes and claims, “ Pioneer reflexes ». The second circle, made up of women who have gone in greater numbers within a profession, sees on the contrary their professional ethos characterized by a certain “ masculinization “: It is a question of blending into the hegemonic model and striving to descend the” female »Supposed to define them. Finally, the last circle, bringing together active women in a balanced mixed profession, is characterized by egalitarian claims and a relative misunderstanding in the face of the persistence of gendered discrimination. There is a problem of transmitting the memory of the struggles, as if collective amnesia had swept away secular and international fights that made it possible to force the ramparts of these male bastions. Some sectors have also resisted the entry of women than others: so at the start of XXI° Century, women brigging the central positions of political space are the first circle of state women, and coexist with journalists or polytechnicians of the second circle, or with doctors or lawyers of the third …

Conduct a European history in the long term of professional equality between the sexes leads Sylvie Schweitzer to favor the movements of convergence between countries, to insist on the amazing similarity of constraints weighing on the process of entry of women in professions male, to the detriment of differences or dissonances. This comparative perspective work is most often convincing and heuristic (it thus leads, on numerous occasions, to undo or relativize “ the French exception ) But necessarily arouses some questions left unanswered, on which we want to open the discussion. On the offsets in access to higher professions first: how to explain that in most countries studied, it is first of all the professions of medicine or the bar that open up to women ? The author advances hypotheses related to long expertise recognized to women in the field of care, but we would like to push more the crossing of professional representations in the process of consolidation with gender standards. On the offsets between countries then: how to explain that the important cultural, religious, social, or legal divisions of the various countries studied seem to influence only the waves of professional equality ? What role finally to grant in these processes to political crises and to the specificity of political space, which is the place of power which most clearly distinguishes European countries from the point of view of gender equality ?