Jo Burr Margadant – författare

"The New Biography" looks at the life stories of eight famous women in nineteenth-century France who became public figures even though they lived in a society that did not encourage women to speak out publicly. All of these women - activists, writers, and philosophers - became controversial figures who challenged conventional notions of femininity in their time. By showing how these women deliberately created their public lives, Jo Burr Margadant and her colleagues demonstrate the rich rewards of the new methods in biography. In her introduction Margadant gives a brilliant explanation of the new biography and how it fits into recent and current debates about the writing of history. Each essay that follows connects the lives of the women it discusses with major themes in French history. The famous activist Flora Tristan, the feminist journalist Marguerite Durand, and a leading advocate of birth control, Nelly Roussell, are just a few of the fascinating women brought to life in this book.Because these stories often expose the cracks in what has been seen as a monolithic separation of gendered spheres in nineteenth-century bourgeois France, they challenge historians to rethink assumptions about the history of this period. "The New Biography" thus joins a body of work that brings women from the margins of the historical record into history's mainstream.

A collective biography of France's first generation of female secondary schoolteachers, this book examines the conflict between their public and private lives and places their new professional standing wtihin the political culture of the Third Republic. Jo Burr Margadant charts the responses of women who attended the nornmal school of Sevres during the 1880s to their roles as teachers and subordinates in the public school system, their plight as outsiders in the social community, and their gains toward educational reforms. These women emerge as pioneers struggling to forge careers in an elite profession, which was separate and inferior to its male equivalent and also controlled by men.Margadant explains that the first women teacher in girls' colleges and lycees were expected to project an intellectually assertive presence in the classroom while maintaining a maternal solicitude toward students and a modest, self-effacing style with superiors. Many who succeeded progressed to administrative jobs and, in some cases, filled official posts left vacant by men during the First World War. The author shows how these achievements led to the transformations of girls' secondary schools into replicas of those for boys and to equal treatment for women and men in the teaching profession.Jo Burr Margadant is Lecturer in History at Santa Clara University.Originally published in 1990.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.