Monsters, New Women and Lady Professors: A Centenary Look Back at Gabrielle Réval

In the early 1900s Gabrielle Réval wrote several semi-autobiographical best-sellers about the first graduates of the Ecole normale secondaire de jeunes filles. Participating in a major shift in educational institutions and middle-class images of femininity, these pioneering women professors struggled for accep-tance in a society that feared and abhorred them. They also contended with the Third Republic's desires to contain many unintended consequences resulting from this educational innovation. Réval's inside views of the private and professional lives of these "new women" throw a stark light on the paradoxes and contradictions upon which the Third Republic's experiment in women's education was founded. (GvS)