French historians gloss over women in the school textbooks

French women might not get fat, but they do get ignored.

Of the 339 historical figures in new French high school textbooks, 11 are women, a new study by a French feminist organization reports.

Of those 11, beheaded Queen Marie Antoinette is represented only with a caricature, no text and contemporary politicians Segolene Royal and Angela Merkel are cutlines.

Emilie du Chatelet, whom biographers call a “daring genius of the Enlightenment,” is referred to as philosopher Voltaire’s girlfriend.

“For us, it was also unbelievable,” centre director Claudine Baudino told the Star.

Their own namesake, leading suffragette Hubertine Auclert, is overlooked. Indeed, the universal suffrage movement is painted in French textbooks as an anomaly rather than a movement, the study said.

“There is a little progress, but very little,” said Baudino, whose centre has evaluated previous editions of history textbooks. “Women of science are beginning to be in the books.

Baudino, who was in Ottawa last July for a women’s congress, looked across the Atlantic with envy.

“Canadian people have a very particular way of telling history, including all the people who are part of your nation. Canadian people are more sensible. They can rewrite history more than French people do, for everyone in Canada not just women.”

A 1992 Canadian study of the portrayal of women in classroom textbooks found women largely marginalized or trivialized.

The current Ontario high school history curricula, however, specifically require figures such as Nellie McClung, Therese Casgrain, Rosemary Brown, Louise Arbour, Roberta Bondar and Emily Murphy and the Famous Five to be taught in their context.

“Canada is more advanced than us,” said Amandine Berton-Schmitt, education director of the Centre Hubertine Auclert.

In France, rejecting the masculine culture is still unknown, she said. Even the president, Nicolas Sarkozy, buys into the culture.

The centre has sent the study to textbook publishers and high schools, but Baudino acknowledges it is almost impossible to get publishers to “start from scratch.”

Fictional women who represent liberty, such as Marianne, fare far better than real women, the study found.

Beyond caricatures of Marie Antoinette, the woman most often written about in French textbooks is Olympe de Gouge, an 18th century playwright and human rights activist who wrote The Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen in 1791.

She was beheaded during the French Revolution after attacking the revolutionists for ignoring the rights of women.

Origin
Source: Toronto Star