Reading and Intellectual Engagement

     In the United States, when someone asks me what I study, and I say "eighteenth and nineteenth century French history," I usually expect a disinterested response.  Sometimes, people are puzzled ("Why?"), equally often, they are actively dismissive ("Yuck.").   Here, people are far more interested.  One might think that it's the difference between working on French and American history, but for the fact that, in the United States, the aforementioned "Yuck" often includes a phrase like "I hate history," with no qualifier for the type of history being studied.
   I was reminded of this difference by a conversation with a neighbor yesterday.  She is an older woman, who has raised all of her children and is now widowed and lives alone, though her daughter and grandchildren live in Lyon.  We run into each other from time to time, especially waiting for the bus, and she always makes an effort to have a conversation with me.  Yesterday, our conversation centered on my research interests (which include motherhood and parenting) as well as her perceptions of local contemporary breastfeeding practices and we had quite a nice conversation about her interest in the topic.  She told me about some books she has read about the history of motherhood and parenting, and she really wanted to remember the author of one of the books because she was certain that I would find it of interest.  Right before my stop, she remembered the author that she was trying to recall -- and it was Elisabeth Badinter, a woman whose work is both academic and political, very engaged with the currents of the conversation that we were having.
    This type of conversation, with someone who is interested, well-read, and engaged, seems to me to be more likely in France than in the United States.  Here, I see people on their way to work reading difficult sociological texts and novels -- not 50 Shades of Grey but real, serious novels -- in the hands of a significant number of people on the train or bus.  Intellectual inquiry is taken seriously in a mainstream way that it isn't in the United States.

French Academia, Gender, and Religion

   I'm a cultural historian of France.  The questions that interest me have traditionally been ones about gender and family life, which is reflected in my training and in my research.  I had somehow internalized the idea that "gender as a useful category of analysis" (a phrase popularized by historian Joan Scott before I even thought of graduate study) was common in France as well as the United States.  Certainly, at conferences, I encounter French colleagues who study women's history and questions of gender.  It's rarely been suggested to me -- and never, in my memory, by a colleague in French history -- that studying gender is illegitimate or worthless, though I do sometimes see it as less mainstream than other types of history.
   Imagine my surprise, then, when a colleague in France told me that she believed that gender was generally not a well-accepted field of study here; that it was marginal and a field in which it would be difficult to find a job.  She said there was less research support, fewer institutes, and that it was more politically-charged than in the U.S. (She paired this with an observation that the history of religion is a "dusty" field, one that is seen as old-fashioned or boring.  Apparently, a history of religious women is both old-fashioned *and* marginal!)
   My first reaction was that this is, quite frankly, not the case in the United States.  I'm sure most women's historians have stories about the colleagues who don't take them seriously or who denigrate their research concerns, but the fact is, a research emphasis on women, gender, or sexuality is not going to be a death knell for a job application.  I've had supportive colleagues who are interested in my work, and there are plenty of institutes devoted to research on related issues.
   And then my second reaction was to remember that the Woodrow Wilson Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship in Women's Studies has been suspended for this year.  I hope that isn't indicative of a trend in the wrong direction!