Massilia Ourabah - The Social Life of aHer story Textbook: Bridging Institutionalism and Actor-Network Theory

Cover illustration: Melisa Hasan

This Palgrave Pivot imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore

For this book, for helping me grow intellectually, for their wisdom and solicitude, I am indebted to the professors from whom I have learned so much. I wish to thank Dr. Herman Tak for his encouragement and wise advice, as well as my professors from the Research Masters Social Sciences of the University of Amsterdam: Dr. Julie McBrien for being a model of kindness in a fierce academic world and Dr. Oskar Verkaaik for putting his trust in me. Finally, I am forever grateful to Dr. Marguerite van den Berg who has done all this and more, who has guided me, shielded me from drowning in self-doubt, and without whom this book would not exist. Thank you for everything Marguerite.

Ce livre naurait pas non plus vu le jour sans la prcieuse contribution des membres de lassociation Mnmosyne et de toutes celles et ceux qui ont accept de me rencontrer, de me parler de leur travail, ou de mouvrir leur salle de classe. Cest un chantier considrable que celui de la promotion de lhistoire des femmes et du genre, merci elles dapporter leur pierre ldifice.

Enfin, ce livre doit normment celles et ceux qui ont, dune faon ou dune autre, tenu la plume avec moi. Merci Aleth et Gonzague pour leur bienveillance infinie, merci mes ami.es qui sont mes respirations Solne, Laura, Fripouille , merci ma famille, ma tante et son soutien prcieux, Yanis et Anas que jaime plus que tout, merci mes parents que jespre rendre fiers autant quils me rendent fire, enfin merci CH qui na jamais failli me soutenir, mencourager, et marracher par le rire mes rflexions sociologiques. Jespre rire encore pour des annes venir.

What images do you like best on this cover?

This one, cause I know her from TV, and that one, cause shes pretty.

High school student about the cover of the textbook

La place des femmes dans lhistoire ()

I am baffled by my own ignorance. This was my exact thought when I first heard about the procs de Bobigny. The procs de Bobigny was the trial of an underaged girl and the four women who helped her get an abortion after she had been raped in 1971 by one of her schoolmates. That trial had a crucial impact on the decriminalisation of abortion in France, and although I was born and raised in France, I had never heard about it until I was eighteen or nineteen. I remain regularly baffled whenever I encounter a historical event or personality as critical to womens history as they are unfamiliar to me. Yet I went to school, attended history classes, did my homework, and read the assigned literature. So what went wrong? Why is it that Robespierre has been part of my French Revolution imagery for so long, but Olympe de Gouges is only a recent character? My well-attended history classes had to bear some responsibility.

In 1975, the French Secretary of State for the Condition of Women Franoise Giroud commissioned a study on the representation of women in childrens textbooks. The study concluded that these texts conveyed a stereotypical image of economically unproductive women, an image that misrepresented the situation of women in the 1970s (Bousquet ).