Contenu du sommaire : Travail de care

The professional work of midwives in France classically involves a subtle synthesis of cure and care, maintaining an ambiguity that forms part of their professional identity and blurs the lines of gender stereotypes. Depending on the social and political context that determines their mode of practice, these professionals have spontaneously developed strategies to balance the tensions that exist between these two poles. As a result, at times they have promoted their caring skills as an added value compared to other medical actors, while at other times they have insisted on their medical-technical expertise and their autonomy of practice, thus affirming their place in the medical and scientific world. This paper combines an approach through social sciences with 30 years' professional experience as a midwife.

Two documents are at the core of this article : a 1903 photograph in which the Malagasy “nénène” holds the youngest child of a French family and an extract from an interview with a métis woman born in 1931, recounting the relationship with her nanny. These two documents highlight the types of sources that can be used to write a history of domestic servants in Madagascar in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They also allow us to analyze the relationships of domination and affection that may have played out in the intimate relations existing between the “nénène” and family members. The interview also helps to shed light on the recruitment process, based above all on moral qualities rather than on recognized skills.

This paper analyses a report from the colonial Gold Coast Medical Department in the early 1930s. Written by the Director of the Medical and Sanitary Services, this report evokes the strong dissatisfaction first expressed by one woman doctor who had been posted to a Maternal and Child Welfare Centre, an institution devoted solely to preventive medicine and care work. Eventually this doctor was joined by many of her female colleagues, who signed a petition protesting against their systematic posting to such centres. Women doctors in the Gold Coast were protesting both against their working conditions and their salaries. More fundamentally, they broke the consensus according to which women doctors were assumed to be particularly competent and naturally drawn towards preventive medicine.

Over the last ten years, care studies in France have adopted a critical view of liberal ethics and the legitimization of social inequalities, dialoguing with American feminist theorists in this field, particularly Carol Gilligan and Joan Tronto. Focusing on the conception of an ontologically vulnerable and relational subject, this perspective on care highlights the moral and political importance of caring for others in order to preserve a shared and livable world. Transdisciplinary work has thus captured different voices, previously obscured through the workings of gender, class or race: the voices of maids, caregivers, “comfort women”, or people with disabilities. This scientific work has explored issues that the social sciences have traditionally devalued, such as maintenance, dependency, or the multiple attachments of humans to non-humans.

The beginnings of the movement for woman's emancipation in modern Greek society coincide with women's entrance to the literary scene. Greek women writers first participated in the patriotic vein that characterized Greek literature during the nineteenth century. But they gradually moved away from this genre in the 1880s, when some of them turned to fiction, allowing them to express criticism of the gender system, which also represented a shift from the narrative of national history towards that of private life. The article considers not only the entanglement of the “National Question” and the “Woman Question”, but also the relationship between Greek women writers and history writing, concluding with historiographic and epistemological reflections on the links between gender, history and literature.

This article is based on 79 biographical narratives mostly collected in Moscow, provided by men and women who finished their studies at the end of the 1980s. It queries whether macrosocial transitions can be related to biographical turning-points. To answer this question, the article analyzes sociocultural models for life-writing in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia, highlighting the transition from a largely ungendered life-writing model to a model indicating strong gender diversification. Secondly, it underlines how the experience of strict gender role division within the couple leads women to produce life-stories that stand outside of History, while men recount biographical turning-points inscribed within a narrative of historical transition.

The World Organization for Early Childhood Education (known through its French acronym OMEP) is an international non-governmental organization (NGO) created in 1948 to promote preschool education. Analysis of this transnational organization with a majority of women representatives offers an insight into the way access to transnational collaboration placed women in positions of relative inferiority. The OMEP campaigned for preschool education, a field clearly associated with women, which helped to build its legitimacy. The women who participated in the organization at international level had been able to accumulate considerable social capital, which meant their commitment came toward the end of their professional careers, or was aided by their husband's social capital. The OMEP advocated for the professionalization of early childhood care and education, and always promoted women's paid and qualified employment as a means of emancipation. The OMEP did not, however, question, the gendered roles that prevailed within the field of preschool education, and was not eager to question gendered roles in general. Thus, it cannot be regarded as a feminist organization, but it does belong to the wider social field of women's advocacy.