Question

Diary writing about cultural and programmes in your school

Answer 1

Schools, Discipline and Community:
diary-writing and schoolgirl culture in
late nineteenth-century France
REBECCA ROGERS
University of Iowa, USA
ABSTRACT This article uses the case-study of one French boarding school in
the nineteenth century to explore the characteristics of schoolgirl culture.
Beginning with an analysis of the multiple effects of constant discipline within
the school, the author argues for the existence of rules that sought to
develop a sense of moral community among students. The teachers used the
ideal of community to transmit feminine but not necessarily domestic values,
particularly the virtues of obedience, selflessness and interdependence. But
students did not passively absorb these institutional messages. The existence
of a student diary, written from 1875 to 1881, allows the author to explore
how students absorbed, transformed and challenged both the implicit and
explicit messages within schools. The very act of writing her daily life allowed
the diary writer, Eugénie Servant, to structure her sense of feminine identity.
While Eugénie posed no radical challenge to the prevailing domestic ideology
communicated within her school, through her writing, she reworked cultural
messages to highlight her own special gifts. This case-study offers an insight,
then, into how individuals could refashion the parameters of school life,
allowing forms of autonomy that raise questions about the realities of French
bourgeois domestic life.
Raising a girl is like raising society itself. Society stems from the family,
whose essential harmony resides in woman. Raising a girl is a sublime
and disinterested task ... She is the flame of love, the flame of the
home. She is the cradle of the future, she is the school, the other
cradle. In one word – she is the altar. (Michelet [1])
We will teach students everything that may be necessary for the mother
of a family so she can run her household ... (Rule-book for a school of
the Legion of Honor, 1816).
Michelet’s romantic and lyrical understanding of women’s role in French
society was widely shared in the nineteenth century. Women were seen, in a
sense, as both the receptacles and transmitters of French culture, values and
morals. But for mothers to educate future generations they needed