Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction
- Part 1 Defining a feminine sphere of action, 1830-1914
- Part 2 Steps toward equality: women's administrative careers since the First World War
- Introduction: The First World War: a “1789” for women?
- 5 New opportunities for women in central government offices, 1919-1929
- 6 The challenges of the 1930s for women civil servants
- 7 Gendered assignments in the interwar Labor, Health, and Education ministries
- 8 Firings and hirings, collaboration and resistance: women civil servants and the Second World War
- 9 After the pioneers: women administrators since 1945
- Select bibliography
- Index
6 - The challenges of the 1930s for women civil servants
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 August 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction
- Part 1 Defining a feminine sphere of action, 1830-1914
- Part 2 Steps toward equality: women's administrative careers since the First World War
- Introduction: The First World War: a “1789” for women?
- 5 New opportunities for women in central government offices, 1919-1929
- 6 The challenges of the 1930s for women civil servants
- 7 Gendered assignments in the interwar Labor, Health, and Education ministries
- 8 Firings and hirings, collaboration and resistance: women civil servants and the Second World War
- 9 After the pioneers: women administrators since 1945
- Select bibliography
- Index
Summary
Women, indeed, cannot accept any fixing of quotas, because they are entitled to be treated on a footing of equality with male colleagues and would not accept any limit to their desire to compete other than that determined by the intellectual value and professional competence of candidates.
Cécile Brunschvicg (1934)New quotas on the hiring of women rédacteurs were not the only threat to women civil servants' livelihoods and ambitions once France felt the impact of the Great Depression during the 1930s. Mounting unemployment or underemployment injected new urgency into the continuing postwar debate about women's societal roles and fueled calls for married women's departure from the workplace. Until 1932 France escaped the full brunt of the international economic downturn touched off by the New York stock-market crash in October 1929, but reduced demand for French exports diminished trade well before unemployment became a major problem. Increasingly short-lived cabinets soon had to reckon with declining tax revenues – 22 percent lower in 1935 than in 1930 – and, to balance budgets, adopted cost-cutting measures which affected the civil service. Radical republican Edouard Herriot, leader of the center-left coalition victorious in the 1932 elections, reduced purchasing of supplies, left vacant posts unfilled, and delayed promotions. His successor, Joseph Paul-Boncour, suspended all national civil service recruiting for 1933 but allowed some exceptions. Edouard Daladier's government imposed the first pay cuts, on a graduated basis, in 1933.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Rise of Professional Women in FranceGender and Public Administration since 1830, pp. 171 - 206Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2000