Women and the Language of Statistics in Late-Nineteenth-Century France - Sciences Po Access content directly
Journal Articles French Politics, Culture & Society Year : 2019

Women and the Language of Statistics in Late-Nineteenth-Century France

Rebecca Rogers

Abstract

This article considers how women adopted a "scientific" statistical language at the end of the nineteenth century to draw attention to their role in the moral and social economy. It explores in particular the messages contained in La Statistique générale de la femme française, a series of eighteen murals that the moderate feminist Marie Pégard sent for exhibition at the Woman's Building at the Chicago World's Fair in 1893. The article begins by considering the place statistics held in France in the final decades of the century within the context of universal exhibitions. It then examines Pégard's choice of quantified categories of social analysis to convey a sustained argument about the comparative weight of women in a modernizing French economy. The article seeks to understand how contemporaries read and interpreted the graphs, and how this mode of rendering visible the issue of women's work played into the politics of an emerging feminist movement.
Fichier principal
Vignette du fichier
Women and the Language of Statistics in Late-Nineteenth-Century France.pdf (184.11 Ko) Télécharger le fichier
Origin : Publisher files allowed on an open archive

Dates and versions

hal-03632496 , version 1 (06-04-2022)

Identifiers

Cite

Hélène Périvier, Rebecca Rogers. Women and the Language of Statistics in Late-Nineteenth-Century France. French Politics, Culture & Society, 2019, 37 (3), pp.1-26. ⟨10.3167/fpcs.2019.370301⟩. ⟨hal-03632496⟩
13 View
36 Download

Altmetric

Share

Gmail Facebook X LinkedIn More