When the Child is the Father of the Man: Work, Sexual Difference and the Guardian-State in Third Republic France

The case of the Ecole d'Yzeure, a state vocational school founded in 1887 for the training of female wards of the state, is used to explore the role of gender & gender identities both in representations of "the state" & the substance of social policy under the early Third Republic in France. State representatives drew on broad representations of the state & its relationship to the populace, which universalized male identities & suppressed feminine specificity, to conceive programs of assistance for abandoned or endangered children at the end of the nineteenth century. By the mid-twentieth century, the Ecole d'Yzeure disappeared from both the institutional infrastrucure & the historical memory of public assistance in France. It is argued that the failed experiment of the Ecole d'Yzeure & the unresolved narration of its fate in the twentieth century suggests that, for those charged with representing the state, either as administrators or as historians, the issue of training skilled female workers shut down the dominant frame of reference for understanding public assistance to children in general terms. Further, the Ecole d'Yzeure represented the breach of the Third Republic's historical sensibilities, interjecting "woman worker" into a paradigm that consistently grounded its images of the past & the future in universalized masculine terms.