Abstract

French female teachers seek to work at the first years of schooling and express an overwhelming preference for the nursery school. This longstanding gendered division of social roles in schools presents no sign of abating. We will explore here the underlying mechanisms of this conservative inertia. Women’s preference for nursery schools will be addressed on the basis of “care” having become the norm in French schools and professional roles and teaching jobs being ascribed along a gendered hierarchy of teaching jobs.

We will then focus on the hurdles young women face when they enter the teaching profession and how balancing work and family is tantamount to “squaring the circle”. We will look at the family environment in order to substantiate the pressure exerted on women so that they “put family first”. Finally, we will explore how women try to solve this normative dilemma linked to their working lives. We will analyze the mechanisms that underlie their choices in the context of the general hostility of the world of work and the internal institutional mechanisms that operate in schools.

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