| The dissertation is a study of the female teaching congregations found in France between 1600 and 1720. The foci of the study are the evolution of active congregations for women and the development of a method and rationale for childhood education. The subject was explored through the archival resources of one department (Seine): the documents from Paris deposited in the Archives Nationales. Contemporary printed materials were used to study the other congregations of the realm and establish a periodization. The emphases are on the changing perceptions of the roles of women and children in society, and on the development of rehabilitative institutions and a rationale justifying their efficacy.;The female teaching congregations evolved in three stages. The first generation comprised religious orders modeled on the Jesuits. They catered to elite girls, whom they received in cloistered boarding schools for a simple vernacular curriculum. The orders violated canon law and would not have prevailed without the support of the reformers known as the Saints. The teaching congregation was modified after 1630 when a group of Parisian reformers, the devots, adapted it for their campaign to moralize society. The devots created institutions for the moral training and rehabilitation of commoner girls, and proposed that girls of all ranks be educated to secure the moral reform of society. The religious order was inadequate to the task, and the flexible secular congregation was invented. After 1650 the devots turned to the problem of poverty and established numerous charitable congregations; the third-generation congregations were founded to promote the economic and moral rehabilitation of females of the indigent classes.;One consequence was the moral rehabilitation of women. Old notions of female lasciviousness were discarded and a new theory advanced: women were the moral equals of men and naturally fitted for the education of the young and the moral management of the domestic sphere.;The underlying assumptions of the educational movement were the plasticity of the child, the determining influence of environment in shaping adult character, and the efficacy of rationally constructed institutions to create good adults. During the last decades of the century the devot, Francois de Fenelon, reduced these assumptions to formal order, and assimilated them to a new politique which required the state to promote the material and moral welfare of its members. Thus the devot movement represents an indigenous foundation for the French Enlightenment faith in the reformability of human character and social institutions.;The origins of the congregations lay in the ancient tradition of monasticism. It offered females the only autonomous institutional structure of the pre-modern period, and it represented a living tradition of character reform. During the Reformation, the new, child-centered pedagogy of the Humanists were grafted onto the monastic tradition with the formation of the male teaching orders. The impetus to adapt the teaching order to females came from the competitive religious situation which prevailed in France after 1598. |
