L'organisation ménagère comme pédagogie: Paulette Bernège et la formation d'une nouvelle classe moyenne dans les années 1930 et 1940

Abstract

This article focuses on the movement for the rationalisation of the home, which developed in interwar France under the leadership of Paulette Bernège. It explores Bernège’s work as an educational project that sought to make a new middle-class woman and a new domestic environment for middle-class families. It highlights the interpenetration of the roles of rationaliser and educator, showing how Bernège drew on the pedagogical theories of the new education movement and on industrial methods, such as Taylorism and ergonomics, to shape the minds and bodies of her students. It is argued Bernège’s lessons in domestic organisation were, among other things, a means of inculcating self-discipline in those who studied them. At a secondary level, the rationalised woman and home were in turn to inculcate in their husbands and sons a disposition towards efficiency.

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