Students at the Ecole des Chartes

The first female Chartists in preservation and documentation training

Abstract

As part of a research on the female pioneers of information and documentation training, this paper investigates the first female students of the École des Chartes in order to understand the construction and evolution of library, documentation and archive professions with the gender prism. It analyses Chartists students’ academic and career paths, school hierarchy relationships, promotion class colleagues, internships and employments within the sociological and political contextualisation of the two great wars, but also the social origins and trajectories of emancipation, which allows the progressive construction of how to think documentation, in the lineage of the trainings offered by Suzanne Briet at the National Library and by Louise–Noelle Malclès at the Sorbonne Library. Between tensions, opposition and appropriation, how these women indorse a profession, that was, till the post–war years, denigrated as “feminine”, by becoming librarians and curators, when men have still the privilege of the archive world.