2021
Cairn
Marianne Lemaire, « Lettres d’amour et de science : Denise Paulme en correspondance avec André Schaeffner », Clio. Femmes, Genre, Histoire, ID : 10670/1.ca8080...
From the beginning of their relationship in June 1934 until their marriage in August 1937, the French anthropologists Denise Paulme and André Schaeffner exchanged a sustained correspondence. While André Schaeffner’s letters are lost, Denise Paulme’s are an essential source shedding light on the outset of a woman’s academic career in the interwar period. They show how her fieldwork experience laid the foundation for her future legitimacy in academic life, given the centrality of such experiences in the career path of ethnologists. They also highlight how a woman at that time needed to find a way of combining her private and her scholarly life if she was to be accepted in an academic world that women were not usually expected to enter.