This moral pedagogy put forth a delicate balance between emancipation and self government and included both feminine and masculine role models. This moral pedagogy specifically targeted the male adolescent as a liminal figure who was ostensibly "torn between passion and will and on the threshold between the family and civil society, dependence and independence" (29). For this scholar, primary education, which was free, mandatory, and secular as of the mid 1880s, served as the mill of citizenship and masculinity for its male school-aged attendees. She examines the role of figures like Ferdinand Buisson and Jules Ferry in shaping debates and policies on the education of male children as future public citizens. In Part I, Surkis illustrates how primary school reformers "sought to balance affect and reason in the moral education of the nation's popular classes" (71).
Indeed, her book is indicative of a recent turn in gender studies in which scholars have begun to examine the social construction of masculinity in its own right.
In contrast to previous research on this period in which scholars have examined gender norms and their deleterious effects for women, Jews, and homosexuals for example, Surkis provides a fresh perspective by analyzing the policies and pedagogies that specifically targeted men.
In this excellent study, Judith Surkis examines the ways in which French educators, moralists, social reformers, and theorists shaped public debates and policies on acceptable forms of male citizenship in France from the beginning of the Third Republic through World War I.
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