Joan Wallach Scott To Speak On French Gender Equality And The Islamic Headscarf

Joan Wallach Scott, Harold F. Linder Professor in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study, will present the lecture Cover-up: French Gender Equality and the Islamic Headscarf on Tuesday, December 5, at 4:30 p.m. in Wolfensohn Hall on the campus of the Institute.

In her talk, Professor Scott will discuss one of the justifications given for the passage of the 2004 law banning Islamic headscarves in French public schools. The lawmakers argued that they were protecting the equality of women, which they took to be a founding principle of the French republic. Her talk will critically analyze that justification, offering a more complex reading of the pressures to pass the law.

Known internationally for writings that theorize gender as an analytic category, Professor Scott is a leading figure in the emerging field of critical history. Her groundbreaking work has challenged the foundations of conventional historical practice, including the nature of historical evidence and historical experience. Her recent writings have focused on the vexed relationship of the particularity of gender to the universalizing force of democratic politics. Parité: Sexual Equality and the Crisis in French Universalism, published in 2005, looked at demands by women for equal access to political office. Her forthcoming book, from which this lecture is taken, critically examines the long-standing insistence on assimilation as the basis for integrating immigrants into French society. Among her other books are Gender and the Politics of History (1988) and Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man (1996).

Professor Scott received her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin in 1969. She was Assistant Professor at University of Illinois at Chicago Circle from 1970-72; Assistant Professor at Northwestern University from 1972-74; and Associate Professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill from 1974-77 and Professor there from 1977-80. She served as Nancy Duke Lewis University Professor and Professor of History at Brown University from 1980-85. She was the founding director of Brown’s Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women.

Professor Scott was a Member at the Institute for Advanced Study in 1978-79 and joined the Institute Faculty in 1985. She was named Harold F. Linder Professor in 2000. Among her many awards are the Herbert Baxter Adams Prize, presented by the American Historical Association (AHA) in 1974; the Joan Kelly Prize, also presented by AHA, in 1989; and the Hans Sigrist Prize of the University of Bern, Switzerland, in 1999.

For further information about this event, which is free and open to the public, please call (609) 734-8175.