Michelle Perrot

Perrot, Michelle (b. 1928). French historian. Her intellectual itinerary (see M. Agulhon (ed.), Ego Histoire, 1986) reflects that of a generation of postwar academics. Starting from a position of left-wing Catholicism, she has recognized the successive influences of Marxism, the May 1968 movement, Foucault, and feminism on her historical writing. Her early work anatomized strike movements in 19th-c. France (Les Ouvriers en grève, 1974) and the nature of incarceration. In the 1980s, she became the best-known French representative of women's history, with a series of influential essays. She edited the 19th-c. volume of Histoire de la vie privée (1988), and was general editor and prime mover of the multi-volume Histoire des femmes (1990-2). While always maintaining a sense of the concreteness of lived experience, she has been a key influence over a younger generation of theorists of gender and history.

[Sian Reynolds]