History

Andrea Mansker

Associate Professor of History

B.A., California State University; M.A., Ph.D., University of California

Mansker offers courses on European cultural and intellectual history, revolutionary Europe and the Atlantic world, modern France, and the history of women, gender, sexuality, and crime.

Her book Sex, Honor and Citizenship in Early Third Republic France will be released on Palgrave Macmillan in October 2011. This monograph repositions French women's struggle for suffrage within a prewar public culture that celebrated male dueling and dictated the proper social and sexual forms of manly comportment. It argues that women appropriated this exclusionary masculine honor code to formulate a powerful political critique of the family and to create civic spaces where "honor had no sex." Mansker received a John B. Stephenson fellowship from the Appalachian College Association to complete this project.

She has recently contributed to a book entitled Confronting Modernity in Fin-de-Siècle France: Bodies, Minds, and Gender, edited by Christopher Forth and Elinor Accampo, which was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2010. Her article “Vive ‘Mademoiselle!’ The Politics of Singleness in Early Twentieth-Century French Feminism" won Feminist Studies’ 2007 Award for best article by a graduate student.

Her next project investigates the business of marriage in modern France. It tracks the variety of cottage industries that sprang up during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in response to changing marriage and divorce laws. This manuscript analyzes matrimonial brokers, personal ads, the rise of the wedding industry, and the connections of these developments to French anxieties about the family and global sex trafficking. It posits that the marriage business embodied evolving political and commercial responses to a national identity crisis by the turn of the twentieth century.