In a 1900 article in the widely read Grande revue, French sociologist Gabriel Tarde wrote that the capacity to shape others' thinking -what he termed "[l']aptitude à exercer l'action inter-spirituelle" -depended the most on two factors: age and sex. A change had taken place since ancient times when the elderly had held the most power to influence. In Tarde's Europe, this aptitude was more likely to be found in the middle-aged: "l'âge mûr, sans nul doute, ... est réputé le plus autorisé, le

more »

... eur conseiller." Women were more often subject to men's influence than the other way around, although Tarde acknowledged historical and national variations in degree, sometimes with significant effects: "Au XVIII e siècle français, où, dans les classes aristocratiques..., la femme a été moins suggestible et plus suggestive que jamais, cette féminisation relative des esprits s'est traduite par une transformation des idées et des moeurs qui a eu des conséquences infinies." But the gender hierarchy had never in his view been entirely overturned. 1 Although Tarde may have been right in correlating age and the power to shape others' opinions, by the time he wrote his essay women in France had actually started to acquire expertise that -when reinforced by traditional feminine attributes such as femininity and motherliness -would endow them with a gender-specific authority to which men completely lacked access. This article analyses the emergence of such womanly expertise in Belle Époque France as a social and cultural process conditioned both by structural changes in the French public sphere and by transnational influences. We will first examine how the gradual politicisation of issues arising from evolving perceptions of gender difference and relations and from women's entry into the professions contributed to the emergence of a kind of "feminine" expertise in the late nineteenth century. The next section will demonstrate how French women experts' participation in transnational networks both built on and reinforced their authority at home. Finally we will discuss the transformation of womanly expertise into a broader, yet still gender-specific form of public authority. It is my contention that certain French women, despite their marginal political status, were able to convert this gender-specific authority into a political resource they could use to shape opinions, policies, and institutions on the eve of World War I and beyond.