Women in French medicine and psychiatry in the belle époque: a feminist cause?

In France, women's relatively early admission to the medical profession (1868) and to psychiatry (1903) co-existed with a conservative gender discourse concerning women's presumed and pre-determined domestic role. The two women doctors featured in this article (both interns in psychiatry), Madeleine Pelletier and Constance Pascal, illustrate many of the constraints operating on exceptional women in the professions, but each had the capacity to exploit the opportunities for career development in the belle époque, and to negotiate the pitfalls of gender construction.