Abstract : As part of a research on the female pioneers of information and documentation
training, this paper investigates the first female students of the École
des Chartes in order to understand the construction and evolution of library, documentation
and archive professions with the gender prism. It analyses Chartists
students’ academic and career paths, school hierarchy relationships, promotion
class colleagues, internships and employments within the sociological and political
contextualisation of the two great wars, but also the social origins and trajectories
of emancipation, which allows the progressive construction of how to think documentation,
in the lineage of the trainings offered by Suzanne Briet at the National
Library and by Louise–Noelle Malclès at the Sorbonne Library. Between tensions,
opposition and appropriation, how these women indorse a profession, that was, till
the post–war years, denigrated as “feminine”, by becoming librarians and curators,
when men have still the privilege of the archive world.