When Suzanne Lacore, a retired schoolteacher in a Dordogne village, heard that Léon Blum was about to offer her a junior ministry in his government in 1936, she hastened to decline it in advance. Blum responded:

This essay will not be concerned with the women ministers of 1936, but they make a suitable starting point for asking how we can begin to assess the ‘presence’ of two sexes in France in the Popular Front period. Surprisingly often, even today, in many general histories of the French Popular Front, or indeed the Third Republic, the classic reference to Léon Blum's famous three ministers accompanies a notable absence of women from the rest of the text. Women's symbolic presence in the government, made clear in Blum's letter, remains symbolic in historical writing. The by now rather large body of writing, published or unpublished, on ‘women in the Third Republic’ still seems, however good its reputation, to be confined to a sort of ‘territory of the women's historian’, rather than integrated into ‘total history’.

The terms ‘women's history’ and ‘feminist history’ are sometimes used interchangeably, sometimes opposed to each other. Here, women's history will be taken to mean a history with women as its subject matter, feminist history one that tries to look at all history using the concepts of gender and gender relations.