The enfranchisement of women in Charles de Gaulle’s France in 1944 is considered a potent element in the nation’s self-crafted, triumphant World War Two narrative: the French, conquered by the ...Germans, valiantly resisted until they rescued themselves and built a new democracy, honoring France’s longstanding liberal traditions. Kelly Ricciardi Colvin’s Gender and French Identity after the Second World War, 1944-1954 calls that potent element into question. By analyzing a range of sources, including women’s magazines, trials, memoirs, and spy novels, this book explores the ways in which culture was used to limit the power of the female vote. It exposes a wide network of constructed behavioral norms that supported a conservative vision of French identity. Taken together, they depicted men as virile Resistors for French democracy and history, and women as solely domestic support. Indeed Colvin shows that women’s access to the vote emerged alongside an explosion of cultural messages that encouraged them to retreat into the home, to find mates, to have ‘millions of beautiful babies’, in the words of de Gaulle, and not to challenge patriarchy in any way. This is a vital study for understanding the nature of postwar France and women’s history in 20th-century Europe
This article examines the relationships among female respectability, aesthetics, and national belonging in the wake of World War II. This was a time of tumult, and the French sought order through ...conformity. This conformity had much to do with conservative gender roles. The article analyzes images of female beauty and love in the feminine press. A complex reading of these images reveals an intriguing subtext: a woman needed to conform to certain images of respectable femininity, which included a properly feminine appearance and, perhaps most important, a satisfied man at her side. Articles in women's magazines warned that a woman's failure to conform to such standards would result in ostracism and a lifetime of loneliness. This article posits that establishing these strict guidelines for women was crucial to reinstating a sense of male virility and control in France after the chaos of war.
In 1971, Cynthia Proulx and Ian Keown, an Anglo-American couple, the male half of which was a famous and prolific travel writer, published a book entitled A Guide to France for Loving Couples. The ...stated purpose of the book was to show amorous travellers the places in France where they could best explore their romantic, sexual sides. They suggestively contextualized the book, writing, “As Diane de Poitiers herself the infamous mistress of Henri IV was heard to murmur, it isn’t what you do that counts. It’s with whom you do it. And how well. Whatever it is you love doing
Air France created the position of air hostess not just to further the company’s interests but to reflect well upon the industry and the nation as a whole. Attractive and cultured women were thus ...recruited to fulfil these objectives. As such, air hostesses quickly found themselves working in a variety of capacities, as ambassadors of French genius in whatever form it took.
Technology, intellectual innovation, and the arts were only a few of the fields where hostesses stood at the foreground of Gallic ingenuity. As this chapter will show, hostesses were present at all types of events, whether they were
On 15 April 1946, Air France’s first air hostesses took to the skies, launching, according to the major newspaper Le Figaro, a new “revolution in the heavens.”¹ Before 1946, Air France employed male ...stewards in airplane cabins, and their job, according to one former hostess, was to sell as much alcohol as possible to passengers, many of whom would turn to drink to take their minds off of the considerable perils of early air travel.² At the end of the war, the French government viewed aviation as a realm in which they could imitate American companies’ practices as well as
The postwar construction of French women as singularly welcoming, beautiful, elegant, and sexy may have found amplification in the halls of the French government’s aviation ministry through its ...promotion of air hostesses, but it quickly and profoundly expanded outward. The idealized narrative of a beautiful French woman as hostess was deployed by government officials to attract tourists and money to a nation struggling to rebuild its economy, infrastructure, and prestige at the end of the Second World War. In order for the narrative to be take hold, it needed to be as appealing as possible, and its targeted audience –
When major events of the postwar decades drew the world’s eyes toward France, the French, usually under the auspices of the French government, consciously put forth their women to capture, maximize, ...and monetize that global gaze. French officials had many moments to capitalize on global attention; this chapter explores two one-off events: the 1958 Brussels World Exposition and the 1968 Grenoble Olympic Games. At each of these international gatherings, various industries, in the case of Brussels, and even the government itself, in the case of both, carefully chose a specific type of woman to front their entire operations, to the
Women were enfranchised in France in 1944, a generation after most western countries and in the context of great tumult at the end of WWII. Given this, it is fair to wonder if this represented ...possible gender equality. The article asks whether enfranchisement was “liberating” for French women. In response, it takes a wide look at the culture of postwar France—specifically emphasizing women’s magazines. A deep reading of these magazines reveals a message of anti-solidarity, that women could not trust each other. This theme echoes those of other publications, in which commentators feared the influence women would have if they banded together. An examination of culture and gender ultimately reveals that Charles de Gaulle’s granting of the vote was not intended to revolutionize women’s roles in France. Rather he and other politicians desired to bring France in line with the other Great Powers in the West and justify France’s presence as an important nation.
