Tyler Stovall,
"The New Woman and the New Empire: Josephine Baker and Changing Views of Femininity in Interwar France"
(page 2 of 7)
The New Woman and New Views of Empire in Interwar France
The rise of the New Woman as a social and cultural trope in interwar
France was intimately linked to the gender dislocations caused by the
First World War. Most significantly, the war produced a tremendous
gender imbalance by killing over 1 million Frenchmen and disabling many
more.[5]
People spoke of the "man shortage" after the war, and cultural
commentators poured forth reams of advice for young woman on the best
ways to secure a husband in such a competitive market.[6]
At the same
time, the war had spurred the entry of young women into jobs previously
reserved for men. Although the nation quickly dispensed with the female
subway car conductors and steelworkers after the Armistice, it soon
became acceptable for young, unmarried, middle-class women to work as
clerks, typists, and salesgirls, and even to live away from their
parents' homes.[7]
Finally, the idea of the New Woman also became a
fashion statement. Wartime shortages of cloth and the dangers of working
in factories surrounded by heavy machinery discouraged the kind of
voluminous dresses that dominated prewar women's fashions. In the early
1920s, designer Coco Chanel pioneered the new look in women's clothing:
short skirts, collars, short hair, and a minimalist waist and bust.
Imitating both masculine fashion and Cubist mechanical aesthetics, this
new fashion look became the sine qua non of the modern young
Parisienne.[8]
Thus was born la garçonne, the bachelor girl, whose outer
appearance supposedly mirrored a new social and sexual daring and
independence. According to popular stereotypes, the woman who cut her
hair short also worked outside the home and earned her own money, which
she often used to support an extravagant, dissolute lifestyle that
included drink, drugs, jazz, and sexual experimentation.[9] She
represented the refusal of youth in general to return to prewar social
norms, and the widespread desire to enjoy life to the fullest while one
still could. The bachelor girl also represented a blurring of gender
roles that graphically illustrated the war's destruction of tradition
and the cultural anxieties of the 1920s. Both the greater freedom and
the greater uncertainties of the interwar years became encapsulated in
the bachelor girl, the ultimate symbol of the modern age.
Yet the specter of the New Woman was more a cultural fear than a
social reality. While fashions certainly changed after the war, most
young middle-class Frenchwomen continued to live lives rigidly
circumscribed by propriety and tradition. Simone de Beauvoir, who grew
up in Paris during the 1920s, tellingly titled her autobiography
Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter.[10]
The garçonne may not
have existed in large numbers, but she provoked a great deal of worried
commentary from social and political authorities in France. As one
Parisian law student wrote in 1925, "These beings—without breasts,
without hips, without 'underwear,' who smoke, work, argue and fight
exactly like boys, and who, during the night at the Bois de Boulogne,
with their heads swimming under several cocktails, seek out savory and
acrobatic pleasures on the plush seats of 5 horsepower Citröens—these
aren't young girls! There aren't any more young girls!" (cited in
Roberts, 20).[11]
Many in France felt that the victory in the war should
be complemented by a renewed emphasis on domesticity and traditional
gender roles; as a consequence, France became one of the very few
Western nations to deny women the vote after 1918.
In 1922, Victor Margueritte published his novel La garçonne,
which chronicled the life and adventures of its heroine, Monique
Lerbier.[12]
In the novel Lerbier rejects her bourgeois provincial family
and flees to Paris to lead a dissolute life that includes drug and
alcohol abuse, sex with both men and women, and dancing the night away
in jazz clubs. The archbishop of Paris denounced the novel, which was
formally banned by the French government. This, of course, made it more
popular than ever; the novel sold over 1 million copies by the end of
the 1920s. If the novel shocked and titillated Parisians, the exploits
of a real live bachelor girl ten years later horrified them. In 1931 a
Parisian teenager named Violette Nozières poisoned her parents, having
been abused by her father. She then stole 1,500 francs from them and
fled to Montmartre, where she spent a week hanging out in the clubs and
living with a variety of men. When apprehended, she demonstrated
absolutely no remorse, claimed her right to live her own life, and was
nearly lynched by a mob on her way to court.[13]
Both Lerbier and
Nozières represented the garçonne as decadent and ultimately a
danger to society and the family.
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