Tyler Stovall,
"The New Woman and the New Empire: Josephine Baker and Changing Views of Femininity in Interwar France"
(page 4 of 7)
As the idea of the "nation of 100 million Frenchmen" demonstrated,
demographic concerns also engaged the empire. Yet colonial natives could
not really contribute to the renewal of the French race. The rise of a
new school of racist eugenics in the 1930s emphasized the natives'
inferiority and their unsuitability for the national gene pool.[24]
However, the empire did offer possibilities for the re-creation of
French family life overseas. Whereas before the war most French
residents of the colonies had been men, authorities increasingly
promoted the emigration of Frenchwomen to the empire in the interwar
years. Advances in tropical medicine and a general maturation of
colonial society made it more possible than ever to conceive of
submitting white women to the rigors of empire. The promotion of white
female settlement also involved appealing to a new kind of woman. In the
past, most Frenchwomen in the empire had been adventurers, convicts, or
camp followers of colonial regiments. The task now was to make the
colonies suitable for respectable white women, their (hopefully
numerous) white children, and white family life in general.[25]
In order to do this, it was necessary to domesticate male colonial
settlers. As the case of Paul Gauguin demonstrated most famously, the
French colonies (like the American West) had often served as a place
where young men could escape the limitations of bourgeois domesticity
and go wild in the tropics. No aspect of white colonial masculinity
received more comment or censure than sexual relations with native
women. These included not only numerous fleeting encounters but the more
stable mariage à la mode de pays, common-law marriages between
Frenchmen and black and brown women. By the interwar years, colonial
officials had concluded that all such arrangements were no longer
acceptable, and were launching ever more aggressive campaigns against
miscegenation in the colonies. French male settlers in the empire
possessed a vitality and virility essential for the well-being of the
nation. Whereas in earlier years they had served France well by
conquering new territories, now this masculinity must be harnessed to
the service of domesticity, in order to ensure the continuity of the
French race. This meant bringing more French women to the colonies. The
white female settler both rebuked and parodied the New Woman of the
1920s: like her, she dared to go where few of her sisters had gone
before, but unlike her she placed female agency at the service of
marriage and motherhood. At the same time, making France's colonies a
space for white reproduction meant getting rid of the native concubine,
who should serve the colonial white family as a domestic but not as a
sexual partner to the French male. Ending the custom of mariage à la
mode de pays would ostensibly enable the colonies to assure the very
survival of the French race and renew the vitality and fecundity that
metropolitan France had seemingly lost.[26]
This exploration of French attitudes about race and gender should
help us examine Josephine Baker's on-screen love affairs. Let us now
proceed to an analysis of her three feature films: La Sirène
des Tropiques (1927), Zou Zou (1934), and Princesse
Tam-Tam (1935).
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