The New Woman and the New Empire:
Josephine Baker and Changing Views of Femininity in Interwar France

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.¹ 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.²

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.³

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).

1. Schneider, op. cit.; Elisa Camiscioli, “Reproducing the French Race: Immigration, Reproduction, and National Identity in France, 1900-1939,” PhD dissertation, University of Chicago, 2000. [↩]
2. France Renucci, Souvenirs de femmes au temps des colonies (Paris: Balland, 1988); Yvonne Knibiehler and Régine Goutalier, La femme au temps des colonies (Paris: Stock, 1985); Tyler Stovall, “Love, Labor, and Race: Colonial Men and White Women in France during the Great War.” In Tyler Stovall and Georges Van Den Abbeele, French Civilization and Its Discontents: Nationalism, Colonialism, Race (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2003). [↩]
3. On the question of colonial miscegenation, see Conklin, op. cit.; Conklin, “Redefining ‘Frenchness’: Citizenship, Race Regeneration, and Imperial Motherhood in France and West Africa,” in Julia Clancy-Smith and Frances Gouda, eds, Domesticating the Empire: Race, Gender, and Family Life in French and Dutch Colonialism (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998; Robert Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race (London: Routledge, 1991); Ann L. Stoler, “Making Empire Respectable: The Politics of Race and Sexual Morality in 20th-Century Colonial Cultures,” American Ethnologist 16, no. 4 (November 1989); Owen White, Children of the French Empire: Miscegenation and Colonial Society in French West Africa, 1895-1960 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Françoise Vergès, Monsters and Revolutionaires: Colonial Family Romance and Métissage (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999). [↩]