Reign of Virtue: Mobilizing Gender in Vichy France / Edition 2

by Miranda Pollard

Overview

In Reign of Virtue, Miranda Pollard explores the effects of military defeat and Nazi occupation on French articulations of gender in wartime France.

Drawing on governmental archives, historical texts, and propaganda, Pollard explores what most historians have ignored: the many ways in which Vichy's politicians used gendered images of work, family, and sexuality to restore and maintain political and social order. She argues that Vichy wanted to return France to an illustrious and largely mythical past of harmony, where citizens all knew their places and fulfilled their responsibilities, where order prevailed. The National Revolution, according to Pollard, replaced the ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity with work, family, and fatherland, making the acceptance of traditional masculine and feminine roles a key priority. Pollard shows how Vichy's policies promoted the family as the most important social unit of a new France and elevated married mothers to a new social status even as their educational, employment, and reproductive rights were strictly curtailed.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226673509
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	12/01/1998
Series:	Women in Culture and Society
Edition description:	1
Pages:	308
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.70(d)

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Foreword by Catharine R. Stimpson
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction
1: "We are Beaten": Women, Natalism, and Familialism from the Third Republic to Vichy
2: "The Blood Tax of Motherhood": Vichy and the Regulation of Female Sexuality
3: "To Make Men of Them"? Education for a New France
4: Vichy In/Action: Mobilizing Men and "Family"
5: "Do Not Expect Too Much from the State": Images, Words, and Action in Vichy's Welfarism
6: "In the Present Circumstances": Women's Work, Women's Dependency
7: A Story of Women? Vichy and the Politics of Abortion, 1942-44
Conclusion: The Etat Francais and the Politics of Gender
Notes
References
Index

What People are Saying About This

John Sweets

Miranda Pollard has written a well-researched and thoughtful account of the Vichy Regime's attempt to reshape the position of women in French society. She rightly argues that women have been missing too often from the existing narratives of the French experience during the Second World War.