Search

This paper examines sexual relationships between European women and Moroccan men during the French protectorate in Morocco in the early twentieth century. These relationships were forbidden and often resulted in calls for expulsion as the women engaged in them were considered 'dangerous for public safety'. The Moroccan men faced no such consequences due to French racial attitudes. Many of the women engaged in these relationships were married to French men who were responsible for managing the French imperial presence, either in the military or as fonctionnaires. Through correspondence sent from these women to their lovers, held within governmental reports on eighty‐three individual cases, this paper examines attitudes towards these sexual relationships as well as the experience of those engaged in them. These relationships were considered to reverse the well‐established function of imperial power through male sexual domination of 'colonised' women. Many Moroccan men may have been drawn to such relationships for this reason. Additionally, highlighting the role of female sexual desire demonstrates how the gendered hierarchies within the relationships themselves threatened imperial racial hierarchies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the intersectional origins of the Mouvement de libération des femmes (MLF) in France through analysis of one of its founding groups: Féminin, Masculin, Avenir (FMA). Complicating historiographical perceptions that the feminist revival of 1970 largely resulted from the revolutionary activity of May 1968 in France, this article argues that Women's Liberation also sprung from a transnational, multi‐issue activist network that predated the events of that year. FMA, though statistically insignificant in the vast arena of late‐1960s activism, boasted a disproportionately influential share of MLF activists who would go on to shape the principle theories of Women's Liberation in France. Their engagement with anti‐colonialism, Black liberation and Marxism facilitated their feminist activism, sharpened their theories of oppression and provided them with models of successful identity‐based social movements. FMA explored the intersections of race, class and gender before eventually abandoning these intersections in the name of 'women' as a class. This turn away from solidarity with anti‐racist and anti‐colonial movements in the name of feminism shaped the priorities of Women's Liberation for years to come. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bourgeois women in nineteenth-century France were timekeepers for their families. They marked time off in their diaries and spent time with family and friends; working; directing servants and running the home. In each of these activities they showed awareness of time as a precious commodity, in keeping with the values of efficiency and economy of their social class. Yet most research on time and timekeeping assumes that time in the nineteenth century was uniform and mechanical and does so by largely ignoring women and the domestic environment. This paper looks at women’s diaries, clock and watch ownership and cookery and domestic advice manuals to argue that women operated on a range of timescales, both linear and cyclical. In arguing that women moved between public and private roles and thought about the seasons while also watching the clock, this paper seeks to widen the definition of modern temporality by arguing that women’s experience needs to be taken into account in order to understand how complex people’s experience of time continued to be in nineteenth-century France. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates why royalist popular culture in the immediate aftermath of the Napoleonic wars often depicted young mothers anxious for peace. Such representations reflected the brutality of the wars, women's relative prominence in anti-conscription resistance and a cultural shift from revolutionary injunctions to wives and mothers to sacrifice their menfolk for the good of the nation to Napoleonic images of women as tremulous counterparts to virile soldiers. But the image of peace-loving mothers in 1814 and 1815 was not simply a response to the devastation of war or a continuation of Napoleonic gender roles. Instead, it served distinctive purposes in a period of peace-making and political transition, which entailed not only disentangling masculinity from martial valour but also strategically invoking feminine anguish or joy. The focus on Louis XVIII's role in rescuing mothers helped legitimise an unpopular monarch, who had gained power only with the help of foreign armies, and was returning to a country that had executed its last king. The image of grateful women and happy families also deflected attention away from contemporary problems - including the difficult return of veterans to a defeated country and the lasting grief of those who had lost loved ones in war - by focusing on the joy of mothers whose sons would remain safely home. This article draws on two different bodies of scholarship, rarely considered together - the growing literature on the history of emotion in the era of the French Revolution and studies of gender and war in the twentieth century, especially the First World War - and uses a variety of sources, from recruitment propaganda to songs, to show the specific ways gendered and emotional images could be deployed at transitional moments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]