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]