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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]

The Forum’s second case study of women in learned culture focuses on their position in the gendered intellectual life of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century France. The Libres entretiens, Open Conversations, inaugurated by scholar, teacher and essayist Paul Desjardins, gave men and women of different professions, political positions, social backgrounds and religious affiliations an opportunity to meet and speak with each other about many of the most important issues of the day. Jean Elisabeth Pedersen explores their work by comparing the profiles of their most active male and female members, by analysing the transcripts of their conversations and by comparing them to a series of additional institutions of learned culture that existed in France at the same time, some of which still continue today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates Marmontel's reworking of the ancient legend of Pero and Cimone in his bestselling novel Les Incas (1777). According to an anecdote in Valerius Maximus's Memorable Doings and Sayings ( c.30 CE), Pero saves her father, condemned to death by starvation, by breastfeeding him in prison. In Les Incas, it is Bartolomé de las Casas who is being cured from a fatal illness through the milk of an Amerindian princess. Jean-Michel Moreau the Younger illustrated this lactation scene in the first edition of Marmontel's novel; his engraving inspired Louis Hersent to render the topic in oil three decades later. My article explores the ways in which French Enlightenment writers and artists employed lactation imagery to propose a utopian reform of colonial relations - the voluntary offering of America's riches to benevolent white patriarchs - at a time when the nature of government authority, paternity, maternity, race and kinship were being redefined. In 1808, Hersent's painting of 'Las Casas Cured by Savages' appears curiously anachronistic in the context of contemporary novels and paintings that portray colonial relationships as inundated by death and bloodshed. In Chateaubriand's Atala (1801), lactation imagery is employed to signify white men's necrophilic desire, genocide and loss. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the years leading up to the First World War, the Frenchwomen of a free performing-arts programme for female workers, known as the Mimi Pinsons, began to appear frequently in popular stories, articles, poems and songs as cultural shorthand for a renovated social vision of France. Founded by composer and philanthropist Gustave Charpentier in 1900, the Oeuvre de Mimi Pinson taught its worker-students elementary music, song and dance, and gradually expanded to include a charitable organisation and social network. A closer examination of the OMP reveals that its members were also used to reconcile early twentieth-century French anxieties about working-class militancy and even war by way of a potent cultural association of female sexuality, aesthetic refinement and labour. In the years before the First World War, the Mimi Pinsons were defined by journalists, government officials and the OMP's own organisers according to a formulaic type which at once modernised and constrained the role of the female Parisian worker. Associated almost exclusively with the luxury-garment trades - seamstresses, flowermakers, milliners and department-store clerks - the new Mimi Pinsons were embraced by the public as naturally chic yet diligent guardians of French art and craft. These female worker-students allowed an easy merging of the body of the female worker with particularly French notions of the patriotic responsibility of feminine taste. When the First World War came, many of the Mimi Pinsons joined the war effort as workers and nurses, yet they were embraced by the public primarily for their service as tasteful creators of patriotic decorative objects, and as an ideal symbolic figure for managing anxieties about the social dissolution that came with the war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on Inayat Khan's life and wartime achievements. It highlights the performative aspects of embodiment as a process of making and doing the work of bodies and of becoming a body in a social space. It focuses on Khan's lived experience of embodiment as an undercover agent in France and analyzes the perils and pleasures of state-sanctioned passing.

This essay is a transnational and comparative study of how gendered national stereotypes structured the experience of American women who studied in France in the 1920s and 1930s and how this cross-cultural exchange contributed to cultural internationalism. In both the French and American popular imaginations, American girls and French jeunes filles connoted opposite modern and traditional notions of femininity. In the process of negotiating these two competing identities in popular consciousness and in daily life, some American women students came to appreciate the limitations of the stereotypes, as well as more complex underlying cultural differences, notably in their encounters with French youth's heterosocial practices and with French women students. I argue that the outcome of this process included women's construction of alternative identities for themselves and a new tolerance and appreciation for cultural difference that represents a distinctive development toward cultural internationalism. This study challenges the cultural asymmetry of United States and European relations between the wars and locates gender and women at their centre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gender studies of violence have forced scholars to rethink the association of femininity with‘vulnerability’ and the objectivisation of women as mute victims of organised violence and oppression, incapable of agency. Recent debates about the role women and homosexuals should play in military systems in the United States and other countries have sparked a renewed interest in exploring historical contexts of the relationships between gender and organised violence. If we consider violence as a performative act, whole new dimensions of gendered aspects of the history of violence and warfare emerge. In this article, I intend to draw on my research on gender, honour, and violence during the French Wars of Religion to explore the roles played by Protestant and Catholic women in southern France during siege operations. These besieged women acted to support their coreligionists by participating in the conflicts as healers, suppliers and even combatants. Besieged women were considered‘vulnerable’ in sieges, yet their involvement in siege operations challenged contemporary gender stereotypes, threatened social norms and opened new potential cultural possibilities for these women. I hope to show how the discourses on violence, bodies, revolt and religion shaped the tough choices that confronted these women as they participated actively in civil violence. The besieged women in southern France, I believe, are key to understanding the dynamics of gender and warfare and the ways in which women have actively participated in violence– especially in cases of civil violence where the status of the body politic was thrown into question. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Because the French Revolution failed to produce a widely acceptable definition of citizenship, the limits of manhood suffrage in the early nineteenth century were uncertain. Social practices, in particular scientific activity, served as claims to the status of citizen. By engaging in scientific pastimes, bourgeois Frenchmen asserted that they possessed the rationality and autonomy that liberal theorists associated both with manliness and with civic capacity. However, bourgeois science was never a stable signifier of masculinity or of competence. As professional science emerged, the bourgeois amateur increasingly became the feminised object of satire rather than the sober and meritorious citizen-scientist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]