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Richard C. Parks, Medical Imperialism in French North Africa: Regenerating the Jewish Community of Colonial Tunis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017).The title of Richard Parks' book, Medical Imperialism in [...]

The Colonial Politics of Global Health: France and the United Nations in Postwar Africa. By Jessica Lynne Pearson. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018. Pp. x, 260. $49.95.) As world [...]

In 1920, journalist Maurice de Waleffe started the first modern French beauty pageant, La Plus Belle Femme de France, which in the following two decades expanded to Europe and the French colonies. This paper follows the history of interwar beauty contests and explores the interactions of gender and race discourses with an emerging consumer economy, illuminating the discursive and economic links that connected the beauty contests to the French Empire and invested national pageants with strong racial content. It argues that the pageant started as an attempt to set a role model for an alternative view of French modernity, one anchored in provincial tradition, in contrast to degenerative urban modernity which, along with the Great War, had upset proper gender roles. However, in examining the struggles between actors of various economic power and agency—elites concerned with degeneration, the consumer industry, and women vying for the title of Miss France—this paper argues that the pageants increasingly became a vehicle for the liberal Modern Girl beauty ideal. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]