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At a glance, high fashion and feminism seem unlikely partners. Between the First and Second World Wars, however, these forces combined femininity and modernity to create the new, modern French woman. In this engaging study, Mary Lynn Stewart reveals the fashion industry as an integral part of women's transition into modernity. Analyzing what female columnists in fashion magazines and popular women novelists wrote about the "new silhouette," Stewart shows how bourgeois women feminized the more severe, masculine images that elite designers promoted to create a hybrid form of modern that both emancipated women and celebrated their femininity. She delves into the intricacies of marketing the new...
In the late nineteenth century, the first wave of female journalists began writing in the French daily press. Yet, while they undeniably opened doors for the next generations of educated women, sexist hiring practices, assumptions about women’s aptitudes as reporters, and more subtle gender biases continued to saturate the industry in the decades that followed. Gender, Generation, and Journalism in France, 1910–1940 investigates the careers and written work of ten women who regularly reported in the national, Paris-based dailies. Addressing the role of mentorship, family connections, gendered behaviours, reporting styles, and subject matter, Mary Lynn Stewart debunks lingering essentiali...
Essays on the history of girlhood in modern Europe.
In France, during the 1880s and 1890s, the protection of women and girls in the workplace was advocated by sociologists, social economists, union leaders, enlightened industrialists, and politicians of virtually every ideological hue. In response, laws were enacted restricting not only the number of hours and the time of day that women could work but also their access to dangerous trades. Mary Lynn Stewart argues that these restrictions, though initiated to protect women and girls, were actually a method of exploiting women's dual role of short-time wage worker and unpaid housewife and mother.
A thrilling tale of adventure and deception set in 1950s Austria, from the queen of romantic suspense and author of Madam, Will You Talk? 'This zestful romantic adventure grips, amuses, frightens and delights' Sunday Telegraph Vanessa March's husband Lewis is meant to be on a business trip in Stockholm. So why does he briefly appear in newsreel footage of a fire at a circus in Vienna, with his arm around another woman? Vanessa flies to Austria to find her husband - and inadvertently becomes involved in a mystery surrounding the famous dancing stallions of Austria's Spanish Riding School . . . Praise for Mary Stewart: 'Mary Stewart is magic' New York Times 'I'd rather read her than most other...
The eight essays collected in this volume examine the practice of gender history and its impact on our understanding of European history. Each essay takes up a major methodological or theoretical issue in feminist history and illustrates the necessity of critiquing and redefining the concepts of body, citizenship, class, and experience through historical case studies. Kathleen Canning opens the book with a new overview of the state of the art in European gender history. She considers how gender history has revised the master narratives in some fields within modern European history (such as the French Revolution) but has had a lesser impact in others (Weimar and Nazi Germany).Gender History i...
The Human Tradition in Modern France gives a human perspective of the history of France from 1789 to the present, revealed in essays that highlight individuals and intriguing events that too often have been lost under labels and statistics. Students will gain an understanding of the humor and passion in French history from these new, original essays by well-established scholars. This collection also relates the individuals, events, and controversies to current historiographical debates. The Human Tradition in Modern France is an excellent supplementary text for courses on French history and is also useful for courses in world history and Western Civilization.
An innovative history of the fashion industry, focusing on the connections between Paris and New York, art and finance, and design and manufacturing. Fashion is one of the most dynamic industries in the world, with an annual retail value of $3 trillion and globally recognized icons like Coco Chanel, Christian Dior, and Yves Saint Laurent. How did this industry generate such economic and symbolic capital? Focusing on the roles of entrepreneurs, designers, and institutions in fashion’s two most important twentieth-century centers, Paris to New York tells the history of the industry as a negotiation between art and commerce. In the late nineteenth century, Paris-based firms set the tone for a...
In recent years the peasant household has become a central focal point of social history. This is true not only because the peasant represents the major element of European society through the nineteenth century, but also because many of the main issues in modern historical debate can be studied within the sphere of the peasant family. This book deals with the European peasant family during the period of transformation from agrarian to industrial society, the time called by some the period of protoindustrialization. The essays in this volume explore some of the major issues concerning the influence of the economy, society and institutions on the peasant household and, conversely, the influen...
In their attempt to cope with the daunting problems of poverty and pregnancy, poor women in nineteenth-century France struggled with their environment and in some respects helped shape it. Rachel Fuchs reveals who these women were and how they survived. With dramatic detail, and drawing on actual hospital records and court testimonies, Fuchs portrays poor women's childbirth experiences, their use of charity and welfare, and their recourse to abortion and infanticide as desperate alternatives to motherhood. Fuchs also provides a comprehensive description of philanthropic and welfare institutions, and outlines the relationship between the developing welfare state and official conceptions of wo...