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In the decades after World War II, French ideas about gender and family life underwent dramatic changes, laying the groundwork for the sexual revolution of the 1960s. This book offers a broad view of changing lives and ideas about love, courtship, marriage, giving birth, parenting, childhood, and adolescence in France from the Vichy regime to the sexual revolution of 1960s.
Women's Rights and Women's Lives In France 1944-1968 explores key aspects of the everyday lives of women between the Liberation of France and the events of May '68. At the end of the war, French women believed that a new era was beginning and that equality had been won. The redefined postwar public sphere required women's participation for the new democracy, and women's labour power for reconstruction, but equally important was the belief in women's role as mothers. Over the next two decades, the tensions between competing visions of women's `proper place' dominated discourses of womanhood as well as policy decisions, and had concrete implications for women's lives. Working from a wide range of sources, including women's magazines, prescriptive literature, documentation from political parties, government reports, parliamentary debates and personal memoirs, Claire Duchen follows the debates concerning womanhood, women's rights and women's lives through the 1944-1968 period and grounds them in the changing reality of postwar France.
Women's Rights and Women's Lives In France explores the everyday experiences of women between the liberation, and May 1968. In 1945, French women believed that a new era was beginning for them, in which they had finally won equality (the right to vote in 1944, equal pay and access to education and employment). But the new Republic considered that women's main role was that of motherhood. Competing visions of women's place had concrete implications for women's lives, influencing work, politics and ideals of femininity. Working from a wide range of sources, including women's magazines, prescriptive literature, political pamphlets, fiction and memoirs, and government reports, Claire Duchen follows the debates concerning women through twenty years, and grounds them in the changing social reality of postwar France.
War of Words argues that the conflicts that erupted over French colonial territory between 1940 and 1945 are central to understanding British, Vichy and Free French policy-making throughout the war. By analysing the rhetoric that surrounded these clashes, Rachel Chin demonstrates that imperial holdings were valued as more than material and strategic resources. They were formidable symbols of power, prestige and national legitimacy. She shows that having and holding imperial territory was at the core of competing Vichy and Free French claims to represent the true French nation and that opposing images of Franco-British cooperation and rivalry were at the heart of these arguments. The selected case studies show how British-Vichy-Free French relations evolved throughout the war and demonstrate that the French colonial empire played a decisive role in these shifts.
The state's policy with regard to fathers and fatherhood had a great impact on concepts of citizenship and gender in France in the era of the two World Wars. Drawing on new material that has only recently become available from the archives of the Vichy regime, Kristen Stromberg Childers analyzes the ways fathers were promoted as saviors of the nation after France's humiliating defeat by the Germans in June 1940. Childers argues that concern for the family and for the status of fathers in modern France was not merely a response to falling birthrates and German aggression, but was fundamental to the very notion of citizenship and political participation. The debate on men as gendered beings, C...
This book examines how material distress shaped the interactions of native and refugee populations as well as perceptions of the Vichy government's legitimacy.
This text tells the story of French statues and monuments that were melted down and shipped to Nazi munitions factories during the Second World War.
Using the framework of genocide, this volume analyzes the patterns of persecution of the Roma in Nazi-dominated Europe. Detailed case studies of France, Austria, Romania, Croatia, Ukraine, and Russia generate a critical mass of evidence that indicates criminal intent on the part of the Nazi regime to destroy the Roma as a distinct group. Other chapters examine the failure of the West German State to deliver justice, the Romani collective memory of the genocide, and the current political and historical debates. As this revealing volume shows, however inconsistent or geographically limited, over time, the mass murder acquired a systematic character and came to include ever larger segments of the Romani population regardless of the social status of individual members of the community.
Defeat and Division launches a definitive new account of France in the Second World War. In this first volume, Douglas Porch dissects France's 1940 collapse, the dynamics of occupation, and the rise of Charles de Gaulle's Free France crusade, culminating in the November 1942 Allied invasion of French North Africa. He captures the full sweep of France's wartime experience in Europe, Africa, and beyond, from soldiers and POWs to civilians-in-arms, colonial subjects, and foreign refugees. He recounts France's struggles to reconstruct military power within the context of a global conflict, with its armed forces shattered into warring factions and the country under Axis occupation. Disagreements over the causes of the 1940 debacle and the subsequent requirement for the armistice mirrored long-standing fractures in politics, society, and the French military itself, as efforts to reconstitute French military power crumbled into Vichy collaboration, De Gaulle's exile resistance, Alsace-Moselle occupation struggles, and a scuffle for imperial supremacy.
This masterful book is the first comprehensive reappraisal of the Vichy France regime for over 20 years. France was occupied by Nazi Germany between 1940 and 1944, and the exact nature of France's role in the Vichy years is only now beginning to come to light. One of the main reasons that the Vichy history is difficult to tell is that some of France's most prominent politicians, including President Mitterand, have been implicated in the regime. This has meant that public access to key documents has been denied and it is only now that an objective analysis is possible. The fate of France as an occupied country could easily have been shared by Britain, and it is this background element, which ...