Civilization Without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France, 1917-1927.

By Mary Louise Roberts (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1994. xiv plus 337pp.).

In her fascinating book on gender identities in post-World War I France, Mary Louise Roberts argues that "the blurring of the boundaries between `male' and `female'--the civilization without sexes" (p. 4) was a central aspect of the cultural crisis which France experienced in the 1920s. The change in women's roles, Roberts notes, was one of the most remarked upon social phenomena attributed to the war. Gender confusion became a central metaphor for the impact of the war on French culture and led to a marked increase in public debate concerning female identity and the woman's proper role. Roberts challenges the conclusion of a number of other historians that the war did not bring about a permanent change in women's roles and asserts instead that the debate itself was a way of coming to terms with a postwar world that was unrecognizable and threatening.

In order to demonstrate the importance of the gender debate, Roberts brilliantly integrates an analysis of literary texts with a critical evaluation of parliamentary debates, newspaper commentaries, medical treatises, vocational literature, and women's fashions in the period just after the end of the war. It is a weakness of the book, however, that Roberts spends little time justifying her choice of the chronological parameters of the her study--1917 to 1927, while taking this decade to be representative of the French accommodation to changes in their society.

Roberts isolates three images of the female self from the postwar debate about gender. Two of these comprise the antithetical poles of the female identity--"la femme moderne" (the modem woman) who represented economic and sexual freedom and "la mere" (the mother) who symbolized the return to bourgeois domesticity and traditional cultural values. A third image that emerges from the postwar debate--"la femme seule" (the single woman)--represents to Roberts a kind of reconciliation between the old and new, between these two opposing poles of female identity. The book is divided into three sections, each devoted to one of these images.

Roberts' discussion of "la femme moderne" focuses primarily on an examination of some fascinating literary examples of the type and on the scandal generated by women's postwar fashions and bobbed hair. She convincingly explains how women's fashions served to express cultural attitudes about gender and analyzes why popular novels like Victor Margueritte's La Garconne (1922) became so heavily laden with cultural meaning in the early 1920s. La Garconne's controversial heroine was sexually liberated and economically emancipated but ultimately embraced "domestic femininity" by choosing to nurse her wounded lover back to physical and psychic health. Thus, insists Roberts, Margueritte's message was both controversial and reassuring that France's war-devastated masculinity could be restored by woman's traditional role as mother.

In the section on "la mere," Roberts analyzes some aspects of republican social policy--such as the 1920 law banning any form of advertisement or propaganda promoting contraceptive devices. As Roberts explains, the 1920 law represented more than the triumph of natalist views and constituted the affirmation of a set of social relationships to which the concept of the woman as mother was central. Indeed, Angus McLaren has already demonstrated in Sexuality and Social Order (New York, 1983) the motive of the lawmakers was far less clearly to promote fertility than to control female sexuality. In a culture undergoing profound transformation, Roberts argues, the legislator became obsessed with promoting fertility less for the sake of population growth than in order to restore social virtue, male virility, and cultural stability.

Roberts' treatment of "la mere" becomes problematic, however, when she deals with the postwar debate on maternity as indicative of a new cultural consensus. She implies that the postwar period's focus on motherhood mixed the notion of "devoir" (obligation or duty) with the republican commitment to rights. Yet recent work on the social policy implemented by the republicans in the 1880s and 1890s suggests an equally potent mixture of duty and individual rights in republican views of the family before the First World War.' Moreover, by concluding her book in 1927 Roberts avoids a discussion of the convergence of nationalist and pronatalist concerns in the 1930s which seems to weaken her conclusion about the significance of the cultural reconciliation effected in the 1920s.(2)

One of the most innovative aspects of Roberts' book is that she grounds her analysis of the cultural image in an analysis of vocational guidance publications and reformist proposals for women's education. A rash of how to find a husband books followed the war, accompanied by the proliferation of vocational guidance manuals, as a response to a belief that middle-class women now had limited prospects for marriage. Roberts emphasizes the spreading perception that a middle-class woman could no longer count on marriage as a career and the consequent acceptance of middle-class women's employment. But on this point one wonders how new the perception of a marriage crisis was when, for example, an 1896 parliamentary debate on the legal formalities of marriage was prompted by a panic about the declining number of marriages in France.

One intriguing aspect of the vocational guidance proponents was their critique of middle-class women's sexual ignorance. Accepted by prewar bourgeois society as the core of the middle-class women's purity, sexual ignorance could no longer be justified in the face of greater numbers of middle-class women working outside the home. The presumed sexual perils of the work place prompted some reformers to promote sex education as part of a social hygiene program that was no longer aimed exclusively at men.

Civilization Without Sexes is a creative and largely persuasive reconstruction of French culture in the 1920s. Roberts' conclusion that traditional gender roles were not restored after World War I but that French society underwent a significant accommodation to changing circumstances must be taken into account by any historian of early 20th century France.

ENDNOTES

(1.) See, for example, the essays in Gender and the Politics of Social Reform, Elinor Accampo, Rachel G. Fuchs, and Mary Lynn Stewart, eds. (Baltimore, 1995).

(2.) See Susan Pedersen, "Catholicism, Feminism and the Politics of the Family during the late Third Republic," in Mothers of a New World: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of the Welfare State, Seth Koven and Sonya Michel, eds. (New York, 1993).