Civilization without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France, 1917-1927 (Women in Culture and Society) - Softcover

Roberts, Mary Louise

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0226721221 ISBN 13: 9780226721224

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 1994

Synopsis

In the raucous decade following World War I, newly blurred boundaries between male and female created fears among the French that theirs was becoming a civilization without sexes. This new gender confusion became a central metaphor for the War's impact on French culture and led to a marked increase in public debate concerning female identity and woman's proper role. Mary Louise Roberts examines how in these debates French society came to grips with the catastrophic horrors of the Great War.

In sources as diverse as parliamentary records, newspaper articles, novels, medical texts, writings on sexology, and vocational literature, Roberts discovers a central question: how to come to terms with rapid economic, social, and cultural change and articulate a new order of social relationships. She examines the role of French trauma concerning the War in legislative efforts to ban propaganda for abortion and contraception, and explains anxieties about the decline of maternity by a crisis in gender relations that linked soldiery, virility, and paternity.

Through these debates, Roberts locates the seeds of actual change. She shows how the willingness to entertain, or simply the need to condemn, nontraditional gender roles created an indecisiveness over female identity that ultimately subverted even the most conservative efforts to return to traditional gender roles and irrevocably altered the social organization of gender in postwar France.

About this title

About the Author:

Mary Louise Roberts is professor of history at the University of Wisconsin and the author of  What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France, Disruptive Acts: The New Woman in Fin de Siècle France and Civilization without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France, 1917–1928.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0226721221
• ISBN 13: 9780226721224
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352