Overview

As the twentieth century dawned and France entered an era of extraordinary labor activism and industrial competition, an insistently romantic vision of the Parisian garment worker was deployed by politicians, reformers, and artists to manage anxieties about economic and social change. Nostalgia about a certain kind of France was written onto the bodies of the capital's couture workers throughout French pop culture from the 1880s to the 1930s. And the midinettes-as these women were called- were written onto the geography of Paris itself, by way of festivals, monuments, historic preservation, and guide books. The idealized working Parisienne stood in for, at once, the superiority of French taste and craft, and the political (and sexual) subordination of French women and labour. But she was also the public face of more than 80,000 real working women whose demands for better labour conditions were inflected, distorted, and, in some cases, amplified by this ubiquitous Romantic type in the decades straddling World War I. Working Girls bridges cultural histories of the Parisian imaginary and histories of French labour, and puts them in raucous dialogue with one another: a letter by a nineteen-year-old seamstress, a speech by a government minister; a frothy Parisian guide by a bon vivant, the minutes of a union meeting; a bawdy café-concert song, a policy brief on garment working conditions.

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9780198841173

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Reviews

Tilburg establishes the centrality of the figure of the midinette to both the fashion economy and the discourse of the working woman. Furthermore, she has opened a productive space to pursue these questions, to engage more deeply with the primacy of visual culture, and to examine working women across class lines. By treating her readers to a dazzling romp through the world of the midinette, the author has also shown how this exhilarating fantasy is inextricable from the labor history of the period and has provided an indispensable resource for future studies. * Susan Hiner, (Vassar College), Nineteenth-Century French Studies * Working Girls makes a major and innovative contribution to several subfields of the historiography of modern France ... It also contributes significantly to both modern labor and cultural history, especially the history of taste in France ... This is an excellent book -- an engaging study that adds a lot to our knowledge of modern Paris and modern France, gender and labor history, and the history of taste. * Tyler Stovall, Distinguished Professor of History, University of California Santa Cruz * This is the first work I know of that that discovers in popular culture not only a complete acceptance of women working outside the home, but a desire to shape them into something other than wives and mothers. Tilburg unveils a predominantly male bourgeois discourse about working-class women and traces its weight and pervasiveness in the French imagination. She then places that discourse into actual dialogue with its subjects who, in turn, appropriated their bourgeois-created image for their own ends. These handcraft workers emerge as heroines of French taste who provided a cultural counterpoint to bourgeois women's perceived decadence. Tilburg thereby succeeds in achieving the exceedingly difficult task of using their own words to give these women their proper place in history, one with which historians of culture, labor, gender, and European history will have to contend. * Elinor Accampo, University of Southern California *

Author Information

Patricia Tilburg is James B. Duke Professor of History and Gender & Sexuality Studies at Davidson College. She is the author of Colette's Republic: Work, Gender, and Popular Culture in France, 1870-1914 (2009).

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