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OverviewIn 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. Full Product DetailsAuthor: Mary Louise Roberts , Catharine StimpsonPublisher: The University of Chicago Press Imprint: University of Chicago Press Edition: 2nd ed. Dimensions: Width: 1.70cm , Height: 0.30cm , Length: 2.40cm Weight: 0.680kg ISBN: 9780226721217ISBN 10: 0226721213 Pages: 352 Publication Date: 03 March 1994 Audience: College/higher education , Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate , Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly Format: Hardback Publisher's Status: Active Availability: Out of stock The supplier is temporarily out of stock of this item. It will be ordered for you on backorder and shipped when it becomes available. Table of ContentsReviewsAuthor InformationMary Louise Roberts is associate professor of history at Stanford University. Tab Content 6Author Website:Countries AvailableAll regions |