Abstract
The years 1945–1968 have proved fertile ground for twenty-first-century scholars of youth, women, gender, and sexuality in France. Notably, Susan Weiner analyzed cultural representations of teenage girls during the 1950s and 1960s in Enfants Terribles: Youth and Femininity in the Mass Media in France, 1945-1968 (Johns Hopkins, 2001), Richard Jobs explored the role of youth in postwar reconstruction and cultural life in Riding the New Wave: Youth and the Rejuvenation of France after the Second World War (Stanford, 2007), Rebecca Pulju examined women’s roles as citizen consumers in Women and Mass Consumer Society in Postwar France (Cambridge, 2011), and Régis Revenin investigated boys and their sexuality in Une histoire des garçons et des filles: amour, genre, sexualité dans la France d’après-guerre (Vendémiaire, 2015). In From Vichy to the Sexual Revolution: Gender and Family Life in Postwar France, Sarah Fishman touches on all these topics as she charts a new course in the history of French family life during the postwar decades.
Fishman comes to this ambitious project having written two fine works of social history on Second World War France. We Will Wait: Wives of French Prisoners of War 1940-45 (Yale, 1992) recounted the experiences of the women married to the estimated 1.8 million French men who were taken prisoner during the Battle of France in 1940, most of whom spent the war in prison camps in Germany, while The Battle for Children: World War II, Youth Crime, and Juvenile Justice in Twentieth-century France (Harvard, 2002) explored the intertwined issues of youth crime and juvenile justice. In Fishman’s latest monograph, the Second World War provides the starting point. Arguing against evaluations of 1950s parenting, gender roles, youth, and sexuality that view them through the retrospective lens of 1968, Fishman offers instead an approach to postwar family life that finds comparisons in what came immediately before. It is only by comparing the postwar years to the war years, Fishman argues, that the newness and even modernity of postwar approaches can be appreciated. From this vantage point, the 1950s emerge as the transformative postwar decade. During these years, strong economic growth joined with attention to the self and human sexuality to profoundly alter gender roles; parenting and spousal relations; and understandings of childhood, adolescence, and youth.
Fishman’s approach to family is admirably inclusive, encompassing mothers and fathers, children of both sexes and varied ages, attitudes toward diverse aspects of family life, and gender roles. Her analysis rests on a broad range of primary sources that tend more toward the social than the cultural. Mostly steering clear of the period’s iconic novels and New Wave films, which Fishman sees as disconnected from the lives of ordinary French people, Fishman delves instead into low brow, mass market women’s magazines, especially their advice columns, guides to marriage and child-rearing, and records from juvenile court cases, specifically the reports on young offenders and their families that were mandated by juvenile courts after 1945. These reports were written by an expanding corps of social workers who were drawn mostly from the ranks of middle-class women.
Fishman is too good an historian to take these reports at face value. Instead, she plumbs them for middle-class attitudes, values, and prejudices “as they bumped up against the realities of life for mostly poor rural, working-class, and immigrant families” (p. xxii). She uses the detailed reports, which noted the presence (or absence) of running water, electricity, and household appliances, to provide glimpses of ordinary people’s aspirations and daily struggles, to discern how successfully families of modest means were able to participate in the mass consumer society taking shape around them. Fishman connects the postwar French state’s family policies to the era’s economic growth and consumption patterns, explaining that family allowances, maternity benefits, and birth bonuses could provide considerable extra income, especially in the case of families with numerous children. These benefits could make the difference in determining whether families could afford to buy a washing machine, television, or dishwasher for their households. In the families with at least seven children who appear in the case reports, the amount brought in from family allowances was greater than that from earned income. Even reports on boys’ petty theft are utilized to track the spread of affluence. If boys stole cash, food, bicycles, and items from department stores during the Second World War, they supplemented these items (minus the food) with radios, electric shavers, and motorized scooters during the 1950s.
The book moves both thematically and chronologically. The first chapter examines men, women, and family life from 1945 to 1949. Fishman portrays these years as an in between and ultimately transitional time, when wartime hardships lingered (rationing remained in force until 1949 and families adjusted uneasily to the return of male prisoners of war) at the same time as new attitudes toward women, mothers, and fathers began to take root. Changing conceptions of fatherhood were crucial in this early postwar period. After the defeat of the Vichy and Nazi regimes, authoritarian approaches to fatherhood and masculinity were discredited and fathers were encouraged to be more collaborative. According to Fishman, fatherhood was in the process of transitioning from a status to a relationship; there was, moreover, “a tiptoeing toward a more collaborative view of parenting as shared responsibility” (p. 16). Although these changes were in their infancy, this was no small development in a country where fathers had long held outsize legal authority over their children. Indeed, it was only in 1935 that fathers were stripped of their right to send minor children to prison without having to provide cause to the courts.
Chapters 2–7 explore the transformations wrought by the 1950s and early 1960s with respect to marital relations and parenting; childhood and adolescence; sex and ideas of the self; and anxieties about women, youth, and young women (jeunes filles). The chapters weave together diverse strands of analysis to construct a textured portrait of shifts in conceptions of family life and, at times, actual behaviors. Fishman illustrates how the popularization of Freudian ideas led to a more pronounced psychological orientation in attitudes and books about sex, marriage, child-rearing, and juvenile delinquency. Interestingly, women penned some of the most important books on parenting and child-rearing. In 1956, for instance, Laurence Pernoud, who had worked as a journalist in the United States in the early 1950s, published the first comprehensive guide for expectant mothers, J’attends un enfant (I’m Expecting a Child). Among other things, Pernoud and other women writers explained the Lamaze method, which was especially useful in a country where anesthesia was in short supply. So influential was the book that it was updated regularly and remains in print.
In the books and magazines of the 1950s and early 1960s, the self became increasingly important while the child was viewed as a distinct being, one with emotional needs and drives, including a sex drive. Sex was discussed more openly and in less moral tones. This largely resulted, Fishman suggests, from the combined impact of Freud, Simone de Beauvoir, and the American sex researcher Alfred Kinsey, whose 1948 and 1954 studies on sexuality were quickly translated into French and gradually became part of the cultural furniture. The child, moreover, was believed to be in an “intense and dynamic” relationship with his or her parents, whose own relationship inched toward egalitarian. Meanwhile, rising levels of affluence and an increase in the school-leaving age brought adolescence to the working class and the rural poor, along with a youth culture revolving around music, clothing, and hair styles.
From Vichy to the Sexual Revolution contains much wonderful material. The freshest explores shifting ideas about fatherhood, motherhood, and childhood, as well as the impact of Freud, de Beauvoir, and Kinsey on understandings of sex, self, and family in France. Although the author’s argument that one can only appreciate the newness and modernity of 1950s developments in family life when contrasted with what came before is well taken, the horizon of Fishman’s backward glance can at times feel inadequate. On the rare occasions when the author reaches back further than 1940 in an effort to establish context and consider continuities, her historical gaze tends to start and stop in the pre–World War I years. It was at this point that adolescence emerged as a recognized stage of life and the juvenile justice system was created in France. The 1920s and 1930s get little mention, relevant books on the interwar period do not appear in the author’s bibliography and continuities in approaches to women, youth, and gender between the pre– and post–World War II periods are sometimes missed. Yet this complaint is a minor one. From Vichy to the Sexual Revolution is clearly written, extensively researched, steeped in the latest scholarship, and broad of scope and concern. This first history of family life in mid-twentieth-century France will be of considerable interest to historians of the family and scholars of twentieth-century France.