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

Women in Culture and Society

by Mary Louise Roberts

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.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, France, European History, Grad School, Politics, 20th Century

352 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1994

About the author

Mary Louise Roberts is the WARF Distinguished Lucie Aubrac Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She is also the Charles Boal Ewing Chair in Military History at the United States Military Academy at West Point for the 2020-21 academic year. Her most recent books are What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France and D-Day through French Eyes: Normandy 1944, both published by the University of Chicago Press.

Reviews

[Billy · Rating 5 out of 5]

In Civilization Without Sexes, Mary Louise Roberts examines a French culture seeking coherence after WWI. The book’s title is taken from a Drieu la Rochelle comment, one in which the blurring of gender “served as a primary referent for the ruin of civilization itself.” (4) In post-war France, changes in gender roles symbolized yet another loss for returning soldiers desperately desiring pre-war normalcy. Robert’s cultural history reveals that women became central to post-war French identity. French culture viewed women as belonging to one of three gender stereotypes. They could be “mothers” who maintained French gender norms, devoted themselves to shell-shocked men, and promoted the virtues of self-sacrifice; they could be “modern women” who opposed these norms, adorned flapper-styles of dress and, disillusioned by widespread destruction, myopically pursued pleasure; or they were “single women,” self-supporting but celibate females who lay between these two extremes. In reality gender and femininity remained more complex, but nevertheless these perceptions of women’s shifting roles in society were powerful and consumed a traumatized French generation.
French novels are central to Roberts cultural analysis; they reveal a French civilization consumed with post-war anxiety. Authors such as La Rochelle and Gaston Rageot noticed shifting gender norms. Their writings brought female domesticity to the fore of public concerns and inflated worries of a France that, like other European nations, equated population size with national strength. Roberts extends her analysis with readings by French doctors who endorsed polygamy as an answer to a faltering population. These suggestions only endorse Robert’s thesis: that women became the focal point on which French men sought to rebuild their fractured nationalism.

[History teacher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ani u nás, ani v zahraničí, není zcela obvyklé, aby historici a historičky psali dějiny genderu tak, jak je jejich úplně první protagonistky zamýšleli a tak, aby měli pro vědu a společnost skutečný přínos. Bez ideologie. Nikoliv jako feministické historičky, které se ptají po vině a navrhují trest. Mary Louis Roberts to ale dokázala. Analyzovala debatu o proměně ženské role v poválečné Francii z různých úhlů a přesvědčivě ilustruje, jak se v ní zrcadlí obava ze společenské změny jako takové a úzkost, kterou vyvolalo válečné trauma.

[Barbora Jirincova · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ani u nás, ani v zahraničí, není zcela obvyklé, aby historici a historičky psali dějiny genderu tak, jak je jejich úplně první protagonistky zamýšleli a tak, aby měli pro vědu a společnost skutečný přínos. Bez ideologie. Nikoliv jako feministické historičky, které se ptají po vině a navrhují trest. Mary Louis Roberts to ale dokázala. Analyzovala debatu o proměně ženské role v poválečné Francii z různých úhlů a přesvědčivě ilustruje, jak se v ní zrcadlí obava ze společenské změny jako takové a úzkost, kterou vyvolalo válečné trauma.

[J.M. Langan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think this could have been a little more concise when emphasising her points there was repetition in the arguments. It felt like a PhD thesis in tone and style.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this...it got me thinking about other times of conflict and the way societies try to deal with drastic changes. Roberts is arguing that post-WWI France became absolutely obsessed with gender categories. This was an attempt to hold on to some kind of ideological continuity in a time when the world seemed to have been radically altered. Roberts looks at all sorts of cultural sources - novels, ads, plays, etc - to show the kinds of ideas that were dominating French society at the time. She claims that "debates concerning gender identity became a primary way to embrace, resist, or reconcile oneself to changes associated with the war."
Basically the idea was that everything was changing, and anything could change, except gender roles. The idea that women might take jobs and resist becoming housewives and mothers was petrifying. France had been seriously hurt. Far too many young men had been killed. And now the survivors were returning home to flapper types who dressed like men and drove cars, and no one would be available to rebuild French society. So the culture responded by denigrating the image of the "modern woman" and elevating to mythic proportions the image of "la mere," the mother.
There are certainly some arguable points here, but it does get one thinking. This seems to be an anxiety that arises over and over again, during turbulent times - I think you see the same thing happen in the USA post-WWII. Humans seem to really want to draw the line at gender roles. The world can turn upside down, as long as women stay women and men stay men. It's kind of odd really, that this appears to be such a universal breaking point.

[T.J. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant, nuanced read examining the fall out of World War I on French society, and its particular impact on French women. The idea of the traditional French woman was destroyed by the guns of the war, and in its place gender was another site to be reconstructed like the ruined countryside.

Women are divided into three categories--the mother, the single woman, and the modern woman--all of which are problematic, overlapping ideas for a new society struggling to orient itself.

An utterly engaging read.

[Päivi Brink · Rating 4 out of 5]

Women were given three narrow roles in the 1920s France: mother, lonely woman or modern woman. Well written and interesting research on gender roles after the WW1 in France.