Having It All in the Belle Époque: How French Women’s Magazines Invented the Modern Woman by Rachel Mesch (review)

Having It All is a study of two successful, glossy, middle-market women’s magazines of the belle époque: Femina (launched February 1901) and La Vie heureuse (October 1902). These two publications, widely sold up to the First World War and finally merged in 1916, represent an important context for work on belle-époque women novelists, many of whom wrote for them and featured extensively in their pages. They have also elicited some interest in their own right, including Colette Cosnier’s Les Dames de ‘Femina’: un féminisme mystifié (Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2009). As her title suggests, Cosnier read Femina as a reactionary publication that peddled a very conventional view of female identity dressed up in fashionably ‘modern’ style. Rachel Mesch, on the other hand, sees both magazines as emancipatory, as offering readers, through the pleasures of copiously illustrated celebrity news, fashion spreads, and serialized fiction, a vision of women in the modern world that was subtly progressive. Mesch argues that, despite their explicit rejection of ‘feminism’ as a campaigning movement and their insistence on the traditionally feminine spheres of homemaking, maternity, and beauty, both magazines expanded their readers’ horizons towards a more empowering vision of female identity. These were commercially driven publications owned by mainstream publishing houses: if their conservatism ensured that they did not scandalize the average reader, their embrace of modernity as offering women new roles and freedoms also appealed to many women at a period of rapid social change. In a non-polemical, taken-for-granted tone, the magazines featured women who were both ‘feminine’ and exemplified prowess in traditionally ‘masculine’ fields: mountain climbing, exploring, sport, studying, and, above all, writing. Like the middlebrow fiction of the women authors published and featured in their pages, Femina and Vie heureuse performed ‘imaginative work’ by offering an ‘airbrushed view of the present’ that expanded what the ‘chères lectrices’ might expect of themselves (p. 29). Without contesting the orthodox view of women as essentially wives and mothers, the magazines represented modern marriage as grounded in social equality, through their glamorous portrayal of celebrity literary couples, and through published debates that demonstrated a broad consensus affirming a woman’s right and capacity to combine homemaking with a career. What is so worthy of attention in these publications is the fact that they brought a quietly radical vision of what a woman could do and be into the households and mentalities of women who may have shuddered at the very word ‘feminist’. The book could be accused of a slightly narrow focus, since it emphasizes the role of women writers — as contributors and role models — to the virtual exclusion of the magazines’ other concerns. It also seems to overplay the distinction between the magazines’ idealized model of the femme moderne, and the more familiar figure of the (feminine but feminist) femme nouvelle. However, with its rich array of reproduced pages to illustrate points, and nice attention to the magazines’ visual as well as verbal discourse, this is a highly readable, enjoyable book that adds an important dimension to the study of how the vibrant feminist contestation of those years was mediated for and experienced by the majority of women.