Disruptive Acts: The New Woman in Fin-de-Siecle France, and: The Modern Woman Revisited: Paris Between the Wars (review)

The publication of books on the Modern Woman continues apace. In addition to the steady stream of monographs on the "stars"—Sarah Bernhardt, Isadora Duncan, Virginia Woolf, Colette, Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, Simone de Beauvoir—there has been an upsurge in the last decade of studies devoted to lesser-known figures of early feminism and modernity: Rachilde (Marguerite Eymery), Gyp (Countess of Martel de Janville, née de Mirabeau), Séverine (Caroline Rémy), Loïe Fuller, Natalie Clifford Barney, Renée Vivien (Pauline Tarn), Kiki (Alice Prin), Lucie Delarue-Mardrus, Isabelle Eberhardt, Sylvia Beach, Augusta Savage, Josephine Baker, Nancy Cunard, Sybil Sanderson, H. D., Ida Rubenstein, Mata Hari, Mistinguett (Jean Bourgeois), Dolly Wilde, Charlotte Perriand, Mina Loy, and Nora Joyce among the most notable. The gender-bending images of Claude Cahun, Romaine Brooks, Florence Henri, Dora Maar, Hannah Höch, and Maya Deren have been the featured subjects of recent exhibitions, and renewed attention has been accorded canonical women artists such as Marie Laurencin, Natalia Goncharova, Sonia Delaunay, Frida Kahlo, Lee Miller, Berenice Abbot, Tina Modotti, and Leonor Fini. All this celebration of feminine achievement attests to a seemingly bottomless appetite for cultural expressions of the time when "Paris was a Woman," as well as to the vitality of interest in feminist history, theory, and culture (refuting post-feminist allegations to the contrary). Research on race and colonial conquest along with new approaches in feminist historiography emphasizing everyday life, material culture, and the private sphere of domesticity, has enhanced appreciation of how the Modern Woman, and her precursor the New Woman, shaped the contours of global modernity. Despite the ferment, however, considerable work remains to be done, even in areas that have been traditionally well-documented such as the expatriate scene in turn-of-the-century France. The landmark 1927 Pensées d'une Amazone (Thoughts of an Amazon) of Natalie Clifford Barney, for example, is still not fully available in English translation, and a thorough analysis of the complex political allegiances (often nationalist or collaborationist) characteristic of many celebrated feminist anti-feminists (Rachilde, Colette, and Barney among them) has yet to be written, most probably because contemporary feminists prefer to ascribe progressive platforms to their forebears.

The two books under review, each of which experiments with applying 1990s identity politics to the feminisms of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, help redress such lacunae in women's history. Mary Louise Roberts's Disruptive Acts: The New Woman in Fin-de-Siècle France offers a valuable account of how women writers managed to enter their voices into political debates of the day, shaping opinion on the Dreyfus affair and preparing the ground for a Third Republic feminism: anticlerical, socialist, and committed to the educational and vocational ambitions of women. Marguerite Durand (the "blond and beautiful" editor-in-chief of the women's newspaper La Fronde), Séverine (a novelist and reporter for La Fronde), and Gyp (a right-wing anti-Dreyfusard polemicist) emerge as the French counterparts of Britain's Mary Wollstonecraft, whose career journalism had provided a mouthpiece for women's rights a century earlier. This belatedness on the French side was, of course, of a piece with the history of postponed women's suffrage. French feminism was in many ways regressive in defining the "personal as political"; but for Roberts, the frequent blurring of the "feminine" and the "feminist" in a journal like La Fronde allowed revolutionary ideas to pass more easily into mainstream culture. The "womanly," if not an outright cover, enabled the raising of women's political consciousness to...