Breadwinners and Citizens: Gender in the Making of the French Social Model (review)

This book reassesses the development of the French social model in the inter-war period. It lays particular emphasis on the discursive constructions of the male breadwinner norm and the practical effects of such discourses in policy terms. One of the book's many strengths is that it underlines the importance of the intersection of gender with race, ethnicity and nationality in French thinking about social and economic citizenship. The main themes of the book are pronatalism and the ongoing concerns about depopulation; rationalization and the gendered and racialized division of labour; the use of science in the development of industrial psychology and physiology; the response of trades unions and other labour organizations to the reorganization and rationalization of working practices; the relationships between economic activity and social and political citizenship; and the effect of the Depression on the French social model. Via these themes, the book demonstrates the ways in which the agents responsible for social and economic reconstruction in post-war France mobilized discourses around gender in order to devise and implement new policies. Frader's account of the construction of masculinity in relation to inter-war pronatalist ideas reveals the associations made between fatherhood and national duty in this period. Frader also explores the ways in which various attempts to create a family wage impacted on women's access to employment. Her nuanced account of women's participation in the labour market establishes that the end of the war and the re-assertion of the male breadwinner norm did not necessarily result in a mass female departure from the labour market, but rather occasioned women's redistribution within it. Frader is often able to demonstrate complex causal relationships where one might imagine a straightforward effect. For example, she shows that the feminization of certain types of unskilled work was not only a product of rationalization, but also facilitated rationalization (p.75). Frader offers a highly differentiated account of the effects of the Depression on particular groups of workers. Her book explores the full extent of the imbrication of the citizen-worker ideal with the creation, and often the imposition, of a social ideal of the French family, for example via the sursalaire or the salaire vital which linked wages not simply to the work performed but to the family situation of the worker. It demonstrates that the types of social and welfare provision offered by inter-war employers to their workforce —provision which, as Frader argues, also functioned as a mechanism of regulation (p. 97) —functioned as a model for the future construction of the French welfare state, a model which was far from gender-neutral. This book offers impressively detailed evidence to support its claims, whilst remaining thoroughly readable and accessible. It is an extremely valuable contribution to scholarship on the social history of France between the wars.