“French or foreign, so long as they be mothers”: Immigrant Women, Welfare, and the Politics of Pronatalism in Interwar Paris

This article examines two private welfare organizations in interwar Paris, the Foyer Français, an early immigrant aid society, and the League for the Protection of Abandoned Mothers, a maternalist welfare agency. It analyzes interactions between middle-class French social workers and their working-class foreign clients to demonstrate that the politics of populationism pervasive in interwar France mitigated those class, cultural, and racial barriers that so often beset interactions between welfare agents and their clients in Europe and the United States. On the contrary, I show that the strength of pronatalist sentiment allowed for the formation of cross-class, cross-national alliances between French welfare agents and their foreign female charges, even during the depressed 1930s. This article thus reveals how the world of welfare functioned as a site of inclusion for immigrants in France and suggests how further research can complicate our understanding of gendered dynamics of social inclusion and exclusion.