Gender, Sexuality, and the City in the Early Twentieth Century

The early twentieth century was an era of social and sexual upheaval. Following war and revolutions, the 1920s and 1930s witnessed ruptures in traditional gender arrangements and the emergence of new forms of sexual behavior, especially in urban areas. Almost a decade ago, the path-breaking collection of academic essays, The Modern Girl Around the World: Consumption, Modernity, and Globalization tracked visual representations and contemporary debates about this new embodiment of femininity as they played out in countries ranging from France, Germany, and Soviet Russia to China, India, Japan, and South Africa.¹ Other studies have documented additional examples of gender and generational conflicts between the two world wars.² The three books under review here provide further case studies of the ways in which gender and sexuality were renegotiated in the context of early twentieth-century urban modernity, specifically in Paris, Berlin, and Mexico City.

Paris in the interwar years attracted not only thousands of French men and women migrating from the countryside in search of work, but also large numbers of Europeans and Americans eager to enjoy the cosmopolitanism and freedom that the city represented. Among these were African American men and women who found in the city a welcome respite from American racism and restrictions. The focus of T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting's lively book, Bricktop's Paris is the intrepid and adventurous, but generally overlooked, group of Black American women who made their life in the city in the 1920s and 1930s. Exploring the experiences of twenty-five African American women—including well-known stage performers such as Josephine Baker and Florence Mills; the renowned night club owner and entertainer, Ada "Bricktop" Smith; literary stars such as Nella Larsen; and less familiar writers and artists such as Jessie Faucet and Laura Wheeler—Sharpley-Whiting describes her work as "a collage, a multilife biography . . . an assembled portrait of black women's lives as they lived them for however long in Paris" (13–14).

Drawing on an impressive array of source materials, including interviews, diaries, letters, memoirs, autobiographies, family papers, magazines, newspapers, literature, art, poetry, recordings, films, musical scores, posters, programs, photographs, and city maps, Sharpley-Whiting manages to piece together an extraordinarily rich account of these women's time in Paris. Some visited the city for merely a few weeks; others made it their home for months or years. Born after 1880, most were young and unencumbered by husbands and children. A few arrived with substantial bank accounts; others barely had money to cover the passage across the Atlantic. Most sought to make a living through popular culture; others came to pursue professional or academic training. Many were writers, musicians, and artists; a few were students; one came to pursue her training as an aviator. Yet, in spite of their differences, they all found Paris to be a space where they could pursue their dreams and hone their talents. In and around Montmartre and the rest of Bohemian Paris, where most of them settled, they found a world where expectations of female domesticity, sexual propriety, familial obligations, and racial subordination could be set aside, if only temporarily. Surely, Paris was not colorblind, but the French seemed at least "not color averse," especially when compared to the bare-knuckled racism of America (7). Besides, the relatively small number of...