Gender and French Identity after the Second World War, 1944–1954: Engendering Frenchness by Kelly Ricciardi Colvin (review)

French women's enfranchisement at the end of the Second World War helped to re-assert the image of postwar France as a major Western democracy and the "birthplace of human rights" (2). Although several Western countries had granted women the right to vote a generation earlier, the French lagged behind, maintaining that women were"inherently unfit" to vote (2). The Fourth Republic and the overthrow of fascism offered the possibility to reestablish France as a modern, democratic power. Charles de Gaulle praised French women's enfranchisement as "tremendous" (2). However, as Colvin demonstrates, French women's enfranchisement did not usher in a new feminist awareness or solidarity. Rather, through an examination of women's magazines, memoirs, court cases, popular artwork, spy novels, political speeches, and newspaper articles, Colvin juxtaposes cultural narratives of gender identity with the political to show how French culture confined women's power just as women had finally been given full citizenship. Drawing on Karen Adler's reference to the period of 1944–1954 as the long Liberation, Colvin examines depictions of womanhood in cultural and political spheres as the country recovered from the war. Central to the postwar national image, the Resistance myth affirmed that the French had heroically resisted the German enemy ("aside from a few errant French traitors" [10]). Through her re-reading of the gendered aspects of the Resistance myth, Colvin underscores how the Resistance narrative itself limited women's power, as it highlighted the virility of French men and deemphasized the wartime contributions of French women. Additionally, in her study of the postwar treatment of résistantes who had endured torture, Colvin notes the broad extent to which acknowledgement of the women's brave actions—whether by the government, the press, or the women themselves—praised the women's silence while in the hands of their captors, as well as their modesty and desire to remain private after the war. As Colvin points out, the resulting erasure of female resistors reestablished stability, normalcy, and national pride in cultural assertions of male virility, while relegating women to the domestic sphere. One particularly colorful section of Colvin's study examines cultural manifestations of anxieties regarding women's voting. Colvin cites, for example, a 1945 headline in the Leftist Resistance newspaper Le Centre républicain urging women to "Stay Naïve" (163), and a May 1946 issue of La Femme, published by the official Mouvement de libération nationale, that advised women to retain their femininity when voting so as not to threaten their men: "If at the exit of the voting bureau, you fix up your mouth or use your compact, your husband will be reassured" (163). Colvin draws from a wide array of narratives to demonstrate how the postwar natalist stance and the need to reestablish normalcy and stability fuelled cultural narratives that undercut women's relationship to power, at precisely the moment in which French women embarked on new political participation. Her work offers a valuable contribution to a more nuanced understanding of gender identity in postwar France.