Gender, Family, and French Political Life

French women's political activity has long been seen as a matter of women's claims for civil and political rights and their uphill battle to be recognized as political actors. Of course, there are good reasons for this, given women's long struggle for rights: women in France were enfranchised only in 1944 and voted for the first time in 1945. Even then, years passed before Civil Code reforms abolished the remaining obstacles to women's civil rights and acknowledged their full legal personhood. Yet, as historians have recognized, women, although they lacked full political citizenship, nonetheless engaged in a variety of political movements, including those on the extreme right. Caroline Campbell and Kelly Ricciardi Colvin examine women's different political trajectories, before and after they won the right to vote, and the limits on their political activity. Campbell examines women's engagement in fascist politics before they won the vote, whereas winning suffrage, Colvin argues, as significant an achievement as it was, hardly meant general recognition of women's rights or agency as political actors in the decade immediately following the war.

Campbell focuses on women's activism in the extreme right-wing Croix de Feu (Cross of Fire, or CDF), the militaristic, violent, and often racist political movement that emerged in 1927 and became a parliamentary political party, the Parti social français (French Social Party, or PSF), in 1936. Drawing on a mass of original archival research and nearly sixty newspapers, journals, and bulletins, as well as contemporary published sources, she scrupulously details the organizations' recruitment strategies and operations in France and its colonies in the Maghreb. The CDF attempted to attract men by appealing to the heroism of the World War I veteran with a notion of "aggressive, yet controlled masculinity" (33) and appealed to women (unsurprisingly) on the basis of their moral and family duties. Croix women constituted a bulwark against the "new woman" of the 1920s and 1930s. Substituting Catholicism for republicanism as a national unifying force, the CDF's "ethnoreligious nationalism" was accompanied by extreme right-wing women's hostility to secular feminism.

Like many of the fascist leagues that emerged in the 1920s and 1930s, the Croix built a complex organization that included youth organizations and four different auxiliary groups. All worked to fulfill the aim of its leader, François de La Rocque, of creating a mass organization, a goal which was largely successful. The Croix indeed constituted France's largest political movement before the war, and women, Campbell argues, had a major role in its success. In addition to auxiliary groups, its efforts included newspapers, songs, parades, public demonstrations, physical education classes, and pressure on local governments to create war memorials to preserve public memory of the war. Social reform constituted one of its core activities and included the establishment of clinics, aid to the poor, and food distribution—services organized and managed principally by women. All took place under the leadership of Antoinette de Préval, head of the CDF's Women's Section, a war veteran (she had been a nurse) and close associate of La Rocque.

Préval worked to bring women into the movement by giving them a role in public, civil society activism. Founded six weeks after the February 6, 1934 riots that pitted French fascist leagues against Communists and Socialists, the Women's Section engaged in a massive recruitment effort. Within a year, women constituted one third of the movement's membership, more than any of the competing fascist organizations (61). Women's entry into the Croix en masse came as part of La Rocque's goal of building a mass movement and revolved around "empowering women...