Modernizing Tradition. Gender and Consumerism in Interwar France and Germany (review)

The topic of this book is the image of women in French and German interwar societies, using advertisements as historical sources to describe the stereotypes of women and of gendered roles. During WWI, French and German women were vested with new responsibilities, but during the interwar years came a period of reaction characterized by a “restoration of housewifery” (p. 25). Stanley shows throughout the book that this reaction developed in the realm of consumption, as a resurgence of tradition underlying a discourse of modernity. Stanley argues that consumption is a key term because it was the most important element to identify women. In this aspect, Stanley follows the footsteps of the work of Jean Baudrillard, La société de consommation. Ses mythes. Ses structures (Paris: SGPP, 1970), which curiouslyis not mentioned in the references.

In his first chapter, through an analysis of advertisement discourses, Stanley explores the lives of the German and French housewives and the tensions existing between their inescapable duties and potential empowerment. Following a similar methodology, Chapter 2 studies the post–World War I discourse of motherhood. After the enormous population losses during the Great War, and anxiety over the birth rate led different European countries to promote policies favoring population growth through procreation. As a result, motherhood was encouraged by the French interwar governments, the Weimar Republic as well as by the Nazi regime. All of these regimes characterized motherhood as the key to female happiness as well as women’s major mission in life. The ideologies to promote motherhood in each country, however, differed from case to case. As Richard J. Evans has shown in The Third Reich in Power: How the Nazis Won Over the Hearts and Minds of a Nation (London: 2006, pp. 516–19), the incentives for women in Nazi Germany to conceive more children went hand in hand with ideological conversion. Although the author’s choice of advertisement ads as its main source is understandable and commendable, it can also generate some limitations. A reader of Stanley’s book can miss the extremely strong links between stereotypes, prescriptive discourses, and propaganda. Stanley asserts that advertising and propaganda differ, but the case of Germany shows that it can be relevant to study advertising in conjunction with propaganda and more generally political sources.

Chapter 3 analyzes fashion, beauty, and health. The discussion about fashion is limited and does not make any use of the comparison between French and German fashion industries, the first centralized in Paris as the focus of consumers’ imagination, and the second sustaining hegemonic ambitions under the Nazi regime. The most interesting part of this chapter is about the discourses on women’s health. Despite the fact that he does not mention Simone de Beauvoir’s Le Deuxième Sexe (1949) in his bibliography, Stanley provides a description of the discourses concerning women’s illnesses and supposed weaknesses that echoes Beauvoir’s analysis.

Chapter 4 is about the automobile in a gendered perspective, tracing the difficult conquest of the steering wheel by interwar women. The border traced between technique, as the realm of the masculine, and aesthetics, as feminine, addresses ongoing interwar debates on consumer goods.

The crucial topics of work and leisure constitute the focus of the last chapter. Here, Stanley intertwines a critique of the messages relayed by the media and scholarly literature about opportunistic views of governments toward women at work. Similarly to Chapter 2 on motherhood, the parallels emerging between different political regimes may reflect generalized promises of consumption, but Stanley leaves the reader expecting to find more information about political and ideological foundations of the different national agendas.

Feminism took many nuances between the wars. Authors like Christine Bard have studied the more radical visions of interwar feminine emancipation, such as the French garçonne or the German Knabin. Mary Lynn Stewart has recently developed an equally relevant notion of hybrid modernity to describe interwar femininity. Stanley...