Women and Mass Consumer Society in Postwar France (review)

Rebecca J. Pulju’s new text adds to a growing body of work that recognizes the era of the Fourth Republic (1944–1958) to be a remarkable moment of transformation for France. Situated between the ignominy of the Vichy Regime and the triumphant return of Charles de Gaulle with the Fifth Republic, the decade and a half immediately following the Second World War is increasingly being revealed to hold the roots of contemporary France; from issues of decolonization and immigration to economic modernization and integration, the long 1950s are a pivot point for modern France. Pulju’s book fills an important gap in the literature by bringing together several aspects of postwar France to explain the social and cultural transformation from the inside out: that is, how changes within the French household not only affected the daily life of those living there, but how, in aggregate, these changes in the habits of household consumption modernized France.

Pulju shows how French state-directed economic modernization intertwined with an expanding role for women in French public life as the “citizen consumer.” In the postwar years, economic and technological modernization was the order of the day, as the state sought to develop mass production in France; however, to support mass production, they needed mass consumption. Given the context of postwar reconstruction and the more generally deplorable condition of French housing, a focus on household consumer durables permitted the possibility of satisfying multiple needs while allowing women to assert a new authority in the polity without upsetting traditional notions of gender. French women gained the vote in 1944, and, Pulju argues that “for women exercising full citizenship for the first time, this was both empowering and constraining, as it implied a new kind of national influence but meant the gendering of citizenship at the moment of enfranchisement” (25).

Pulju’s book examines the top-down efforts to structure and encourage informed mass consumption in conjunction with the bottom-up demands of the women consumers themselves who were concerned with procuring an improved standard of living at an affordable cost. Her book is organized topically. Chapter One considers the ways in which women’s consumer organizations and state planners together defined the role of the citizen consumer based on women’s expertise of the home and family. Chapter Two examines the ways in which goods themselves were produced and made widely accessible, with very interesting insight into how purchasing on credit gained legitimacy within an economic culture that had long abhorred it. Chapter Three looks at how these new patterns of consumption affected the dynamics of marriage and family life, while Chapter Four looks at the moderating effects on class-consciousness. Finally, Chapter Five is an examination of the Salon des art ménagers, an annual public trade show for household goods, a “festival of consumption,” which Pulju skillfully uses as a case study to bring together the main thrusts of the preceding chapters.

Pulju’s book is very well researched. She carefully uses the relevant secondary literature to good effect while the wealth and breadth of her primary research is formidable. A significant proportion of her evidence is drawn from a vast array of sociological studies produced by a host of public and private institutions. Indeed, the social scientific gaze applied to housewives and consumption in this period is remarkable, yet it goes without specific comment. Perhaps this monograph isn’t the place for it, but it would be interesting to see this intersection of commerce, governance, culture, and social study itself put under scrutiny as it produced a particular vision of the French housewife, mass consumer society, and what it meant to be modern. That is, a critique of these sources is merited to understand the inherent assumptions built-in to such epistemologies in the particular context of mid-twentieth-century France.

Related to this, the French housewife and female consumer is less presented than represented here. She is represented in the sense of the usual...