Working Girls: Sex, Taste, and Reform in the Parisian Garment Trades, 1880-1919

ISBN-13: 9780198841173 / Angielski / Twarda / 2019 / 288 str.

Patricia Tilburg

Opis

Working Girls offers a cultural history of the women of the Parisian garment trades as read by French entertainment and popular culture, labour reformers, and the women themselves, bridging the divide between the cultural history of the Parisian imaginary and the history of the French working classes and national identity.

Recenzje

This is the first work I know of that that discovers in popular culture not only a complete acceptance of women working outside the home, but a desire to shape them into something other than wives and mothers. Tilburg unveils a predominantly male bourgeois discourse about working-class women and traces its weight and pervasiveness in the French imagination. She then places that discourse into actual dialogue with its subjects who, in turn, appropriated their bourgeois-created image for their own ends. These handcraft workers emerge as heroines of French taste who provided a cultural counterpoint to bourgeois women's perceived decadence. Tilburg thereby succeeds in achieving the exceedingly difficult task of using their own words to give these women their proper place in history, one with which historians of culture, labor, gender, and European history will have to contend.

O autorze

Patricia Tilburg is James B. Duke Professor of History and Gender & Sexuality Studies at Davidson College. She is the author of Colette's Republic: Work, Gender, and Popular Culture in France, 1870-1914 (2009).