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

As the twentieth century dawned and France entered an era of extraordinary labor activism and industrial competition, an insistently romantic vision of the Parisian garment worker was deployed by politicians, reformers, and artists to manage anxieties about economic and social change.
Nostalgia about a certain kind of France was written onto the bodies of the capital's couture workers throughout French pop culture from the 1880s to the 1930s. And the midinettes-as these women were called- were written onto the geography of Paris itself, by way of festivals, monuments, historic
preservation, and guide books. The idealized working Parisienne stood in for, at once, the superiority of French taste and craft, and the political (and sexual) subordination of French women and labour. But she was also the public face of more than 80,000 real working women whose demands for better
labour conditions were inflected, distorted, and, in some cases, amplified by this ubiquitous Romantic type in the decades straddling World War I. Working Girls bridges cultural histories of the Parisian imaginary and histories of French labour, and puts them in raucous dialogue with one another: a
letter by a nineteen-year-old seamstress, a speech by a government minister; a frothy Parisian guide by a bon vivant, the minutes of a union meeting; a bawdy cafe-concert song, a policy brief on garment working conditions.


Author: Patricia Tilburg
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 12/31/2019
Pages: 288
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.30lbs
Size: 9.30h x 6.40w x 1.00d
ISBN: 9780198841173

About the Author

Patricia Tilburg, James B. Duke Professor of History and Gender & Sexuality Studies, Davidson College

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).

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