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In the decades after World War II, French ideas about gender and family life underwent dramatic changes, laying the groundwork for the sexual revolution of the 1960s. This book offers a broad view of changing lives and ideas about love, courtship, marriage, giving birth, parenting, childhood, and adolescence in France from the Vichy regime to the sexual revolution of 1960s.
List of contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: The 1940s?From War to Peace
- Chapter 1: Men, Women, and Family Life, 1945-1949
- Chapter 2: Forces of Change
- Chapter 3: Marriage and Parenting in the 1950s
- Chapter 4: Children and Adolescents in the 1950s
- Chapter 5: Family, Sex, Marriage, and the New Self
- Chapter 6: Youth, Women, Jeunes Filles
- Chapter 7: Dating and Courtship
- Chapter 8: Something Old, Something New: Marriage and Children in the 1960s
- Bibliography
About the author
Sarah Fishman is Professor of History at the University of Houston. Her books include The Battle for Children: World War II, Youth Crime and Juvenile Justice in Twentieth-Century France and We Will Wait: Wives of French Prisoners of War, 1940-1945.
Summary
At the end of World War II, the vast majority of people in France, living in small towns or rural areas, had suffered through a series of traumas-economic depression, war and occupation, the absence of millions of POWs, deportees and forced laborers, widespread destruction. The resulting disruptions continued to reverberate in families for several years after the Liberation. In the decades following the war, France experienced radical economic and social transformations, becoming an urban, industrial, affluent nation. In less than thirty years, French ideas about gender and family life underwent dramatic changes. This book provides a broad view of changing lives and ideas about love, courtship, marriage, giving birth, parenting, childhood, and adolescence in France from the Vichy regime to the sexual revolution of 1960s.
To understand how such changes influenced ideas about family life, From Vichy to the Sexual Revolution explores inexpensive guide books on marriage, childbirth and parenting, advice columns and popular magazines directed at readers from a variety of backgrounds. Sarah Fishman puts these sources into context, by exploring juvenile court family case studies. She links economic and social changes to the evolution of thinking about gender, the self, and the family, throwing new light on the emergence of a new vision of the family, one based on dynamic relationships rather than a set structure.
Additional text
a clear, convincing account of post-war France which engages with a number of important discussions in modern European history. The originality of sources, the attention to the language deployed in the documents analysed and the focus on children within developing gender relations is especially valuable. Throughout the book, Fishman introduces elements of transnationalism and comparison with other European countries and with the US which will no doubt be of interest to all historians and students of gender, sexuality and childhood in the modern period.
