From Vichy to the Sexual Revolution: Gender and Family Life in Postwar France [Hardcover]

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.At the end of World War II, France discarded not only the Vichy regime but also the austere ideology behind it. Under the veneer of a conservative vision of family characterized by the traditional structure of a male breadwinner and female homemaker, the conception of love, marriage, and parenting began changing in the years immediately after the Liberation. In the 1950s, France experienced rapid economic development alongside a baby boom, changing from a rural country worn out by economic depression, war, and occupation into an urban, industrial, and affluent nation. Meanwhile, the works of Sigmund Freud, Simone de Beauvoir, and Alfred Kinsey began to influence popular culture and shape how people thought about their partners, their children, and themselves. Little more than twenty years after Vichy was abolished, France had already entered the early phases of a dramatic sexual revolution, laying the groundwork for the turmoil of May 1968.From Vichy to the Sexual Revolutionexplores the factors that led to such radical changes in French notions of gender roles, family structures, and sexuality. Sarah Fishman follows French women's path toward emancipation from winning suffrage in 1945 to the social movements of 1960s, painting a broad view of shifting habits and ideas about love, courtship, sex, marriage, parenting, childhood, and adolescence. She surveys a wide range of sources, including juvenile court cases, inexpensive guidebooks on marriage and childbirth, and popular magazines--Marie ClaireandEllemost notably, where iconic columnists such as Marcelle Auclair and Mals2