Abstract
Reviewed by: Joan Tumblety, University of Southampton, UK
This is a book about the gendered languages of politics in the 1920s and 1930s. Using parliamentary speeches, politicians’ correspondence, funeral orations and the newspapers of movements and parties across the political spectrum, including the radical fringes on left and right, Read presents instances of gendered thinking among political actors, teasing out what was shared and what was distinct. He anchors such ideas quite precisely within debates about citizenship, youth, reproduction, immigration, welfare, employment and suffrage. If virtues such as self-abnegation, duty and hard work were applied to both men and women, he argues, they were nonetheless not gender neutral. Read demonstrates, for instance, how self-effacement for men meant performing the role of benevolent protector in the family, whereas for women it entailed subjugation to paternal authority as wives and mothers. There were distinctions across the spectrum of politics, too, so that despite a pervasive acceptance of natalism, large families and Catholicism were extolled mainly on the conservative right, while the kind of gender non-conformism preached by the socialist Léon Blum and the feminist Madeleine Pelletier, rare enough on the left, was literally unthinkable there.
Yet it is one of Read’s chief arguments that there was a good deal of convergence in the gendered norms implicated in political debate in these years. In a chapter devoted to the widespread rhetorical evocation of ‘new men’ (less so ‘new women’, who were confined to the brief period of communist gender radicalism in the early 1920s), the author interprets the gendered language around these figures as evidence that politics as a whole was becoming radicalized. The exultation of militant virility within radical rightist groups (specifically the Croix de Feu/PSF and Parti Populaire Français) is read as a ‘fascist attempt to graft the fraternalist spirit of the left onto the fascist project’ (76), and Read sees the explosion in membership of the Croix de Feu/PSF by 1937 as evidence of the traction of this ‘fascist new man’ among the wider public. Pointing to the fact that centrist and conservative political parties espoused apparently similar rhetoric in their mobilization of youth after the mid-1930s, he goes so far as to suggest that the period was marked by a ‘totalitarian drift’ (55) in which ‘totalitarian new men destabilized the hegemonic breadwinner ideal’ (90). This is too reductive a reading in my view, although there was certainly a bleeding of political boundaries between the conservative and far right, whose factions sometimes shared members and even leaders.
The book also explores how these gendered imaginings intersected with racialized conceptions of national strength in a period also marked by anxieties about immigration, economic crisis, and a persistently stagnant birth rate. Thus Read draws attention to the pervasive quest to improve the race through the sort of physical exercise that also honed bodies into prevailing manly ideals, and to address women as bearers of the race. Xenophobic attitudes and a sense of imperial superiority, if not outright racism, were expressed in the socialist as well as the rightist press. Natalism itself became racialized, with widespread concerns about the effects of cultural swamping by the wrong sort of immigrant. Drawing on the recent work of Elisa Camiscioli among others, Read thus invites us to question the ‘progressive’ credentials of the mid-1930s Popular Front governments, and instead to see the era as a turning point towards a fixation with ‘racial regeneration’ that had obviously harmful effects under the Occupation of 1940–1944 (12).
Much of the territory that Read treads is familiar. His work contributes to the recent surge of scholarly interest in the relationship between gender and the radical right in France, but one can read more substantial accounts of gender and radical politics, populationism and eugenics elsewhere. The same is true for the themes of social welfare, natalism and the gendered underpinnings of ‘breadwinner’ status. Despite claims to treat the impact of this gendered and racialized thinking on interwar policy formation, the originality of the book remains tied to its discussion of representations, including those found in less commonly used sources such as obituaries and eulogies. What commends the study is the treatment of a much wider swathe of the political spectrum than is commonly attempted, and the relational nature of its exploration of masculinity and femininity. Its close and systematic reading of the interwar press, with attention paid to both male and female voices, furnishes the reader with a wealth of examples of specific gendered formulations. For this reader, Read’s explication of the bourgeois, paternalist mesure that marked centrist politicians’ idealizations of manliness; and the survey of attitudes to women’s suffrage across all parties and movements, which underlines the energy of women’s own activism, are especially welcome.