Randall Webster

Women in Modern Europe

Civilization Without Sexes

Moral panics, though most often exaggerated beyond the bounds of the problem, are

usually based in something real: a concrete problem that scares people for any number of

reasons. By the end of World War I, the people of France were confronted with a totally new set

of problems. Specifically, ones of demographic nature. The war had been won, but the nation had

somehow been lost. France was sick, and in Civilization without Sexes, Roberts argues that her

illness and potential cures were largely interwoven with fears of, and solutions to, the changing

gender roles in french society.

Roberts argument largely lies on the inter-war debates over female identity, the

environment that led to its perceived importance, the problems it saw as most pertinent, and the

solutions that it prescribed. The causation, in her view, seems to be divided into two loose

groupings: those problems caused by the great war, and those caused by the march of

modernization. However, Roberts is careful to highlight the interplay of all these causes.

Interwoven in the minds of those reacting to such change, they set a stage on which the

unworkable old was played against the fearfully imagined monster of the new. And from this

dialectic, emerged two different conceptions of feminine identity to appose the modern woman;

both of which drew on the past in different ways.1

A monster stalked the streets of inter-war France; its name: la femme moderne. Hardly

proud of their accomplishments at war, weary soldiers found themselves ambushed in their own

1
Mary Louise Roberts, 1994, Civilization Without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Postwar
France, 1917-1927, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pg 11.
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homes by creatures determined to further strip them of their valor. Though often not to these

extremes, popular culture presented an actualization of the long feared modern woman during

the chaos of war-time France. This amalgamation of fears was formed into a widely shared

conception of what should never have been; a representation of the great wars unforeseen

consequences. In Roberts own words, the modern woman came to symbolize the loss of

everything familiar in postwar France.2

Strung up for display, the narrative of the modern woman was tied to everything new,

used to contextualize the rapid changes brought largely by the experience of total war. Roberts

argues that clothing, especially, effected peoples perceptions of gender roles. Changes in fashion

were seen as both a means in which women were being liberated from their old roles, and an

attempt to blur the lines between genders.3 Though they did little to liberate in reality, these

changes offered a horrifying microcosm for french society as a whole. Not only did women

seemed more numerous, become bolder, and seem to gain economic and social power, but they

were beginning to encroach on what defined masculinity at its most superficial level.4 Such a

terrible act brought forth images of a civilization without sexes.

Roberts largely analyzes popular literature to foundation her arguments about the

thoughts, emotions, and fears of french society at large. Through this methodology, she shows

that not only did images of the modern woman crop up in popular literature, but they did so as

antagonisms. The conclusion to these stories, and the solution to France's cultural problems, were

2
Ibid, 41.

3
Ibid, 84.

4
Ibid, 86-87.
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the rectification of an older system of gender roles. The need for such drastic measures could

surely be justified by only the encroachment of the modern woman. It wasnt, however,

The creation of the modern woman was put into a much larger context, centered mostly

around the moral decay and decadence of french society. As Roberts explains, France was sick.

Economically, politically, morally, etc.5 The debasement of gender roles was not merely a

symptom, either, it was a major cause. The casualties of the first world war stripped france of its

men, and with it went vitality, masculinity, life, and economic and political dominance. In a

display of incredible irony, the war that was meant to assure the vitality of french men had done

the opposite, and it was now the women of France who needed to shoulder that burden.6 And so,

from both hardship and opposition to the modern woman, la mere was conceptualized.

The idea of the mother as a decidedly modern construct is further supported by the

range in which it was contextualized within the debt that men had just paid as members of the

military. Roberts describes the movement as presenting a solution to a set of anxieties, gendered,

economic, and political, that they had helped to ferment.7 She presents this case by bringing forth

legal, cultural, and political examples of women having their actions directly speaking to her

loyalty to the state, and her understanding of the sacrifice that its soldiers had made. Women who

rejected the normative conceptions of gender were seen as undermining the efforts of the war, as

well as the very masculinity of the men who fought in it.8

5
Ibid, 103.

6
Ibid, 131.

7
Ibid, 214.

8
Ibid, 141.
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The creation of this narrative was no small effort. It involved not only the confused,

disheartened, and emasculated men whos fears were most listened too, but the professional

classes that dominated public policy at the time. Doctors and psychologists, specifically,

contributed to the discourse around both the inherent need for women to fulfill their normative

roles, and the sickly state of France whos moral decay left it on the verge of collapse and death.9

The mother was, as a concept, central to the natalists narrative for reconstructing the

roles of women around nationalist guidelines. Like many of the right-wing socio-political

movements of inter-war period, the natalists were not hard-set on the past construction of

motherhood. Instead, they sought to appropriate that conception and recreate it for their needs.

The mother was not a figure of the past, it was a decidedly modern construct.10 This can be seen

in its clearly stated goalsduty to the state being most notablewhich are answers to modern

problems, and contextualized in a modern idea of the nation.

The cornerstone of the eventual synthesis of female roles was the image of the single

woman. In contrast to the starkly conservative image of the mother, the single woman was a

synthesis of old and new, and one that allowed some amount of relative progression in the area of

womens liberation.11 These gains were made on the grounds of motherhood, and essential factor

in ensuring their acceptability to french society at large.12 This is not to say that the construction

of the single woman was a practical concession of more radical minds. Though deliberately

9
Ibid, 111-112.

10
Ibid, 14.

11
Ibid, 168.

12
Ibid, 141.
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sheltered from the political realm, it was similar but separate to the natalist construction of the

mother, a genuine attempt to redefine gender roles by looking into the past for interspersion.

Though it is not as reactionary as the natalist conception, it is still tinted with the logic of

conservatism.

In my opinion, one of the major strengths of this work lies in a contextual fit that is

barely examined: that of the larger socio-political movements of the inter-war period. Roberts

makes half-baked nods towards the natalist movements in other states such as Germany, but does

not tie it nor its emergence in any other countries to the turbulent far-right political scene of

continental Europe. There is a reason why the great war marks the end of Monarchism as a

serious political position. It forced parties who had formally looked to the past to grapple with a

new reality, and one that could not simply be reverted to and older time. The last few pages of

the book speak to a point that Roberts could have made much more strongly: the socio-political

context that created the single woman and the mother also led to the rise of the revolutionary-

right.

Roberts argues that gender became a medium in which french society could cope with the

horrors of modernity that were forced on them so suddenly, and that from this emerged a

complex series of roles that shaped society at a fundamental level. Aside from gripes about links

that could have been, its safe to say that Roberts makes her argument successfully.