The Parisian Workingwoman, 1880-1936

FAIN: FT-248808-16

Patricia Ann Tilburg
Davidson College (Davidson, NC 28036-9405)

A book-length study of French women garment workers in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.

From the late eighteenth-century, France has been a center of fashion and luxury craft production. At around that same time, the Parisian garment trade worker held a special place in French popular culture. In the 1830s and 40s, these women became common cultural currency with the creation of indelible fictional creations like the grisettes of romantic literature. My book manuscript assesses the legacy and cultural meaning of this type, particularly in its early twentieth-century incarnations, when the working Parisienne became an especially weighted icon and a meeting point of concerns about women’s work, labor reform, and national taste. This book brings together the lived experience of Parisian workingwomen—gleaned through letters, contemporary interviews, and other archival materials—with the deeply romantic and deeply gendered cultural screen through which they were understood in this period.

Associated Products

Working Girls: Sex, Taste, and Reform in the Parisian Garment Trades, 1880-1919 (Book)
Title: Working Girls: Sex, Taste, and Reform in the Parisian Garment Trades, 1880-1919
Author: Patricia Tilburg
Abstract: 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.
Year: 2019
Primary URL: https://www.worldcat.org/title/working-girls-sex-taste-and-reform-in-the-parisian-garment-trades-1880-1919/oclc/1137218789&referer=brief_results
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: ‎ 0198841175
Copy sent to NEH?: No

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