Rebuilding the French Race: Immigration, Reproduction, and National Identity in France, 1900-1939

FAIN: FT-51189-03

Elisa Camiscioli
SUNY Research Foundation, Binghamton (Binghamton, NY 13902-4400)

Requests funding to prepare one chapter in a book manuscript on gender and race in the early 20th-century immigration debate. The book explores how social critics hierarchized immigrant populations, evaluating the quality of their labor and potential to produce French offspring. The book advances our understanding of immigration by analyzing untraditional sources rooted in the private/domestic sphere, using marriage, sexuality, and reproduction as categories of analysis. Specifically, the chapter examines the intersection of race, immigration, and reproduction in documents concerned with the presence of non-white prostitutes in France; and "white slavery," or, the alleged kidnapping of French women and their sale into prostitution abroad.