The Politics of Family, Gender, and the French Right, 1919-1944

FAIN: FT-59163-11

Cheryl A. Koos
California State University, Los Angeles (Los Angeles, CA 90032-4226)

I propose to use a NEH Summer Stipend to complete a book project on the social and political history of interwar France. This project argues that concerns about family, gender, and the birthrate became central to the way the political right, from mainstream conservatives to nascent fascists, conceived of the French nation and state. It maintains that the resulting twenty-year campaign by a host of political leaders and pro-family/pronatalist (pro-birthrate) activists to create a conservative, authoritarian, and patriarchal state culminated in the Vichy regime of 1940-44. The project underscores the centrality of representations of gender and family in politics beyond this particular national or chronological framework, and thus is of importance for understanding political history as well as contemporary politics, culture, and society.