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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.