Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Abbreviations
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction: the long liberation
- 2 Narrating liberation
- 3 Anticipating liberation: the gendered nation in print
- 4 Limiting liberation: ‘the French for France’
- 5 Controlling liberation: Georges Mauco and a population fit for France
- 6 Liberation in place: Jewish women in the city
- 7 Conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare
6 - Liberation in place: Jewish women in the city
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 July 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Abbreviations
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction: the long liberation
- 2 Narrating liberation
- 3 Anticipating liberation: the gendered nation in print
- 4 Limiting liberation: ‘the French for France’
- 5 Controlling liberation: Georges Mauco and a population fit for France
- 6 Liberation in place: Jewish women in the city
- 7 Conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare
Summary
At liberation, the assimilatory project loomed large in resister and demographer discourses. But how was the project received and interpreted by those who had been its targets during the occupation? Some answers to this question will be sought from testimony from interviews with a number of immigrant Jewish women from Paris. There is no sense that the interviews together form a sociologically representative sample, though it is also unclear quite how such a sample might be constituted. Women, immigrants and Jews had faced Vichy exclusionism from a variety of standpoints. I chose to interview a number of individuals on the basis of their femininity, Jewishness and foreignness — essentialized traits, perhaps — rather than on the basis of their actions that might in some small way express their agency, such as joining resistance groups, going into hiding or having babies, for instance. It has been a central contention of this study that gender in general, and references to maternity in particular, framed the assimilatory project. Motherhood provided one of the areas of reflection in interviews, although the people concerned did not necessarily see themselves primarily as mothers. All had undertaken paid work, though many suspected that their femininity and loss of education while in hiding had hindered the type of employment available. A number had been political activists before, during and after the war. All had married and had children, and all were in Paris during the period of liberation.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Jews and Gender in Liberation France , pp. 144 - 174Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2003