ABSTRACT
Some episodes in the past have posed a less obvious challenge, but feminists might argue that their construction by historians is just as fragile and partial. One of the benefits of the fragmentation of the historiography of the Revolution, after all, was that more space opened up for consciousness of the presence or absence of women in revolutionary history. By contrast, the inter-war period, the subject of this book, has not been subjected to the same drastic revision and interpretation as the two previous examples. There may be considerable nuances in the way the story is told, but the narrative outline of ‘what happened in France’ between 1918 and 1939 will be found in recognizable form in most student textbooks or histories for the general reader. This book sets out to rethink that period from a feminist perspective, not so much to challenge what has so far been written as to query what has not been written, using the new research of recent years to ask different questions and-inevitably-to propose some alternative readings. It aims to apply the perspectives and the findings of what is variously known as women’s history, gender history or feminist history to a rather resistant historical ‘site of research’. I do not underestimate the difficulty of trying to do this. It was after having taught twentieth-century French history to students, and found it awkward to incorporate the findings of women’s history into it, that I began this project. Authors of textbooks, who must try to write concise accounts, have my sympathy. But the prevailing gender-blindness of so much of the historical literature has been a spur to explore how it could be otherwise. It is not a matter of ‘putting the record straight’: this account, like others, will be partial, in both senses of the word.
