ABSTRACT

In Civilization without Sexes, Mary Louise Roberts describes a ‘dialectical effort to reconcile outdated domestic ideals with a changing social organization’. Although it seldom garnered front-page headlines, Roberts writes, the mobilization of women during the Great War as workers on the home front performing tasks previously exclusive to men created a postwar demand for an end to established gender roles. Previously women had been perceived as wives and mothers, cultivating the foyer familial in silence, but the experience of working life and the death of one-and-a-half million future husbands in battle permanently altered the face of both the French family and the workforce.1