Fashioning Motherhood: French Magazine Subscribers Debate Class, Race, and Social Status, 1919–1939

Abstract:This research analyzes how bourgeois French women thought about, practiced, and performed their identity as mothers in the 1920s and 1930s. Mothers were deeply implicated in government schemes to raise the birthrate to prepare for a future conflict with Germany. However, motherhood was not the monolith that government officials thought it was; each woman experienced it differently based on many factors—most prominently, social class. This study relies on women's correspondence in fashion magazines for a microhistorical view of their lives—invisible from a government standpoint—and considers how they negotiated their identity as mothers within this sociopolitical climate. These women used the columns as social networks in which to define who was a "good" mother, describe how good mothers should raise their children, and uphold their own class status for others to see. Their conversations ultimately reflected both interwar social divisions and writers' changing notions of "good" motherhood.