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REVIEWS
| Fathers, Families, and the State in France, 1914–1945. By Kristen Stromberg Childers (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003. xii + 261 pp. $39.95).
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| Kristen Stromberg Childers examines "public manifestations" of fatherhood to underscore the centrality of gender to "issues of citizenship and nationhood in early twentieth-century France" (11 and 44). She examines how diverse reformers collectively produced a language of civic paternity that organized beliefs concerning fatherhood into a coherent set of beliefs that ideologically promoted perceived and French national interests. Childers traces legislative debates, social reform agendas, political struggles, and popular perceptions concerning paternal authority and responsibility to underscore their symbolic centrality in a discourse concerning nation, state, and citizenship and to argue that there existed "a vibrant and critical discussion of paternity in the French state among participants from all across the political spectrum." (11) |
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Representing a new generation of scholarship1, Childers seeks a "more complex and politically revealing relationship between gender and the state." (3) Fathers, Families, and the State in France, 1914–1945 adopts a disposition of cultural analysis not easily dismissed by social historians who cut their teeth on statistical distributions or thick description. She finds that rather than viewing "male citizens as gender-neutral beings against whom they contrasted women," (3) the French state hosted, instead, an "animated conversation" on paternity between 1914 and 1945. (9) |
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Childers' approach may be distilled in how she interprets the un-named "Husband" in Guillaume Apollinaire's "Les Mamelles de Tirésias" (The Breasts of Tirésias) as emblematic of the complex and frequently ambivalent relationship between gender roles and gender politics that constitutes the "silent historiography" of modern French paternity wherein the "links between gender identities and the public good were at the forefront of French debates on national decline, war, population growth." (2) Following his wife's abrogation of her civic duties—spectacularly represented when her bosoms surrealistically fly off like a set of balloons—the now hermaphroditic Husband heroically bears the Nation's children parthenogenetically. The audience is relieved when Tirésias' beard falls off and the family bosom returns home. Thus, Janet Flanner reminds us, sterile, weak, and emasculated France was "repopulated, and indeed, rearmed, to music."2 |
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