This essay explores Jean Benoît-Lévy and Marie Epstein's box-office success La Maternelle and their lesser-known Maternité in the context of interwar debates over women's roles in society. Reflecting natalist-familialist conceptions of motherhood and femininity, the films magnified three pervasive cultural icons in French social and political discourse: the monstrous, childless "modern woman," the exalted mother, and the "single woman" who fell somewhere in the middle. As both products and vehicles of these tropes, La Maternelle and Maternité not only illustrate how popular cinema disseminated and justified certain value-laden assumptions about female identity in the late 1920s and early 1930s; they also reveal the limitations of French feminism and socially-engaged, progressive art of the period.
Search Results
The Good, the Bad, and the Childless
The Politics of Female Identity in Maternité (1929) and La Maternelle (1933)
Cheryl A. Koos
In Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques
- Published (Print):
- 01 Jun 2009
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 3–20 (18 total)
The Catholic Nobility’s Commitment to Écoles Libres in France, 1850–1905
Elizabeth C. Macknight
patrie et de la famille”: femmes catholiques et maternité sous la III République (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2000); Bruno Dumons, Les Dames de la Ligue des femmes françaises (1901–1914) (Paris: Cerf, 2006). 5 John K. Huckaby, “Roman Catholic Reaction to the
In Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques
- Published (Print):
- 01 Dec 2017
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 18–41 (24 total)
Wives and Goods in the Venetian Palazzo
Stanley Chojnacki
Renaissance Italy , trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 117–118. First published as “La ‘mère cruelle’: Maternité, veuvage et dot dans la Florence des XIV-XV siècles,” Annales: Économies, sociétés, civilisations 38, no
In Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques
- Published (Print):
- 01 Mar 2017
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 104–118 (15 total)
“Before the War, Life Was Much Brighter and Happier than Today”
Letters from French War Orphans, 1915–1922
Bethany S. Keenan
, “The Great War and Modern Motherhood: La Maternité and the Bombing of Paris,” in Women and War in the Twentieth Century: Enlisted With or Without Consent (New York: Garland, 1999), 58–68. For work on women and World War I in general, see, among others
In Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques
- Published (Print):
- 01 Dec 2020
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 55–77 (23 total)