Jews and Gender in Liberation France

A new look at France during and after the German occupation in World War II.

K. H. Adler (Author)

9780521026963, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 2 November 2006

288 pages, 1 b/w illus. 2 maps
22.8 x 15.2 x 1.7 cm, 0.443 kg

'Jews and Gender in Liberation France offers a compelling and highly convincing account of the gendered and racialized structures of assimilationism in occupied and liberated France … Adler's argument is persuasive, rooted in details analysis of a number of historical sources, and lucidly expressed.' French Studies

This book takes a new look at occupied and liberated France through the dual prism of race, specifically Jewishness, and gender - core components of Vichy ideology. The imagining of liberation and the potential post-Vichy state, lay at the heart of resistance strategy. Their transformation into policy at liberation forms the basis of an enquiry that reveals a society which, while split deeply at the political level, found considerable agreement over questions of race, the family and gender. This is explained through a new analysis of republican assimilation which insists that gender was as important a factor as nationality or ethnicity. A new concept of the 'long liberation' provides a framework for understanding the continuing influence of the liberation in post-war France, where scientific planning came to the fore, but whose exponents were profoundly imbued with reductive beliefs about Jews and women that were familiar during Vichy.

List of illustrations
Abbreviations
Acknowledgements
1. Introduction: the long liberation
2. Narrating liberation
3. Anticipating liberation: the gendered nation in print
4. Limiting liberation: 'the French for France'
5. Controlling liberation: Georges Mauco and a population fit for France
6. Liberation in place: Jewish women in the city
7. Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Gender studies, gender groups [JFSJ], Judaism [HRJ], Second World War [HBWQ], Postwar 20th century history, from c 1945 to c 2000 [HBLW3], European history [HBJD]