Freshly Printed - allow 7 days lead
Couldn't load pickup availability
Reproductive Citizens
Gender, Immigration, and the State in Modern France, 1880–1945
Nimisha Barton (Author)
9781501749636
Hardback, published 15 September 2020
306 pages, 16 b&w halftones - 16 Halftones, black and white
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.7 cm, 0.907 kg
This book will therefore appeal to a wide readership. The strength of this book lies in its attention to details and relatability. By offering personal accounts to illustrate the effects of these populationist policies, Barton has made History accessible, and maybe more importantly, real: These are people's stories, lives lived. Barton's attention to solidarity and the forces that shaped immigrants' opportunities and everyday experiences provides an enormously valuable contribution to a literature that has tended to stress exclusion and discrimination. Barton shows, without whitewashing the racist and genocidal policies of the French state under Vichy, that populationism could also have a different face: namely, one that gave immigrants a place in a society at risk of depopulation caused by a combination of political and economic crises. Barton has done a remarkable job of resurrecting the voices of people at the margins of social and political life in France, and she strikes the perfect balance between the inner lives of her protagonists and their forgotten role in shaping the French state's policies toward immigration, the family, and the meaning of the nation. Reproductive Citizens expands our understanding of citizenship in the first half of twentieth-century France, illuminating the ways in which gender and sexuality shaped access to social rights, privileges, and protections. Barton has written a book both engaging and vital to understanding issues of immigration and French citizenship in this period.
In the familiar tale of mass migration to France from 1880 onward, we know very little about the hundreds of thousands of women who formed a critical part of those migration waves. In Reproductive Citizens, Nimisha Barton argues that their relative absence in the historical record hints at a larger and more problematic oversight—the role of sex and gender in shaping the experiences of migrants to France before the Second World War. Barton's compelling history of social citizenship demonstrates how, through the routine application of social policies, state and social actors worked separately toward a shared goal: repopulating France with immigrant families. Filled with voices gleaned from census reports, municipal statistics, naturalization dossiers, court cases, police files, and social worker registers, Reproductive Citizens shows how France welcomed foreign-born men and women—mobilizing naturalization, family law, social policy, and welfare assistance to ensure they would procreate, bearing French-assimilated children. Immigrants often embraced these policies because they, too, stood to gain from pensions, family allowances, unemployment benefits, and French nationality. By striking this bargain, they were also guaranteed safety and stability on a tumultuous continent. Barton concludes that, in return for generous social provisions and refuge in dark times, immigrants joined the French nation through marriage and reproduction, breadwinning and child-rearing—in short, through families and family-making—which made them more French than even formal citizenship status could.
Introduction
1. The Forces that Push and Pull
2. Bachelors, Bureaucrats, and Marrying into the Nation
3. Wives, Wages, and Regulating Breadwinners
4. Mothers, Welfare Organizations, and Reproducing for the Nation
5. Neighborhood, Street Culture, and Melting-Pot Mixité
6. Motherhood, Neighborhood, and Nationhood
7. Neighborly Networks and Welfare Work under Vichy
Conclusion