Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributor
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction
- The formation of the French Popular Front, 1934–6
- The origins and nature of the Spanish Popular Front
- The French Radicals, Spain and the emergence of appeasement
- The Spanish army and the Popular Front
- Soldiers and Socialists: the French officer corps and leftist government, 1935–7
- The Spanish Church and the Popular Front: the experience of Salamanca province
- ‘La main tendue’, the French Communist Party and the Catholic Church, 1935–7
- Trotskyist and left-wing critics of the Popular Front
- The development of marxist theory in Spain and the Frente Popular
- The other Popular Front: French anarchism and the Front Révolutionnaire
- The French Popular Front and the politics of Jacques Doriot
- The Blum government, the Conseil National Economique and economic policy
- Social and economic policies of the Spanish left in theory and in practice
- Women, men and the 1936 strikes in France
- From clientelism to communism: the Marseille working class and the Popular Front
- A reinterpretation of the Spanish Popular Front: the case of Asturias
- Le temps des loisirs: popular tourism and mass leisure in the vision of the Front Populaire
- The educational and cultural policy of the Popular Front government in Spain, 1936–9
- French intellectual groups and the Popular Front: traditional and innovative uses of the media
- Index
Women, men and the 1936 strikes in France
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 October 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributor
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction
- The formation of the French Popular Front, 1934–6
- The origins and nature of the Spanish Popular Front
- The French Radicals, Spain and the emergence of appeasement
- The Spanish army and the Popular Front
- Soldiers and Socialists: the French officer corps and leftist government, 1935–7
- The Spanish Church and the Popular Front: the experience of Salamanca province
- ‘La main tendue’, the French Communist Party and the Catholic Church, 1935–7
- Trotskyist and left-wing critics of the Popular Front
- The development of marxist theory in Spain and the Frente Popular
- The other Popular Front: French anarchism and the Front Révolutionnaire
- The French Popular Front and the politics of Jacques Doriot
- The Blum government, the Conseil National Economique and economic policy
- Social and economic policies of the Spanish left in theory and in practice
- Women, men and the 1936 strikes in France
- From clientelism to communism: the Marseille working class and the Popular Front
- A reinterpretation of the Spanish Popular Front: the case of Asturias
- Le temps des loisirs: popular tourism and mass leisure in the vision of the Front Populaire
- The educational and cultural policy of the Popular Front government in Spain, 1936–9
- French intellectual groups and the Popular Front: traditional and innovative uses of the media
- Index
Summary
When Suzanne Lacore, a retired schoolteacher in a Dordogne village, heard that Léon Blum was about to offer her a junior ministry in his government in 1936, she hastened to decline it in advance. Blum responded:
Ma chère amie,
I will not bow to your refusal … You will not have to run anything [diriger], simply to encourage [animer]. Above all, your role is to be there, for your mere presence will signify a great deal. (my italics)
This essay will not be concerned with the women ministers of 1936, but they make a suitable starting point for asking how we can begin to assess the ‘presence’ of two sexes in France in the Popular Front period. Surprisingly often, even today, in many general histories of the French Popular Front, or indeed the Third Republic, the classic reference to Léon Blum's famous three ministers accompanies a notable absence of women from the rest of the text. Women's symbolic presence in the government, made clear in Blum's letter, remains symbolic in historical writing. The by now rather large body of writing, published or unpublished, on ‘women in the Third Republic’ still seems, however good its reputation, to be confined to a sort of ‘territory of the women's historian’, rather than integrated into ‘total history’.
The terms ‘women's history’ and ‘feminist history’ are sometimes used interchangeably, sometimes opposed to each other. Here, women's history will be taken to mean a history with women as its subject matter, feminist history one that tries to look at all history using the concepts of gender and gender relations.
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- The French and Spanish Popular FrontsComparative Perspectives, pp. 185 - 200Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1989
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