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- Title
The Good, the Bad, and the Childless: The Politics of Female Identity in Maternité (1929) and La Maternelle (1933).
- Authors
Koos, Cheryl A.
- Abstract
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.
- Subjects
FRANCE; WOMEN in motion pictures; MATERNITE (Film); MATERNELLE (Film); BENOIT-Levy, Jean, 1888-1959; EPSTEIN, Marie; MOTION pictures &; history; MOTION pictures; FRENCH films; MOTION picture history; TWENTIETH century; MANNERS &; customs
- Publication
Historical Reflections / Réflexions Historiques, 2009, Vol 35, Issue 2, p3
- ISSN
0315-7997
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.3167/hrrh2009.350202