Mary Lynn Stewart

Stewart traces the implementation of these laws in factories with an examination of the work of the predominantly bourgeois inspectors and their relations with employers and workers. She shows how employers and workers alike at first evaded, then slowly adjusted to the restrictive legislation. By identifying the curious mixture of reformers involved - including union organizers and enlightened employers, socialists and Social Catholics - and investigating the motives behind their campaign for protective labour legislation in France, Stewart reveals that these laws were conceived as barriers to exclude women from male job monopolies.

Professor Stewart-McDougall stresses the continuity of this extraordinarily successful and persistent movement from its beginnings under the July Monarchy through the revolutionary period to the advent of the Second Empire. She shows how, following the silk workers' insurrection of 1834, an indigenous radical leadership emerged and developed a flexible clandestine network which facilitated the creation of durable political machinery under the republic. Lyonnais radicals are shown to have been more successful than their Parisian counterparts in electing candidates, disseminating democratic-socialist ideas in the provinces, and resisting the successive blows of the repression of 1849-51. The Artisan Republic uses the techniques and approaches of local, labour, and social history to test some of the recent theories about the dynamics of revolution, repression, and resistance. It is an important addition to the growing number of studies which are giving a new direction to the formerly Paris-oriented historiography of the Second Republic.

In the late nineteenth century, the first wave of female journalists began writing in the French daily press. Yet, while they undeniably opened doors for the next generations of educated women, sexist hiring practices, assumptions about women’s aptitudes as reporters, and more subtle gender biases continued to saturate the industry in the decades that followed. Gender, Generation, and Journalism in France, 1910–1940 investigates the careers and written work of ten women who regularly reported in the national, Paris-based dailies. Addressing the role of mentorship, family connections, gendered behaviours, reporting styles, and subject matter, Mary Lynn Stewart debunks lingering essentialist notions about women’s entry into journalism. She shows that struggling newspapers, attempting to reverse declining circulation, hired women to cover subjects that expanded to include international relations, colonial conflicts, trials, local politics, and social problems. Through content analysis, deixis, and systematic comparisons of several women and men reporting on the same or different events, she further queries claims about a feminine style, finding more similarities than differences between masculine and feminine reporting. Documenting the persistence of gender discrimination in the hiring, assigning, and assessment of women reporters in the French daily press, Gender, Generation, and Journalism in France, 1910–1940 demonstrates that, through the support of their female colleagues, women managed to succeed despite a variety of challenges.

At a glance, high fashion and feminism seem unlikely partners. Between the First and Second World Wars, however, these forces combined femininity and modernity to create the new, modern French woman. In this engaging study, Mary Lynn Stewart reveals the fashion industry as an integral part of women's transition into modernity. Analyzing what female columnists in fashion magazines and popular women novelists wrote about the "new silhouette," Stewart shows how bourgeois women feminized the more severe, masculine images that elite designers promoted to create a hybrid form of modern that both emancipated women and celebrated their femininity. She delves into the intricacies of marketing the new clothes and the new image to middle-class women and examines the nuts and bolts of a changing industry-including textile production, relationships between suppliers and department stores, and privacy and intellectual property issues surrounding ready-to-wear couture designs. Dressing Modern Frenchwomen draws from thousands of magazine covers, advertisements, fashion columns, and features to uncover and untangle the fascinating relationships among the fashion industry, the development of modern marketing techniques, and the evolution of the modern woman as active, mobile, and liberated.