| Summary: | This book takes the mythos of the Parisian midinette as its primary field of investigation, analyzing the plethora of fanciful commentary about female garment workers in the capital during the belle epoque, but demonstrating that this whimsical Parisian imaginary was a fantasy with political intention. This narrative of Parisian working-class femininity defined significant aspects of French popular culture, philanthropy, and labor reform from the fin de siecle through World War I, and became an essential means of representing and coping with the early twentieth-century encounter between labor and modern capitalism. From the 1880s through the Great War, nostalgia about a certain kind of France was written onto the bodies of these women across French popular culture. The attractive, single young garment worker with a ready smile and inimitable Parisian taste was featured in countless novels, films, songs, social commentary, and even reform campaigns from the era as an inescapable urban type. She stood in for, at once, the superiority of French taste and craft, and the political and sexual subordination of French women and labor. The midinette was written onto the geography of Paris, by way of festivals, monuments, historic preservation, and guide books. She was also the public face of tens of thousands of real workingwomen whose demands for better labor conditions were modulated, distorted, and, in some cases, amplified by this ubiquitous Romantic type. This book reveals the way that the figure of the midinette inflected labor policy, reform efforts, and the daily lives of Paris's workingwomen.
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