Mary Louise Roberts

Bio: Mary Louise Roberts is an academic researcher from University of Wisconsin-Madison. The author has contributed to research in topics: Gender history & Politics. The author has an hindex of 8, co-authored 18 publications receiving 326 citations.

Disruptive Acts: The New Woman in Fin-de-Siecle France

Abstract: In fin-de-siecle France, politics were in an uproar, and gender roles blurred as never before. Into this maelstrom stepped the "new women", a group of primarily urban middle-class French women who became the objects of intense public scrutiny. Some remained single, some entered nontraditional marriages, and some took up the professions of medicine and law, journalism and teaching. All of them challenged traditional notions of womanhood by living unconventional lives and doing supposedly "masculine" work outside the home. Mary Louise Roberts examines a constellation of these famous new women active in journalism and the theatre, including Marguerite Durand, founder of the women's newspaper "La Fronde"; the journalists Severine and Gyp; and the actress Sarah Bernhardt. Roberts demonstrates how the tolerance for playacting in both these arenas allowed new women to stage acts that profoundly disrupted accepted gender roles. The existence of "La Fronde" itself was such an act, because it demonstrated that women could write just as well about the same subjects as men - even about the volatile Dreyfus Affair. When female reporters for "La Fronde" put on disguises to get a scoop or wrote under a pseudonym, and when actresses played men on stage, they demonstrated that gender identities were not fixed or natural, but inherently unstable. Thanks to the adventures of new women like these, conventional domestic femininity was exposed as a choice, not a destiny. Lively, sophisticated and persuasive, "Disruptive Acts" should be a major work not just for historians, but also for scholars of cultural studies, gender studies and the theatre.

What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France

Abstract: What Soldiers Do presents a devastating new perspective on the Greatest Generation and the liberation of France, one in which the US military use the lure of easy, sexually available French women to sell soldiers on the invasion, thus unleashing a "tsunami of male lust" among the war-weary GIs. The resulting chaos-ranging from flagrant public sex with prostitutes to outright rape and rampant venereal disease - horrified the battered and demoralized French population and caused serious friction between the two nations at a crucial point as the war drew to a close.

Samson and Delilah revisited: The politics of women's fashion in 1920s France

Abstract: IN FRANCE DURING THE 1920s, FASHION WAS A HIGHLY CHARGED ISSUE. In 1925, an article in L'oeuvre jocularly described how the fashion of short hair had completely overturned life in a small French village. After the first woman in the village cut her hair, accompanied by "tears and grinding of teeth" on the part of her family, the fashion had quickly become "epidemic: from house to house, it took its victims." A gardener swore he would lock up his daughter until her hair grew back; a husband believed that his wife had dishonored him. A scandalized cure decided to preach a sermon about it, but "unfortunately he had chosen the wrong day, since it was the feast of Jeanne d'Arc." As he began to condemn bobbed hair as indecent and unchristian, "the most impudent young ladies of the parish pointed insolently at the statue of the liberator."' By claiming the bobbed-cutJoan of Arc as their mascot, these young women grounded their quest for "liberation" in the rich, tangled mainstream of French history. They appealed to the ambivalent yet strongly traditional image of Jeanne la pucelle (Joan the Virgin), at once patriotic, fervently Christian, and sexually ambiguous. The fashion among young women for short, bobbed hair created enormous tensions within the French family. Throughout the decade, newspapers recorded lurid tales, including one husband in the provinces who sequestered his wife for bobbing her hair and another father who reportedly killed his daughter for the

The Price of Discretion: Prostitution, Venereal Disease, and the American Military in France, 1944–1946

Abstract: IN SEPTEMBER 1944, WHILE LEADING the 29th Infantry Division across Brittany to liberate France, the American general Charles Gerhardt decided that his boys needed sex. So he instructed his chief of staff to start a house of prostitution.1 The task went to the St. Renan office of Civil Affairs, the military section assigned to address the needs of the liberated civilian population. Asa Gardiner, the local civil affairs officer, called upon his contacts in the French police force, who produced a pimp named Morot. The pimp, in turn, recommended four prostitutes currently refugeed nearby. Gardiner and Morot rode an army jeep to interview them, and on the way back Gardiner asked Morot to manage the business. For the actual brothel, they billeted a house outside St. Renan that had recently been vacated by the Germans.2

Women and the public sphere in the age of the French revolution

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Feminist history after the linguistic turn: historicizing discourse and experience

Abstract: L'A. analyse la redefinition des mots-cles - experience, agence, discours, identite - de l'histoire sociale et de l'histoire des femmes, qu'il nomme le « tournant linguistique », a travers une etude des politiques du travail dans l'industrie textile allemande dans les annees 1890-1920. Il s'interesse en particulier a deux mouvements de crise et de transformation de l'histoire allemande : l'emergence de la question sociale du travail feminin dans les annees 1890 et la feminisation de l'union politique durant les annees 1890