Having It All in the Belle Époque: How French Women’s Magazines Invented the Modern Woman

Abstract

Rachel Mesch. Having It All in the Belle Epoque: How French Women's Magazines Invented the Modern Woman. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2013. Pp. 241. Rachel Mesch has realized a tour de force with this book, which is at once entertaining, innovative, and scholarly. As its title, Having It All in the Belle Epoque, suggests, the current North American debates about women's need to find balance between professional and personal lives have a long history. (1) This book is an illuminating study of a community of women readers and writers in France in 1901-11. Scholars who study women writers of the Belle Epoque have long been struck by the contradictions at work in novels, in authorial commentaries, and in the way they lived lives. (2) How can they write, earn a living, and travel but continue to insist on own very traditional femininity? And why are they always so quick to claim that they are not feminists? Mesch goes to the heart of these contradictions and offers new ways to analyze and understand them through the previously overlooked and rich medium of the illustrated women's magazines Eemina and La Vie heureuse. (3) Mesch argues convincingly that these two magazines present examples of what women were capable of accomplishing in the early years of the twentieth century and, in so doing, how they set a higher standard for what women could aspire to (29). The book is divided into two parts. The first, Readers and Writers, sticks closely to the magazines, explaining workings, identifying the community of readers who subscribed to them, regular contributors, and the new photographic techniques they pioneered. The second, Texts and Contexts, goes beyond the magazines to study reception and influence in fiction, media scandals, and on cultural institutions. Mesch's introduction provides an overview of the creation of Femina in 1901 and La Vie heureuse in 1902. Both magazines reflect a society in transition, poised to accept women in more powerful, visible than ever before, but not always certain as to how to imagine them inhabiting those roles (4). They will take up the job of doing some of the imaginative work. Mesch shows that the magazines rejected the label and imagined model of achievement for women set against a straw informed by the stereotype of the bas-bleu. The ideological position of the magazines is expressed through a clear and consistent editorial voice that strikes a careful balance between tradition and modernity. Chapter 1, Cheres explores the magazines' workings, the communities of readers and writers that the magazines were able to create, and the technical innovations--particularly in the use and alteration of photographs--with which the magazines experimented. Mesch shows how the magazines' readers were presented as consumers of goods, including literature and culture. Buying Femina, she writes, constituted an instant makeover (42), as readers were enticed to model themselves on the women (often writers) featured in the magazines' pages and to purchase the advertised consumer products that would help them achieve goals. One of the most interesting ways that the magazines created a community was through constant invitations to readers to participate in their magazines' many contests and surveys. Not only did this help the magazines gather information about cheres lectrices, it encouraged the readers to reflect on and present opinions and, sometimes, to express themselves creatively by sending the magazines poems and short stories. Mesch shows that writing was particularly encouraged as a hobby and as a possible professional pursuit for women. Encouraging women to think, to discuss ideas, and to take up the pen themselves may seem like timid gestures in comparison to the feminist struggles that were to come, but they were significant first steps. …