Mimi Pinson Goes to War: Taste, Class and Gender in France, 1900-18

Abstract

In the years leading up to the First World War, the Frenchwomen of a free performing-arts programme for female workers, known as the Mimi Pinsons, began to appear frequently in popular stories, articles, poems and songs as cultural shorthand for a renovated social vision of France. Founded by composer and philanthropist Gustave Charpentier in 1900, the Oeuvre de Mimi Pinson taught its worker–students elementary music, song and dance, and gradually expanded to include a charitable organisation and social network. A closer examination of the OMP reveals that its members were also used to reconcile early twentieth-century French anxieties about working-class militancy and even war by way of a potent cultural association of female sexuality, aesthetic refinement and labour. In the years before the First World War, the Mimi Pinsons were defined by journalists, government officials and the OMP's own organisers according to a formulaic type which at once modernised and constrained the role of the female Parisian worker. Associated almost exclusively with the luxury-garment trades – seamstresses, flowermakers, milliners and department-store clerks – the new Mimi Pinsons were embraced by the public as naturally chic yet diligent guardians of French art and craft. These female worker–students allowed an easy merging of the body of the female worker with particularly French notions of the patriotic responsibility of feminine taste. When the First World War came, many of the Mimi Pinsons joined the war effort as workers and nurses, yet they were embraced by the public primarily for their service as tasteful creators of patriotic decorative objects, and as an ideal symbolic figure for managing anxieties about the social dissolution that came with the war.