The Problem that Had a Name: French High-Rise Developments and the Fantasy of a Suburban Homemaker Pathology, 1954-73

Abstract

Within Western Europe, France had the largest and longest postwar commitment to private social-market housing inside dense residential suburbs called grands ensembles d'habitation (GEs). Social-Catholic activists and planners viewed the GEs as facilitating women's maternal mission within egalitarian communities, but others across the political spectrum saw them as pathological spaces, especially for women who supposedly contracted a psychological disease dubbed ‘sarcellite’, after France's flagship GE of Sarcelles. This article analyses how a phantasmatic gendered discourse of housing disaster, first circulated by the media, strategically influenced gendered actors’ residential desires and legitimised policy shifts toward single-family housing. The discourse of sarcellite reveals how housing realities and imaginaries shaped gendered claims to housing as an evolving aspect of social citizenship. The article considers both suburban women's demands for subsidised childcare and other services and the nuances and contradictions of the evolving discourse of sarcellite.