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Book Reviews Women in the Western World Histoire des femmes en Ocddent. Vol. 5: Le XXe siècle. Françoise Thébaud, ed. Georges Duby and MicheUe Perrot, series editors. Paris: Pion, 1992. 644 pp. ISBN 2-259-02386-X (d); 320FF. PubUshed in English as A History of Women in the West. Toward a Cultural Identity in the Twentieth Century. Françoise Thébaud, ed. Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1994.713 pp.; Ul. ISBN 0-674-40374-6 (d); $29.95. Karen Offen This massive anthology, edited by Françoise Thébaud, replete with iUustrations, extensive endnotes, and bibUography for further reading , is the fifth and final of the History of Women in the West pubUshed initiaUy in ItaUan by Laterza. It is now avaUable in half a dozen European languages, inducting the new EngUsh edition issued by Harvard University Press, which suggests that its intended audience is broad and that its editors mean it to have a significant impad. The foUowing review is based on the Frendi language edition (1992), with reference to the more recently pubUshed American edition, which is virtuaUy identical in contents. Some of the essays in the volume are magisterial, and the book is worth its price for these alone. Others, by academics who are not trained historians, are less satisfying because they lack historical depth. The translations seem, on the whole, satisfactory. The contents of this book, overaU, stand in a surprisingly paradoxical, if not conflicting relationship to its general title, and particularly to the subtitle added to the American edition. In the introduction, Thébaud explains that the volume is intended to "nourish" its readers' "reflections ." She warns that it offers neither a chronological narrative of women's "Uberation" ("emancipation," in the French)—namely, no linear history of women's "progress." Indeed, she says, women's "achievements" ("acquisitions") can also be taken away. She underscores the point made by the series editors, Georges Duby and MicheUe Perrot, that women cannot be studied in isolation from men; and that what counts is the "relation between the sexes," a sodal relationship "constructed and incessantly remodeUed—at once an effect and a cause of the sodal dynamic" (p. 4, U.S. edition). Thus, this coUection clearly privüeges gender as a "useful category of analysis," in Joan Scotf s formulation. Indeed, "the evolution of the gender system" is given deUberate precedence over © 1995 Journal of Women's History, Vol 7 No. ζ (Summer) 146 Journal of Women's History Summer women's gains or achievements, and even over evidence of women's agency. Let us examine what kind of a history of women this approach has produced. The volume is divided into four major parts, entitled "The Nationalization of Women" (eight chapters), "Women, Creation, and Representation " (four chapters), "The Century's Great Changes" (three chapters), and "Current Issues" (four chapters). It concludes, as do its four predecessors , with a short section on "Women's Voices," featuring poignant and startling excerpts from the writings of Christa Wolf and NeUy Kaplan. No essays have been added or omitted in the English-language edition. The eight essays of Part I, "The Nationalization of Women," compose nearly half the volume. These essays synthesize recent scholarship that coUectivdy testifies to the preoccupation of national leaders with mobilizing and regulating women in a period marked by total war and fierce competition between nations. Françoise Thébaud's lengthy essay on World War I opens the section by surveying the eartier historiography on women and war, which, she argues, was predicated on the questions of how war and women's emandpation were related and whether war was conducive to women's emandpation. Her approach, evocative and degant , nuanced by layer after layer of detaü (though by few women's voices), questions the thrust of the earUer feminist historiography: she argues that the overaU effed of the war on gender relations was conservative , reinforcing old roles, expectations, and images. Successive essays by Nancy Cott and Anne-Marie Sohn reinforce this pessimistic perspective as they explore the interwar period in the United States, France, and England. They emphasize espedaUy the prescriptive Uterature direded toward women on the subject of...

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