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UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Plus Ça Change: Change and Continuity in French and American Gender Culture, 1952-2007 Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2vt9d05f Author Moodie, Benjamin Aldrich Publication Date 2013 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Plus Ça Change: Change and Continuity in French and American Gender Culture, 1952-2007 by Benjamin Aldrich Moodie A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Sociology in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Ann Swidler, Chair Professor Marion Fourcade Professor Jerome Karabel Professor Kim Voss Professor J. Nicholas Ziegler Fall 2013 © Copyright by Benjamin Aldrich Moodie 2013 All rights reserved Abstract Plus Ça Change: Change and Continuity in French and American Gender Culture, 1952-2007 by Benjamin Aldrich Moodie Doctor of Philosophy in Sociology University of California, Berkeley Professor Ann Swidler, Chair This dissertation traces the transformation of gender cultures in the U.S. and France from the 1950s to the present. Using mainstream as well as avowedly feminist women’s magazines as a primary source of evidence, I find deep and lasting cultural contrasts that were crucial for determining both the character and the impact of American and French second-wave feminism. Finding fertile ground in an institutional structure and a cultural ideology that dramatizes universal individual choice and agency, popular feminism in America transformed everyday social norms more thoroughly than the French movement. While France’s elitist culture permitted some socially privileged activists to win victories through dramatic advocacy for downtrodden and voiceless ordinary women, French feminists were less able to persuade women to contest sexism in their own daily lives. American feminism grew out of a milieu of abrasive gender relations. American culture endorsed a more aggressive and emotionally myopic version of masculinity than prevailed in France. It also subjected women to irreconcilable social pressures by dramatizing the self- enhancing experience of employment while cautioning married women against it; by portraying sexuality as both morally hazardous and exciting for young women; and by asking wives to promote the self-confidence and success of loved ones while insisting that each person ultimately controls his or her own fate. The French vision of the cultivated and emotionally empathetic man, by contrast, contributed to the culture’s emphasis on the aesthetic and emotional pleasures, rather than the dangers, of relations between the sexes. Although American feminism has delegitimated men’s aggression and relieved women of responsibility for the constant maintenance of male egos, the other major patterns of gender culture in both countries have persisted up to the present. The findings of the dissertation suggest that the deep patterns in gender culture, and thus in gender equality or inequality, involve much more than power, either in the economy or the family, and instead incorporate broader ethical ideals about what is a good person and how to 1 achieve a fully realized life. It provides a corrective to existing work in the sociology of culture that exclusively stresses the invidious character of aesthetic judgments. And it establishes the pivotal importance of society’s deepest cultural meanings to the objectives, opportunities, and outcomes available to social movements. 2 Dedication To my late mother, Meredith Aldrich, and my father, T. Dunbar Moodie, for giving me a lifelong love of people and of ideas. i CONTENTS List of Figures ................................................................................................................................ iv List of Tables ...................................................................................................................................v Note on Translations ...................................................................................................................... vi Acknowledgements ....................................................................................................................... vii CHAPTER 1 Feminism’s Cultural Matrices..........................................................................................................1 The cultural roots of gender .................................................................................................3 Sources .................................................................................................................................4 Methodological considerations ............................................................................................7 CHAPTER 2 Passion and Vocation .....................................................................................................................10 Opportunity and danger: Work for pay ..............................................................................12 Home is where the heart is: Domesticity ...........................................................................26 Virile virtues: Ideals of masculinity ...................................................................................46 Infidelity: The great drama of the French domestic sphere ...............................................80 CHAPTER 3 Feminism, Le Remake ...................................................................................................................92 Preface. Winning the everyday: The behavioral traces of American feminism’s normative success........................................................................................................................102 Part I. Culture and rhetoric in second wave feminism’s founding texts ..........................106 Part II. Democratic elitism: The cultural logic of an abortion manifesto ........................118 Part III: Popularizing feminism: The advent of mass-circulation feminist magazines ....133 CHAPTER 4 Sex and Sensibility .......................................................................................................................170 Hot or sublime? Erotica and sex advice compared ..........................................................170 Social class and French ideals of sociability and eroticism .............................................204 Making marriage work and infidelity redux ....................................................................229 Anti-feminist nightmares .................................................................................................245 ii CHAPTER 5 Love’s Deep Codes ......................................................................................................................247 A review of findings ........................................................................................................247 “Hard” and “soft” explanations for culture ......................................................................255 Learning from the Other ..................................................................................................265 Figures..........................................................................................................................................268 Tables ...........................................................................................................................................292 Bibliography: Magazine Articles .................................................................................................303 Bibliography: General Sources ....................................................................................................313 METHODOLOGICAL APPENDIX Using Fiction Sociologically........................................................................................................329 The turn away from aesthetic content ..............................................................................332 The hierarchy of fictional meaning .................................................................................334 Sampling ..........................................................................................................................342 Recovering fiction as a source of sociological evidence .................................................346 iii FIGURES 1.1 French women’s magazine readership as a percentage of total adult female population, 1957-2007 1.2 U.S. women’s magazine circulation, 1952-2007 1.3 Educational percentile of average female reader, French women’s magazines, 1957-2007 1.4 Educational percentile of average female reader, American women’s magazines, 1949- 2007 (early figures imputed) 1.5 Procedure for assigning educational percentile to magazine audiences 2.1 Female Civilian Labor Force Participation as a Percentage of All Women (ILO) and of Working-Age Women (BLS), 1900-2012 2.2 Women as a Share of the Labor Force in France and the U.S., 1970-2012 3.1 Paid work per day, full-time working parents 3.2 Domestic (unpaid) work per day, full-time working parents 3.3 All work, paid and unpaid, per day, full-time working parents 3.4 Gender gap in all work, paid and unpaid, full-time working parents 3.5 Sleep per day, full-time working parents 3.6 Age of magazine readers (women only) 3.7 Marital status of magazine readers (women only) 3.8 Employment status of magazine readers (women only)