Les françaises dans la guerre et l'Occupation / Michèle Cointet

The leaders of Vichy have managed to impose inaction and silence only their own women. For never, in their history, the French women did not engage as much as during the Second World War. In this beautiful essay, Michèle Cointet paints a portrait of this feminine France, collaborationists and familiar with power, such as Maréchale or Josée Laval, the resistant and deported. By following the destinies of the many volunteers of free France, the leaders of the Resistance, Berty Albrecht or Marie-Madeleine Fourcade, and the small hands, the author restores the multiple forms of the engagement of women in the war. For if political convictions were sometimes the driving force, it was often the result of patriotic education and ethics. A dimension that we find in the difficult issue of female deportation. These questions are renewed by the gaze of a historian aware of the realities of French society and which uniquely illuminates the history of women in the post-war period. The path of their integration into political life was indeed open.