Two Modernities: from Elle to

Mademoiselle. Women's
Magazines in Postwar France

SUSAN WEINER

Today an international fashion magazine known for marketing French style to young
women, Elle had a very different look in its early years. From 1945 to the late 1950s,
Elle projected the image of a reader who was at the time uniquely modern. She was a
mother, a citizen and a working woman, whose wide-ranging expertise in `making
do' during the Occupation carried over to her home in the postwar years. The skill,
ease, humour, and good sense she demonstrated in the domestic sphere could be
equalled only by her talents in her salaried job. There lay the novelty of Elle: for the
®rst time, a women's magazine displayed the fantasy of `having it all', a ful®lling career
and a traditional home life. It was only in 1962 with the ®rst issue of Mademoiselle, that
the popular press began to address the general audience of teenage girls.1
In the women's magazine market, Elle is of pivotal interest in its transformation
over the course of the postwar period from a weekly which speci®cally catered to
adult women readers to one which tried simultaneously to appeal to teenage girls,
increasingly visible in French culture as both a category of identity and as a
consumer group in its own right. As the category of the teenage girl became more
explicitly de®ned as what was truly `new' in 1950s France, through channels such as
the publishing industry and popular cinema, the central position held by the home-
oriented Elle in the women's magazine market was ripe for contest. Elle is an
important point of access to understanding the story of a contest between two

This article is part of a forthcoming book, Enfants Terribles: Gender, Youth and the Mass Media in
France 1945±1968, to be published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 2000. We thank Johns Hopkins
for allowing us to reproduce the article here.
1
The French Mademoiselle was unrelated to the American Mademoiselle, founded in the 1930s to
address the needs of young working women. I am not taking into consideration romantic magazines
such as Nous deux. Political groups that came out of the Resistance and religious groups such as the
Protestant Jeunes Femmes FrancËaises published pamphlets and newsletters, but circulation was
necessarily limited. For romance magazines, see Sylvette Giett, `Vingt anneÂes d'amour en couverture',
Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, 60 (1985), 17±22, as well as Evelyne Sullerot, La Presse feÂminine
(Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1966). For an excellent historical analysis of young women's religious
groups, see Martine Muller et al., Etre feÂministe en France: Contribution aÁ l'eÂtude des mouvements de femmes
1944±1967 (Paris: IHTP, 1985).

Contemporary European History, 8, 3 (1999), pp. 395±409 Printed in the United Kingdom
396 Contemporary European History

modernities: how the immediate postwar version of female modernity as maternal,

nationalistic and institutionally approved was usurped by the renegade other that
was female adolescence, a modernity generated largely in the mass media, where the
in¯uence of political ideology was tangential at best.
The choice of Elle as the source of the de®nitions and images of female identity
and the exigencies of the feminine role in the post-Second World War era is not a
random one: Elle was ®rst sold as a supplement to France Soir, formerly the clandestine
DeÂfense de la France of the Occupation period, and could thus easily cast itself as
representative of the Fourth Republic. Elle's messages regarding women's roles in
postwar reconstruction are indeed continuous with the new regime's own equivo-
cality. In the rhetoric of the Fourth Republic, as well as in the pages of Elle magazine,
women were called upon to be, variously, wives, mothers, homemakers, profes-
sionals and citizens. Women might be able to `have it all' in the glossy pages of Elle
and the platforms of Fourth Republic politicians, but these various components of
femininity as they were lived in postwar France were fraught with contradiction.
At the end of a suffrage movement begun in 1870, and well after most of their
European counterparts, just months before the Liberation, French women acquired
the right to vote.2 Bills for limited suffrage had been introduced in 1890, 1901 and
1906; in 1919, 1922, 1924, 1929 and 1933, the measure had been defeated in
parliament by alternately left- and right-wing majorities, who warned of the demise
of the family and raised the spectre of prostitutes at the polls.3 Finally, on 23 March
1944, the government in exile in Algiers ruled in favour of female suffrage, and the
preamble to the new constitution of October 1946 accorded them this right.4
Practically speaking, the decision to extend the vote to women was less a question
of their equal contribution to the Resistance movement than of the need to
complete quorums in municipalities that had been decimated by the war.5
Newly acquired civic rights could scarcely topple the monolith of the
Napoleonic Code Civil, which legislated a woman's submission to her husband as
`chef de famille'. While a commission to reform marriage laws was established under
the Fourth Republic, no proposal ever reached the stage of being formally brought
before the National Assembly and the Senate and put to the vote.6 Despite small
modi®cations over time, the Napoleonic Code remained in effect in France well
into the 1960s, its effect on women's lives compounded by depopulation anxieties
2
For a good overview of feminist goals in the nineteenth century, see Dorothy McBride Stetson,
Women's Rights in France (New York and London: Greenwood Press, 1987).
3
The ®rst series of dates is given by McBride Stetson, Women's Rights; the second by AndreÂe
Michel and GenevieÁve Texier, La Condition de la FrancËaise d'aujourd'hui (GeneÁve: Editions Gonthier,
1964), 177, 192.
4
For a history of the suffrage movement in France, see Steven C. Hause, `More Minerva than
Mars: The French Women's Rights Campaign and the First World War', and Jane Jenson, `The
Liberation and New Rights for French Women', in Margaret Randolph Higonnet et al., Behind the
Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1987), 99±113,
272±84.
5
The latter view is expressed by Michel and Texier, La Condition, 178.
6
Claire Duchen, Women's Rights and Women's Lives in France 1944±1968 (London: Routlege, 1994),
176.
 From Elle to Mademoiselle. Women's Magazines in Postwar France 397

especially evident after both world wars.7 As Article 24 of the constitution of

October 1946 stated, `The Nation guarantees woman the exercise of her functions
as female citizen and worker in conditions that allow her to ful®l her role as mother
and her social mission,' justifying women's participation in the political life of the
nation in its emergence from wartime and the Occupation as an aspect of their
social mission: maternity.8
From the socialist Catholic-dominated MRP (Mouvement reÂpublicain populaire)
to the French Communist Party, the many changes of men and parties in power in
those years had in common their expectation of an economic, social, and moral
renewal brought about by the ranks of numerically strong families across the
boundaries of class difference.9 A symbolic beginning was marked by de Gaulle's
speech in 1945 in which he called upon the French to produce `douze millions de
beaux beÂbeÂs' for the nation, its population and economy decimated by the war.10
But while motherhood dominated the Fourth Republic's de®nition of female
citizenship, French women did much more during the postwar years than stay at
home. Among the privileged classes, their presence steadily increased in the work-
place and in university classrooms.11 Alongside anti-abortion and anti-contraceptive
propaganda, movements for reproductive rights, from the right to anaesthesia
during childbirth to the ®rst family planning clinics, were beginning to take shape.12
These important but gradual social changes were, however, overshadowed by the
valorisation of domesticity in postwar France. Female domesticity could be valorised
because it was in a certain sense rede®ned ± by technology. The home appliance
industry skyrocketed in the postwar years: between 1950 and 1958, production went
up a remarkable 400 per cent.13 For those who could afford washing machines,
dishwashers and the like, the time-consuming drudgery of household tasks was

7
ReÂmi Lenoir, `Transformations du familialisme et reconversions morales', Actes de la recherche en
sciences sociales, 59 (1985), 4. The Vichy regime demonstrated similar depopulation anxiety.
8
The political vision of women as mother-citizens was not unique to postwar France. Feminist
historians have noted the connection made between a woman's responsibilities in her home and to her
nation in the nineteenth century as well. Karen Offen, `Liberty, Equality, and Justice for Women: The
Theory and Practice of Feminism in Nineteenth-Century Europe', in Renate Bridenthal, Claudia
Koonz and Susan Stuard, eds., Becoming Visible: Women in European History, 2nd edn, (Boston:
Houghton Mif¯in Company, 1987), 335±66.
9
Antoine Prost, `L'Evolution de la politique familiale en France de 1938 aÁ 1981', Le mouvement
social, 129 (Oct.±Dec. 1984), 10.
10
The promotion of the family was carried out most notoriously in the policy of allocations familiales.
See ReÂmi Lenoir, `L'effondrement des bases sociales du familialisme,' Actes de la recherche en sciences
sociales, 57/58 (1985): 69, as well as Duchen, Women's Rights, 104±105.
11
Lenoir, `L'effondrement', 84. See his statistics on the evolution (within the dominant classes) of
women's education from 1945 to 1982, and on women's place in the work force outside the agricultural
sector during these years, 78±83. Lenoir notes that the increased female presence in the public sphere in
the 1950s because dramatic in the late 1960s, the result of which has been the long-standing neglect of
the earlier decade in the ®eld of women's history.
12
The anti-abortion and anti-contraceptive law of 1920 was to remain in effect until 1967, despite
attempts to subvert it by the family planning movement in the mid-®fties. See Duchen, Women's Rights,
122±6.
13
Jean-Pierre Rioux, La France de la IVe ReÂpublique, vol. II, L'expansion et l'impuissance 1952-1958
(Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1983), 212±13.
398 Contemporary European History

transformed, although the number of hours spent on these tasks remained largely the
same.14
But before the late 1950s most people could not actually afford to buy the new
time-saving appliances. Since the purchasing power of individual salaries could not
keep pace with the always increasing cost of living, household tasks were thus
primarily rede®ned within the realm of representation: technology did not change
the way people lived, but the way they saw female domesticity. 15 In tandem with
the industrial boom to which the statistics testify, the mass media transformed the
home into a fantasy space which women of all social classes could experience.
Advertisements showed how the ideal gifts for women were washing machines and
refrigerators. In women's magazines, the housewife became a glamorous and stylish
®gure, the ef®ciency of her accessory appliances a sign of both progress and pleasure.
Such images of ultra-modern domestic space were often fake: in the early 1950s, for
example, commercials on French television for home appliances were ®lmed in
American suburban kitchens.16 Sometimes ¯agrantly, sometime not, it was Amer-
ican-style home life that constituted the postwar fantasy of glamorous domesticity in
France. Elle magazine played a major role in generating American domesticity as the
new French fantasy, just as it applauded the increased visibility of women in the
public sphere. But within the cheeriness and self-suf®ciency of the magazine's
images of female modernity lay an Eternal Feminine, in which woman only existed
in that she could be relationally de®ned.17
From the magazine's very inception, Elle took its cues from the American
experience. The magazine's founder, HeÂleÁne Gordon-Lazareff, had spent the war
years with her media magnate husband Pierre Lazareff in New York City, where
she found work as an editor of the women's page of the New York Times Magazine
and on Harper's Bazaar.18 With her return to Paris in 1945, Gordon-Lazareff was
able to meet the challenge of bad paper, a shortage of ®lm, and primitive
technology, and the ®rst issue of Elle came out under her guidance in October, just
a year after the Liberation.19 One year later, FrancËoise Giroud joined her team, and
took over as editor-in-chief when Gordon-Lazareff became seriously ill.20
Sociologist Edgar Morin has described Elle's role in the immediate postwar years
as that of a `discoverer of comfort'.21 At ®rst, the magazine's concerns were limited
to the most basic needs, making ends meet more pleasantly in the face of the

14
Michel et Texier, La Condition de la FrancËaise, 69. Also, see my `Consommatrice of the 1950s in Elsa
Triolet's Roses aÁ creÂdit,' French Cultural Studies, June 1995, 123±144.
15
Rioux, La France de la IVe ReÂpublique, 234±6.
16
De la 4 CV aÁ la videÂo 1953±1983: Ces trente anneÂes qui ont change notre vie (Paris: Communica
International, 1983), 14. This book commemorates the thirtieth anniversary of the credit organization
CETLEM, founded in order to help ®nance the purchase of home appliances.
17
Colette Audry, `Elle', Les Temps modernes, 78 (Apr. 1952), 1788±1794.
18
Denise Dubois-Jallais, La Tzarine: HeÂleÁne Lazareff et l'aventure d'Elle (Paris: Editions Robert
Laffont, 1984).
19
Dubois-Jallais, La Tzarine, 136. HeÂleÁne Gordon was the ®rst French magazine editor to use
colour photographs. FrancËoise Giroud, Si je mens (Paris: Editions Stock, 1973), 123.
20
Giroud, Si je mens, 119±20.
 From Elle to Mademoiselle. Women's Magazines in Postwar France 399

continued shortages of the late 1940s. The Liberation had not put an immediate end
to the dif®culties of everyday life ®rst experienced during the Occupation.
Rationing of food staples like bread, sugar, dairy products, and edible oils continued
until 1949. Gas heating was not readily available until 1953, and the limited
availability of coal meant that one of the major preoccupations until then was trying
to stay warm. Staples were in short supply in the world of 1945, when `old times'
were synonymous with abundance and `modern times' meant hardship. In the
magazine's ®rst issue, the `Elle Cuisine' recipe was entitled `Don't mistrust powdered
eggs'; the following week's issue provided suggestions of how to prevent cold from
entering the home, and recipes to keep warm. The 12 December Elle may have
featured the fantasy of a robust woman in a fur coat on its cover, but articles in the
26 December Christmas issue discussed with realistic practicality how to give turkey
leftovers and old sweaters new appeal.
With its help, the magazine asserted, women would be able to ®ght the
continued shortages and poor conditions of the late 1940s, to create comfort in their
homes and thus happiness in their lives. In fashions and features, Elle showed
women in the role of the inventive, ef®cient housewife. No matter what her social
class, `Elle is the queen of the Make-Doers'.22 Her material situation was not so very
different from that of the deÂbrouillards, the men and women whose practical
inventiveness made everyday life more bearable during the Occupation.23 The only
difference was that after the Liberation, the cheerful make-doer became a uniquely
female role. Now that men had returned to the workplace, it was understood that
women should take up where they had left off before the war: at home.
While most individuals and businesses were struggling to emerge from the
penury and unproductivity of the Occupation, Elle, under the in¯uence of HeÂleÁne
Lazareff, was already helping women bring small pleasures into their homes. Just as
she continued to use ration coupons for food staples,24 the diligent reader could cut
out the occasional `bons magiques,' or magic coupons, in the magazine's pages,
which could be exchanged for both personal and home-related luxury products,
cheaper because they were made for the Elle label. Outside the Bazar de l'HoÃtel de
Ville, the Parisian equivalent of Marks & Spencer, the magazine had a stand that
offered free homemaking advice.25 The station `Radio Elle' served a similar
purpose. Elle even ran a contest for the ideal housewife in 1952: 27,500 women
competed for a prize of one million francs.26
From the very ®rst issue on, Elle offered images of all sorts of women leading

21
Nicole BenoõÃt, Edgar Morin and Bernard Paillard, La Femme majeure (Paris: Editions du Seuil,
1983), 43.
22
As the January 1948 cover reads.
23
Henri Amouroux mentions a ®lm entitled Le Roi des deÂbrouillards, starring Georges Milton, in `La
Vie quotidienne pendant l'Occupation,' Les FrancËais sous l'Occupation (France Inter: Cassettes Radio
France, 1984). I thank Alice Kaplan for calling this reference to my attention.
24
Bread rations ended in 1948. In 1949, the end of all rationing was declared. The reality, however,
was somewhat different. Non-alimentary rations (for building materials, school supplies, etc.) continued
to be issued throughout the 1950s.
25
Elle, 19 Nov. 1951, 14.
400 Contemporary European History

productive lives in the public sphere, but rarely to the exclusion of a domestic,
relational identity. Be she actress, astronomer, anonymous model, Resistance
®ghter, intellectual, secretary, mountaineer or a lucky and attractive reader chosen
from the sea of correspondence Elle received, women were shown to be briskly,
ef®ciently and happily managing to raise children, cook and clean, in always
immaculate and fully out®tted households. By 1955, one out of six French women
read Elle.27 By this same time, Elle's covers had progressed from the prewar fantasy
value of showing women in fur coats to its own modern fantasy: women with
children, laundry baskets, or even refrigerators.
Elle made exceptional women accessible to readers by `domesticating' them: by
showing how they, too, were part of the relationally de®ned feminine norm. A
woman is at her most complete in Elle when ensconced in a domestic space with a
husband among its accessories, as seen in Juliette GreÂco's transformation in the
magazine's pages from bohemian into housewife. GreÂco, a glamorous actress and
singer associated with the jazz clubs of Saint-Germain-des-PreÂs and the `existential-
ists' who frequented them ± as well as with Sartre ± was a familiar face to the weekly
reader of Elle, from its ®rst numbers through to the late 1950s. In 1953, the magazine
ran a lengthy feature article on her marriage. The captions under the photographs of
GreÂco, now Madame Lemaire, serving dinner to her husband enumerate the bride's
many new acquisitions with a string of possessive adjectives in quotation marks,
which call into question the very nature of ownership: `Madame Lemaire has ``her''
basement which is quite a change from the basement nightclubs of her youth, in
Saint-Germain-des-PreÂs . . . ``her'' refrigerator, ``her'' dryer, ``her'' table (and her
husband to serve)'.28 New home furnishings may be featured in this equation, but
the essential is the parenthetical new husband: without him, none of these domestic
objects would belong to her.
Elle emphasized the space of the home rather than fashion and beauty as the
source of female pleasure. In an early issue soon after the war, the magazine
presented French couture in an unusual way: in terms of its use-value.29 Readers
learned the real numbers: with the foreign sales from three dresses ± one each by
Dior, Balmain, and Balenciaga ± France was able to purchase 9,800 bags of wheat,
three million kilogrammes of wool, and 789,000 kilogrammes of meat from abroad.
Exported French elegance was helping the more practical matter of basic comfort at
home, where conversely it was more appropriate to do as American women did, as
another article suggested, and wear trousers: `Why don't we wear, in our poorly

26
`1 million recompense 15 ans d'expeÂrience de la meÂnageÁre ideÂale', Elle, 17 Mar. 1952, 14. ` ``I
prefer washing dishes to mending,'' said Mme d'Harlaborde, voted Ideal Housewife of 1952. But it
wasn't washing dishes or mending socks that earned her this title. It's the simultaneously clever and
technically savvy way she answered four pages of the questionnaire addressed to 27,500 contestants.'
27
Like Harlequin romances, Elle probably had many more readers than the statistics indicate;
women's magazines are also passed between friends and family.
28
`Mme Lemaire a ``sa'' cave qui la change bien des caves de sa jeunesse, aÁ Saint-Germain-des-PreÂs
. . .' ``son'' reÂfrigeÂrateur, ``son'' sechoir, ``sa'' table (et son mari aÁ servir).' `Juliette GreÂco: la marieÂe du
25 juin,' Elle, 6 Jul. 1953, 17±19.
29
Elle, 1 Apr. 1948.
 From Elle to Mademoiselle. Women's Magazines in Postwar France 401

heated apartments, this practical item. Let's call it by its American name, slacks, and
no one will ®nd fault with it.'30
In keeping with such newly acceptable practices, in the early 1950s Elle showed
its readers fashions that were economical and simple, as be®tted a woman whose
home was her major pleasure and duty. According to FrancËoise Giroud in a 1951
article called `Where is French Haute Couture These Days?', extravagant fashion
was, quite simply, passeÂ. French women would rather buy a car, a washing machine
or a refrigerator:
In short, fun and especially comfort win her over rather than simple coquettry. It's a major
evolution which will probably become even more dramatic, because it accompanies a change
in women themselves, one that no one would criticise. On the contrary: it's the progressive
disappearance of the woman as doll, preoccupied solely with her hats and dresses.31
Giroud saw the cultural shift from women's single-minded preoccupation with their
own attractiveness to the desire to acquire appliances and own a car as a positive
change, as a form of participation in the modern world. But she neglected to
mention the unglamorous reality of the female share of technological society:
women were bound to household tasks just as much as they had been before. And
while advertisements for automobiles suggested that the fantasised freedom of the
open road was not an unfeminine one, the actual purchase of a car in the 1950s was
only for the happy few.32
In every article about a woman's success in the public sphere, the Eternal
Feminine maintained a constant presence in Elle, not just in references to family and
domestic space but as a state of mind. For example, a 1953 article entitled `Women
Really Only Do What They Want To', presented the careers of several remarkable
women, including a young lawyer who defended a murderer sentenced to death in
1951. Elle recounted how she entered the of®ce of President Vincent Auriol,
stammering, tearful, `ravissante et rouge de confusion', to ask for the man's pardon:
`No lawyer had behaved that way in front of the President . . . who signed' (ellipsis
in original text).33
No need to relinquish one's emotions at work, according to this article. In fact,
`femininity', in its pretty, blushing, talkative, tearful way, was shown still to be the
most effective tool of all for the career woman. But the emotional lawyer's story
shows that feminine behaviour has the power to move minds that otherwise might
not budge, even altering the course of history. Here was a case of a woman with
power who used it to make the world a more humane place.34
Similarly, the faces and home lives of women writers appear most dramatically in

30
`Salopettes et ``Slacks'' ', Elle, 28 Nov. 1945, 10.
31
FrancËoise Giroud, `OuÁ en est la Haute-Couture FrancËaise?' Elle, 26 Nov. 1951, 22±3.
32
Between 1952 and 1958, automobile production in France doubled (from 500,000 vehicles to
1,120,000); such extraordinary growth of the industry still meant that in 1958 only one out of seven
people owned a car, making it `a palpable object of social satisfaction, fascinating to all classes and in all
regions', Rioux, La Femme de la IVe ReÂpublique, 180.
33
Elle, 5 Jan. 1953, 10±11.
34
A feminist position today as well, in our nuclear age. Sara Ruddick suggests that peacemakers can
402 Contemporary European History

a 1954 issue of the magazine, in a full-page photo entitled `70 Women Novelists,
300 Novels: Women of Letters Make a Name for Themselves'. Each of the seventy
novelists is identi®ed in parentheses by the number of children and novels she had
produced. In terms of production, children come ®rst, novels second.35 In his essay
`Romans et enfants', Roland Barthes criticises Elle's promotion of women writers as
mothers as yet another instance of how a woman is ineluctably attached to her
domestic role.36 But what Barthes doesn't account for in his reading is the intended
audience. Most probably many were mothers themselves, or intended to be. It is
exciting now, as it must have been then, to see assembled in one photograph
seventy young women novelists. No matter what came ®rst, babies or novels, the
photo makes the fantasy of `having it all' look feasible.
Elle conducted an interview with the best-known woman writer of the time,
Simone de Beauvoir, soon after she had won the Prix Goncourt of 1954 for Les
Mandarins ± and the scandalous DeuxieÁme sexe (1949) had retreated from the public
eye. Elle introduced its readers to a Beauvoir who shouldn't intimidate them: one
who preferred the detective novels of the SeÂrie Noire to La Critique de la raison pure as
bedtime reading.37 The interviewer reassuringly wrote that the two-sided `leÂgende
indestructible' the press had created of Simone de Beauvoir the humorless
existentialist of rollicking Saint-Germain-des-PreÂs, `the deaconness in ¯at heels and
pulled-back hair, wearing no makeup, academic and pedantic, the image of the
feminist, in the bygone heroic times of the suffragettes', was simply not her. She
may not have followed the trends of couture, but she had her own sense of style.
And while housework horri®ed her `tout comme la suffragette', she too had to cook
during the Occupation ± as she recounts one failed pot-au-feu prepared for Picasso,
Camus and Sartre.
This article is an excellent source of information about how French culture
understood feminism in the 1950s. Feminism was deemed obsolete since women had
acquired the vote, a view Beauvoir herself espoused in Le DeuxieÁme sexe.38 It is
evident from this article that to be called a feminist in the 1950s was already an insult.
As the interviewer hastens to add, once she has sketched the caricature of `the
feminist' with which Beauvoir was so often and wrongly associated, the image is a
false one. Beauvoir is simply a typical French woman, who may not like to cook,

learn from maternal non-violence, for while not all mothers are peaceful, `peace is their business':
`Nonviolent action, like maternal practice at its best, requires resilient cheerfulness, a grasping of truth
that is caring, and a tolerance of ambiguity and ambivalence. For mothers, issues of proper trust,
permissable force, and the possibility and value of control are alive and complex in daily work as they
are in any non-violent action.' Sara Ruddick, Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1989), 220.
35
Elle, 22 Nov. 1954.
36
Roland Barthes, ``Romans et enfants'', Mythologies (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1953), 56±7.
37
`Un personnage mysteÂrieux, un esprit lucide, une femme simple, un eÂcrivain violent: Simone de
Beauvoir Prix Goncourt 1954', Elle, 3 Jan. 1955, 22.
38
`We are no longer like our partisan elders; by and large we have won the game . . . . Already
some of us have never had to sense in our femininity an inconvenience or an obstacle.' Beauvoir,
Le DeuxieÁme sexe (Paris: Gallimard, 1976 [1949]), vol. I, 29. And The Second Sex, trans. H. M. Parshley
(New York: Vintage Books, 1974 [1952]), xxxii.
 From Elle to Mademoiselle. Women's Magazines in Postwar France 403

but will do so when she must. For even existentialists keep their gender roles. When
intellectuals get together, it's the woman who will do the cooking.39
Women whose political awareness mattered because they were mothers; women
who were public ®gures and still identi®ed themselves primarily as wives and
mothers in a world of high-tech domestic comfort where feminism was no longer
necessary: how might girls read Elle's various components of femininity, reconciled
in a fantasised equilibrium between an Eternal Feminine and modern self-
suf®ciency? Somewhat critically, I would argue: by the middle of the decade,
popular representations of femininity had diversi®ed. Images of the mature woman
were supplemented by a new character, who slowly emerged over the course of the
decade, in novels, ®lms and advertisements: the female adolescent.40 In Elle, young
women ®rst appear in advertisements in counterpoint with their female elders. A
linen company advertisement provides a good example of the continuum promoted
between mother, daughter and home. This advertisement, in the 15 April 1953
issue, contained side-by-side images of a teenage girl and a woman in her thirties,
both dreamy-eyed, their gazes uplifted: `A quoi reÃvent les jeunes ®lles? A un
trousseau plein de draps Solidra', and `A quoi reÃvent les femmes d'inteÂrieur? A un
armoire plein de draps Solidra'. One may be dreaming of her trousseau, the other
of her linen closet, but each represents a stage in the continuous and inevitable
progression of female desire in the 1950s towards the comfort of the modern home.
There are signi®cant differences between these 1950s advertisements of a docile
femininity shared across generations, and novels and ®lms from the same period
about mothers and daughters. Many 1950s novels by young women narrate fraught
relationships between two generations of women. Most often, the father is a
necessary but oblivious presence in the con¯ict, and rarely does the historical
context ®gure directly. In FrancËoise Sagan's Bonjour tristesse, for example, the catalyst
for CeÂcile's con¯ict with her soon-to-be stepmother Anne is her father, who is
completely unaware of his daughter's rage. The novel takes place in 1954, a
turbulent year marked by the fall of Dien Bien Phu, the end of the French war in
Indo-China, the escalation of con¯ict in Algeria, and the ongoing Cold War, but
CeÂcile's malaise and anger remain enigmatic, and seem to have nothing to do with
the world outside her potential new family con®guration.
It is in an advertisement for a brand of margarine, whose manufacturers were
attempting to create new associations for its use after the shortages of the
Occupation, that the triangulation between mother, daughter and father along the
seductive and con¯ictual lines of gender and generation are made startlingly clear.
The full-page advertisement for Astra margarine is a conversational narrative told in
the paternal voice, by a man whose wife has left home to visit her sister for a few
weeks during the summer. He ®nds himself alone with his teenage daughter,

39
For a discussion of Simone de Beauvoir and domesticity in the context of the Occupation, see
Elizabeth Houlding, `Between the Lines: Women Writing the Occupation of France', (Ph.D.
dissertation, Columbia University, 1991), 226±56.
40
See my forthcoming Enfants Terribles: Gender, Youth, and the Mass Media in France, 1945±1968
( Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000).
404 Contemporary European History

Arlette. She exposes him to all kinds of new products appreciated by the youth of
the day, including ®sh prepared with margarine instead of butter. Margarine is
something his old-fashioned wife, daughter Arlette assures him conspiratorially,
would have rejected before even trying: `I've been wanting to try it for a while, but
Mum is a bit old-fashioned; you're more open-minded.'
The Astra advertisement communicates on various levels. First, it gently pokes
fun at the rigid domestic order of the housewife, aligning instead with the youthful
and `relaxed' approach of the teenage girl taking a spin in the kitchen ± thus
encouraging women of all ages to do the same. The femme au foyer of the early
covers of Elle, proudly ¯anked by her refrigerator or laundry basket, has become a
quaint relic of the recent past: it is, rather, her absence which facilitates a newly
exciting domestic scenario, where the reader is called upon to do away with old
images of femininity and identify with the teenage girl. Along with old images of
femininity, wartime and the dif®cult postwar years are also banished to history.
Astra has a new and good `®fties taste' which, as the advertisement claims, has
nothing to do with the margarine rationed during the war as a butter substitute. It's
up to teenage girls, the rising generation of homemakers like Arlette, who have no
memory of margarine's association with war and low-quality substitutes, to integrate
this product into modern 1950s cuisine. Nevertheless, modern times continue to
hold the promise of the Eternal Feminine: as the advertisement reassuringly ± or
troublingly ± intimates, Arlette's play in the kitchen signi®es that she will eventually
reign in the home, just as her mother did before her.
But it is not yet Arlette's time: images of the teenage girl in the 1950s may refer
to their domestic potential, but it is their sexuality which is in the foreground. Quite
overtly, the vehicle of the Astra narrative of modernisation and the banishment of
war memories is the daughter's seduction of the father. He recounts the weeks spent
alone with his daughter ± `Arlette kindly initiated me into a life full of originality
and imagination' ± a recollection whose sexual overtones are echoed in Arlette's
conspiratorial tone when she tells her father that she's been wanting to try it, and
she's sure he'll like it too, but the domestic experimentation has been off-limits due
to the mother's old-fashioned ways. Yes, the daughter will eventually become a
mother in her own right, but for the time being she's making her father's life just a
little more exciting. The Astra advertisement shows youth and femininity acting
upon each other in the person of the teenage girl: youth eroticises femininity, while
femininity domesticates youth. The end result, in this formula, is the pleasure of the
male consumer.
Such overt male pleasure was absent from Elle's features for girls. The magazine
initially conceived of the adolescent reader as simply a younger version of her elders.
Beginning in 1953, Anita Pereire's weekly column `Us Girls' focused solely on
domestic skills for the junior set, presenting girls of all ages as docile creatures on
their way to becoming good wives and mothers. Pereire's column was very much in
line with the sentiment of the early postwar years that national reconstruction was a
project both moral and material, and young girls had to be trained for the eternal
and natural `mission feÂminine'; to this effect, the Inspecteur geÂneÂral de l'Education
 From Elle to Mademoiselle. Women's Magazines in Postwar France 405

nationale Paul Crouzet advocated a speci®cally female programme of studies that

would have enseignement meÂnager as one of its components, a relic of the nineteenth
century if ever there was one.41 Domesticity may have been the reigning ideology,
but popular culture and real social mutations had other messages to offer. In 1954,
the eighteen-year-old FrancËoise Sagan and her international best-seller Bonjour
tristesse exploded onto the cultural scene; in 1956, the French public eagerly
watched the equally young Brigitte Bardot gyrate on screen ± if it escaped the town
censors ± in Roger Vadim's Et Dieu creÂa la femme. The presence of girls of the
bourgeoisie in higher education was on the rise. By mid-decade, the youthful reader
of Elle could no longer be simplistically conceived as an aspirant to domestic
technology and tranquility. This was a creature whose habitat was not the home,
and whose desires and relationship to the new technology were not de®ned by
duties. Indeed, the Pereire column was quick to disappear, and Elle just as quick to
declare dramatically that the differences between the desires of girls and those of
their mothers had the scope of a generational rift:
Success: that's the word. The girl go-getter of 1956 doesn't think of happiness ®rst.
Happiness to her seems like an old word in Europe. No, this adolescent thinks about personal
success . . . Does she still have the time to think secretly of the young gentleman who set
Ninette or Ninon aquiver? Hardly. What was serious in 1830 ± love affairs ± is much less so
in 1956 . . .
The reign of the adolescent begins . . . Knowing that she can earn plenty of money right
away, she no longer thinks of getting married at all costs. On the contrary, one should
experience life, right? A bit of freedom is so much fun! The girl go-getter is a new product.
In the past, Rastignac was a good young man who liked Paris. Our young miss 1956 . . . is a
wily one who arrives from her province with a singsong accent . . . Her big sister, in the
euphoria of the Liberation, taught her that one is only what one makes oneself. So she
believes that millions can replace happiness. What would she do with a husband?42
After years of offering to its adult readers the fantasy of `having it all' ± traditional
femininity and modern opportunities ± and ®tting girls into the equation well
within the lines of the reigning ideology, Elle of the mid-1950s brie¯y took its
inspiration from `the reign of the adolescent'. As the magazine imagined the new
queen of French culture, she was a far cry from the femininity of the early postwar
years. According to Elle, this form of relational happiness looked hopelessly old-
fashioned to young women, who lived their modern times in the public sphere
alone. Success consisted of the fame and fortune they dreamed of generating for
themselves alone, no different from their male counterparts.
It is interesting to note the causality Elle establishes for the new individualism
witnessed in the teenage girl of 1956: through a reference to recent history, the esprit
du temps of the Liberation, in particular existentialism. Existentialism's assimilation
into popular culture is signalled by the evocation of an intermediate generation of
`big sisters' and the lesson they taught to their juniors: `one is only what one makes
oneself '. In Elle's equation, however, by 1956 the existentialists' ethical and indeed

41
Paul Crouzet, BachelieÁres ou jeunes ®lles? (Paris: Privat-Didier, 1949), 9.
42
`La jeune ®lle qui veut arriver,' Elle, 27 Feb. 1956, 36.
406 Contemporary European History

feminist call for individual consciousness and action in lieu of passivity had taken on
the newly post-ideological shape of economic self-realization. No longer did girls
bide their time in provincial villages as romantic heroines had done, waiting for
Prince Charming to appear; instead, they were apt to pack their bags, move to a big
city, and set about making their mark.
Not only did Elle refer to the lessons of existentialism: popular culture also played
a role in creating the new type of the ambitious teenage girl. For she had seen others
like herself, just as young ± and almost always middle class ± ®nd fame and fortune:
`She has discovered her face in the pages of the daily papers. She knows she has
become the latest news'. FrancËoise Sagan, unmentioned but essential to such a
statement, has left her mark, along with other young writers and actresses, making
stardom seem feasible for any girl from a good family. With Sagan in the public eye,
the present seemed to belong, not just to the young, but more speci®cally to the
young female. And if stardom did not await, nor did the life of a housewife:
The girl of the prewar period worked if she had to earn a living. In 1956, she works more
out of pleasure or desire: ``What do you do, young lady?'' ± ``Nothing!'' She would blush
with shame if that were her answer. And that's a good thing . . . All professions are open to
her, she has only to choose. She will no longer go to the eÂcole du Louvre,43 where her
mother dozed every afternoon. This kind of school, she af®rms, leads nowhere . . . So she
learns a real profession, she specializes in something.44

What Elle represented as reality for teenage girls belonged more speci®cally to the
middle classes, which the reference to the eÂcole du Louvre makes clear. Working
class girls, as they always have, continued to work because they had to. What was
new in the 1950s was that an increasing number of girls of the middle classes were
actually choosing to continue their studies and have careers. They scoffed at the
domesticity their mothers had embraced, just as they dismissed genteel and feminine
pastimes outside the home, for they were not `real jobs', and did not involve earning
a living. What mattered to the younger generation was economic independence and
professional self-realisation. A career, and not new appliances, exempli®ed moder-
nity for them.
There were, of course, other factors at work besides the ones Elle mentioned in
the emergence of such a conception of teenage female modernity: along with their
increasing presence in university, there was the expansion of technology to the
leisure market, the exodus of French youth from rural areas to urban centres, and
the ubiquitous image of the American teenager, to name a few. But Elle's version of
the teenager as an amalgam of the cultural forces of existentialism and the mass
media is truly remarkable when we consider the context: the dominant ideology of
the family and its renewed emphasis on transgenerational female domesticity, as well
as the absence of a feminist movement in 1950s France that might have urged girls
to look beyond the high-tech home to ®nd themselves. While adult women were

43
One can study to become an art historian or curator at the eÂcole du Louvre, or just take courses
for pleasure.
44
Elle, 27 Feb. 1956, 36.
 From Elle to Mademoiselle. Women's Magazines in Postwar France 407

presented with the fantasy of `having it all', the image of middle-class girls that Elle,
like Astra margarine, offered here, was that of a delayed domesticity: the essential
was not their sexuality ± that was the domain of novels, ®lms and advertisements ±
but their self-realisation in the present.
Elle's attempts to appeal to an audience of individualistic teenage girls alongside
their faithful adult readers never quite worked. After hailing the reign of the female
adolescent, the magazine returned to its primarily domestic and relational orienta-
tion. If anything, Elle became less interesting at the beginning of the new decade.
Gone were the polemical features, the calls to action. Old formulas, rather, were the
rule. In this vacuum, in February 1962, a new magazine made its ®rst appearance on
the newsstands: Mademoiselle. `At last, here's your magazine', the cover proclaimed,
alongside a laughing young woman in slacks and a turtleneck, posed as if in the
midst of an energetic dance session. Although the monochromatic backdrop offers
no information other than the energy of its colour, this was most certainly no one's
kitchen. According to this ®rst issue's editorial, such a carefree cover girl was the
typical young FrancËaise. She had her father's newspapers as a source of information
on politics and the world, and her mother's magazines (among them Elle, one
would imagine) to learn how to keep up a country house. Once again, we see that
the `typical French girl' of 1962 is ®rmly situated in the middle classes. But neither
world news nor home decoration met the preoccupations of her own age. Like
Arlette in the Astra margarine advertisement, the Mademoiselle reader, projected to
range in age from ®fteen to twenty, was a girl who wanted a life both more
comfortable and more exciting than her mother's.
In 1962, however, comfort was no longer de®ned in opposition to the conditions
of the Occupation, as it had been for the readers of Elle in the early years. Just as in
the Astra advertisement, this editorial does away with unsavoury war memories by
positing an unfathomable generation gap au feÂminin, aligning with youth in order to
forget politics, ideology and hard times. The Mademoiselle reader, the editors wrote,
never had to make do in the hard times of the Occupation and the immediate
postwar years. She was part of a `new generation' who had always lived with
television and nylon stockings, a generation for whom `the last war is already just a
page of History'. The typical reader that Mademoiselle projected, though, was less a
student of history than an object of the current consumer culture, and it was in the
latter domain that the magazine envisaged its role:
You are becoming a social phenomenon. Manufacturers and retailers, fashion designers and
hairdressers are preoccupied with satisfying this new `market' of girls. But you need a
representative.45

With consumer culture's attention turned to girls, Mademoiselle positioned itself as

something better than a best friend: a guide, one who could help them make
choices among the bewildering assortment of fashions, accessories, hairstyles, beauty
products and so on. As magazines necessarily do, Mademoiselle alternately served as a

45
Mademoiselle, 1 (Feb. 1962).
408 Contemporary European History

guide to consumer products and as an advertising forum for them: no longer

refrigerators and baby formula, but record players, acne cream, and boutiques for
teenage fashion.
Nevertheless, Mademoiselle wasn't just about how to shop. To ful®l its assumed
role as a magazine which spoke for French girls, the ®rst issues featured pro®les of
teenagers' lives in different French towns (`J'ai 17 ans et j'habite Blois'), articles on
how to get along with one's parents and how to be appealing to boys ± alongside
one boy's plaintive assertion that in Paris, `girls aren't romantic any more' ± beauty
tips, and a short story contest ± something Elle had never offered ± with a trip to
Paris as ®rst prize. A surprisingly large amount of space is consecrated to letters of
thanks and praise for being a magazine for girls who were, as one reader put it,
`real', and not how their grandmothers wanted to be, or how the romantic press
presented them. Even Salut les copains, the magazine for fans of the international
popular music scene, had not proved itself to be completely on the mark for the
teenage girl audience. As another Mademoiselle reader wrote, `For a long time now I
had lost hope of ®nding a magazine that ``understands us'', that focuses on us and
not on Johnny Hallyday or some other clown'.46 Girls had other things to think
about besides popular teenage heart-throbs: most speci®cally themselves. `Focusing
on us', though, generally involved physical appearance alone. For example, in an
echo of Elle's early postwar innovation of coupons known as `bons magiques',
Mademoiselle instituted a `Club Mademoiselle,' which earned its readers reductions on
the purchase of certain beauty items.
For the most part, Mademoiselle concentrated less on following in Elle's footsteps
than on setting itself apart from its elder, often by taking an approach that heralded
its own realism. In the early 1950s Elle glamorised the secretary in a fashion piece as
a `key personality' of the twentieth century; Mademoiselle's version was an article
entitled `Secretary ``Forever''?', comprising of a series of interviews in which many
young secretaries talked about the daily unglamorous realities of the job. While the
home was often the backdrop for fashion shoots in Elle, it disappeared in
Mademoiselle, where at ®rst, as in the initial cover shot, there was no familiar context
at all; against brightly coloured backdrops, `la mode jeune ®lle' was exhibited:
inexpensive clothing available at the local Prisunic, that could be worn to school or
on dates.
By the third issue of 1963, according to Mademoiselle, one out of three girls read
the magazine. `For the ®rst time, a magazine, our magazine, is trying to give to the
most fragile of youth ± girls ± a defence'. Adolescent girls were fragile because they
were alone: no longer under the constant surveillance of parents,47 and not yet
married and under the protection of husbands. The latter was, however, the end
that all Mademoiselle readers knew awaited them: `Your life will be, for the most

46
Mademoiselle, 3 (1963), 23.
47
Raymonde Carroll makes the interesting observation that while adolescence in America is a time
of intense parental surveillance and childhood a time of freedom, it is the other way around in France.
See her Evidences invisibles (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1987); Carol Volk trans., Cultural Misunderstandings
(Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1988), Ch. 3.
 From Elle to Mademoiselle. Women's Magazines in Postwar France 409

part, determined by your marriage. While waiting for it, you have the right to laugh
and dream, to laugh and dream a lot.'48
In what today reads as a rather pathetic evocation of female adolescence as a
premarital swan song, Mademoiselle's message was at heart a profoundly contradictory
one. Mademoiselle in the early 1960s may have been able to scoff at `women's
magazines' and their sedate, home-oriented brand of femininity, but its own
conception of adolescent femininity nevertheless kept domesticity in the picture,
albeit as a future rather than a present state for its young readers. Girls had `the right'
to laugh and dream while waiting for marriage, that ineluctable destiny which would
come as the ®nal punctuation mark of their lives. Marriage was a destiny which, in
this equation, ®gured above all as dismal: as the end of laughter and dreams. Not
only should girls laugh and dream ± they should do so `a lot' ± for it was their last
chance.
Most articles and editorials in Mademoiselle did not, of course, take on such an
unintentional voice of doom. But moments such as these make us view the
magazine's self-presentation as young, fresh and unshackled by recent history, with a
more critical eye. Elle was founded by women, for women, to show them how to
create comfort at home in a new society where they could and should take part in
the political process. Mademoiselle, on the other hand, was a creation of marketing
savvy, capitalising on the important and heretofore neglected audience of teenage
girls, both as readers and consumers. The editor-in-chief, Herve Lamarre-Terrane,
was a man ± a problematic choice as `guide' and `representative' for young female
readers. Under Lamarre-Terrane, Mademoiselle's message was far from a radical one:
have fun, purchase widely and wisely, for tomorrow you may be married.
I would like to evoke once again the parable of the Astra margarine advertise-
ment as an illustration of the relationship between Mademoiselle and Elle, of the way
youthfulness and femininity do battle with each other in media images of teenage
girls. In this advertisement, the kind of youthful energy, newness and even revolt in
which Mademoiselle delighted was framed and contained within the domestic norm
that was presented as the only ending possible. The kind of home-de®ned
femininity promoted in Elle is rejuvenated, made exciting and even seductive, by
youth. In the early 1960s, these two magazines and the kind of reader they projected
were two key points in the de®nition of the modern teenage girl. She could revolt,
reject romance and sentiment, remain untouched by the past, and indulge in the
new, as long as she remained a good daughter and kept in mind the domestic
destiny that awaited her.

48
Mademoiselle, 3 (1963), 1.