The politics of food and gender in occupied Paris

Abstract

This article examines the origins, development and meaning of women's mobilisation around problems of food scarcity and supply during the Occupation. Memoirs, fiction and testimony of the war years show that food issues dominated the daily life of French men and women. Police and protesters saw the struggle for bread as distinctly a women's issue, but for different sets of reasons. How did defining food protest as ‘female’ serve the political agenda of the Vichy authorities on the one hand, and that of the French Communist activists on the other? Particular attention will be paid to the summer of 1942 when the collaborationist press reported that women's demonstrations for food constituted a ‘second front’.