{"product_id":"working-girls","title":"Working Girls","description":"\u003cp\u003eAs the twentieth century dawned and France entered an era of extraordinary labor activism and industrial competition, an insistently romantic vision of the Parisian garment worker was deployed by politicians, reformers, and artists to manage anxieties about economic and social change. Nostalgia about a certain kind of France was written onto the bodies of the capital's couture workers throughout French pop culture from the 1880s to the 1930s. And the\n\u003cbr\u003emidinettes-as these women were called- were written onto the geography of Paris itself, by way of festivals, monuments, historic preservation, and guide books. The idealized working Parisienne stood in for, at once,\n\u003cbr\u003ethe superiority of French taste and craft, and the political (and sexual) subordination of French women and labour. But she was also the public face of more than 80,000 real working women whose demands for better labour conditions were inflected, distorted, and, in some cases, amplified by this ubiquitous Romantic type in the decades straddling World War I. Working Girls bridges cultural histories of the Parisian imaginary and histories of French labour, and puts them in raucous\n\u003cbr\u003edialogue with one another: a letter by a nineteen-year-old seamstress, a speech by a government minister; a frothy Parisian guide by a bon vivant, the minutes of a union meeting; a bawdy café-concert song, a policy\n\u003cbr\u003ebrief on garment working conditions.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Oxford University Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44082405310702,"sku":"9780198841173","price":177.22,"currency_code":"AUD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0630\/9612\/7726\/files\/9780198841173.jpg?v=1706258005","url":"https:\/\/bookland.com.au\/products\/working-girls","provider":"Book Land AU","version":"1.0","type":"link"}