Two Modernities: from Elle to Mademoiselle. Women's Magazines in Postwar France

Abstract

Beginning with its first issue of 1945, Elle magazine was instrumental in changing the way the French saw female domesticity in the postwar period, infusing the domestic space with an aura of glamour and modernity. Newly glamorous female domesticity went hand-in-hand with images of women as voters and professionals, communicating to the magazine's readers that they could ‘have it all’ – but never to the exclusion of their primary identity as mothers and wives. This ultimately conservative postwar version of femininity came to be challenged in the early 1960s by Mademoiselle, a magazine that projected a reader unmarked by war memories and whose relationship to technology and modernity went beyond the home. Yet, Mademoiselle was grooming the fun-loving teenage girl as a consumer who would one day be a wife and mother as well; from one version of modernity to another, feminine destiny remained the same.