Patricia Tilburg, "Working Girls: Sex, Taste, and Reform in the Parisian Garment Trades, 1880-1919" (Oxford UP, 2019)

In Conversation: An OUP Podcast · Feb 16, 2022 · 1h 2m

Patricia Tilburg's Working Girls: Sex, Taste, and Reform in the Parisian Garment Trades, 1880-1919 (Oxford University Press, 2019) is at once a cultural, gender, urban, and labour history of the Belle Epoque era. The midinette is the central figure the book chases across serval chapters. Named for the lunch hour when thousands of female garment workers spilled into the streets of Paris each day, this female garment worker became a symbol of French taste and skill, the embodiment of productive labour and the pleasures of the modern capital. Represented by a range of observers during the period…