Enfants Terribles: Youth and Femininity in the Mass Media in France, 1945-1968 (review)

Susan Weiner’s exciting work on France in the period following the Second World War explores the emergence, between 1945 and 1968, of a new definition of what it meant to be young and female in France. Through her examination of women’s and girl’s fashion magazines, popular novels and films, and the new phenomenon of the public opinion poll, Weiner traces the evolution of the “enfants terribles,” the precocious, sexualized, bad girl of postwar France. Juxtaposed [End Page 155] with the French mother, who represented reconstruction and recovery, and the angry young man damaged by the Occupation and angered by the current challenges of French social and political life, teenage girls remained untouched by history and uninvolved in current events. Instead, they reveled in their flagrant sexuality and disregard for bourgeois societal norms. Gone was the jeune fille, the virtuous young girl who came to represent a vanishing world. As Weiner sees it, the unarticulated anxieties of a France both eager and reluctant to embrace change are apparent in the discursive creation of young women challenging the restrictions of French society, but ultimately unable to fully escape the strictures of patriarchal control.