Colonial Metropolis: The Urban Grounds of Anti-Imperialism and Feminism in Interwar Paris

By Jennifer Anne Boittin
University of Nebraska Press

Interwar Paris conjures up images of romance and renewal. From the ashes and rubble of the First World War, families reunite and rebuild under what seemed to be the end of the most dire of circumstances. Unfortunately, Colonial Metropolis fails to capture this magic, and yet it is an extremely thoughtful and methodical review of the local primary source material available, and would serve as a very strong academic referral source.

The author, Jennifer Anne Boittin, has a clear passion for the subject matter and conveys this well through her enthusiastic descriptions of the characters of the period who populated the anti-colonialism and feminist movements. The problem, for me, stems from the fact that we never feel the interaction between these players. These characters never seem to weave together into the larger story of feminist and anti-colonial activism, the tale that Boittin is seemed so hopeful to tell at the outset of the book.

Boittin lifts directly from the historical record to bring a multitude of characters from this period to life, but none so well as that as Josephine Baker. Pages and pages are dedicated to bringing her tantalizing and mischievous performances to life. Imagine the dedication and zeal of Marina Abramović crossed with the free wheeling sexual spirit of Isadora Duncan. Who wouldn’t want to be warped back to the front row for that show of an old theater in Paris?

With these high sensory moments scattered throughout, readers catch glimpses of the time gone by that was advertised to them, but even the best of these moments failed to sustain me from page to page. Clearly, Boittin’s integrity to the historical record speaks to her virtues as an academic; it just doesn’t make for a particularly interesting read.

Review by Nicole Levitz

The Great Silence: Britain from the Shadow of the First World War to the Dawn of the Jazz Age

By Juliet Nicolson
Grove Press

The Great Silence starts out with a story that is never fun to tell—the story of a war—the First World War. Nicolson writes of a part of life that divides humans like no other, but also remedies that story with one that is incomparable in drawing us together—that of music. Everything in between is categorized under feelings such as, hopelessness, anger, honesty, and acceptance, to name a few.

The year of 1918 gave birth to a day that was supposed to represent a temporary suspension of hostilities by mutual agreement—a truce—for this is what Armistice means. Armistice Day, however, served more as a bandaid in the lives of millions of Britain’s inhabitants. Hostilities would fester for a lifetime for those who would never see their husbands, brothers, or fathers again. It also offered little consolation to returning soldiers who saw the end of the war, but were marked by it forever with their injuries and disfigurements.

Nicolson seems to pull back the curtain on that time making the reader feel as if they are in the midst of the goings on of these lives forever touched by the war. No one was spared of the atrocities, from the ordinary to the famous, such as, D.H. Lawrence, T.S. Eliot, and Virginia Woolf, who found time to write of Armistice Day while at a trip to the dentist.

The war and its residual effects would give rise to many unprecedented events, such as women’s right to vote (with certain restrictions), the increased blurring of class lines, and a music that would therapeutically liberate a people’s mental constraints. Not even the world of fashion was spared when French couturier Coco Chanel introduced innovative fashions that complemented androgyny while retaining femininity, thanks in part, to this jazz music. It seemed that the high hopes of winning the war and/or returning from it unbroken placed on the success of the war in the beginning came crashing down along with the nation’s morality (according to what the powers that be believed), due to its failure in both. Jazz music only served to divide the morale with its primitive elements wreaking havoc on the virginal principles of good people.

Nicolson weaves such a thorough and engaging social history that makes the reader feel personally privy to a time when many of our grandparents were not even a thought. Nicolson’s ability to tell a story complemented by first-hand accounts and access to the diaries of Queen Mary give the reader a virtual experience of what it was like to experience a time long gone, but not forgotten.

Review by Olupero R. Aiyenimelo

Entangling Alliances: Foreign War Brides and American Soldiers in the Twentieth Century

By Susan Zeiger
NYU Press

When men are shipped out to foreign locations to engage in wartime activities, it seems inevitable that they will become romantically and sexually involved with foreign women. In Entangling Alliances, Susan Zeiger explores this phenomenon, examining governmental, military, and societal responses to American soldiers’ desires for sex, companionship, and marriage while engaged in combat overseas. She argues that the changing ways Americans treated war brides over the course of the twentieth century demonstrates shifting American sensibilities regarding foreign policy, race, and gender. More than anything, because war brides involved an exchange of women across cultural and national boundaries, American discourse about war brides was ultimately about what constituted American manhood, men’s relationships with women, and the role of the nation in its relationship to other countries.

During World War I, the military preached sexual abstinence while devising methods to keep American soldiers and local women apart, in particular African-American soldiers and white European women. The army’s response to marriage requests vacillated until an official policy was handed down that marriage was a personal, not military, question. Meanwhile, domestic policy concerns in the U.S. triumphed over an internationally-oriented political outlook; xenophobia for newcomers was inevitable and Americans wondered if these foreign women could become good American wives. Though many predicted the demise of these marriages, evidence reveals that the majority made it.

In World War II, military policy differed depending on location. It encouraged marriage in Great Britain and Australia, both Allied countries with similar cultural backgrounds to white middle-class America. Likewise, American society welcomed these brides, suggesting that American women should emulate their domesticity and loyalty to husbands. Alternatively, the military encouraged prostitution, rather than marriage, in both Italy and the Philippines, while American society viewed these war brides as less desirable immigrants. Zeiger argues that both policies—encouraging prostitution or marriage—“shared... the intention to preserve and extend male control over women.” She also points out that though many of these local women showed independence and an assertion of personal freedom by going out with American men, sometimes against their family’s wishes, their stories “end with marriage and dependence.”

Race played a huge role in war bride stories post-WWII and throughout the Korean and Vietnam Wars. Congressional policy actively limited brides from Asian countries, outright barring Japanese spouses for several years, while all interracial couples faced social discrimination and, occasionally, found that their marriages were not legal when they moved from one state to another.

Zeiger argues that the conflicts in Korea and Vietnam saw the “demise” of the war bride as a phenomenon considered and debated by the American public. The military did not provide transport to war brides the way they did in WWI and WWII, and it actively encouraged prostitution rather than marriage, extending its WWII policy of creating red-light districts where prostitutes were regularly examined by medical officials and given “safe” ratings to prevent the spread of venereal disease. Korean and Vietnamese wives were not written about widely in the American press and they have not written about their post-war experiences in America, the way war brides from earlier eras have done. They have been, Zeiger writes, “all but invisible in American culture.” Demographic information suggests that these Asian war brides tend to be isolated, even in comparison to other Asian immigrants though they have sponsored family members to come to the U.S., unlike earlier war brides. Though Asian war brides were an untold story, there was a lot of media attention paid to the mixed-race children left behind in Vietnam and, sometimes airlifted out and brought to the U.S. Zeiger argues that the story of Amerasian children, and the efforts to bring them to the U.S. allowed Americans to re-conceptualize the war, seeing both Amerasian children and American soldiers as victims in the story. “The American nation becomes father and, also, paradoxically, child. Vietnam, the mother, the war bride, is not part of this reconciliation.”

Entangling Alliances is a compelling read, illuminating twentieth century social struggles encountered by men and women on both domestic and foreign soil over questions of gender, race, and nationality. Though Zeiger argues that the war bride phenomenon died out with the Korean and Vietnam wars, clearly, soldiers still took wives and fathered children with Korean and Vietnamese women. More recently, stories of male American soldiers marrying Iraqi women have been exploited in the media. Because Zeiger only covers the period from WWI up through the Vietnam War, she leaves a perplexing question unexplored: What has happened with female soldiers and local men in the conflicts that the U.S. has engaged in the last twenty years? Have female soldiers, like male soldiers, engaged in romantic and sexual conquests with non-U.S. citizens? I suspect their experience has been radically different than their male counterparts.

Review by Jessica Powers