“An Appetite to Be Pretty”

Abstract

This chapter considers a defining moment of the working Parisienne’s day to which early twentieth-century French observers returned again and again: midi. The noon lunch break afforded Parisian artists, writers, and tourists alike a daily glimpse of the “fairies” of the city’s luxury garment workshops as they took to the boulevards and parks for an hour in the sun—an hour imagined to consist of flirtation, window-shopping, laughter, and, I will establish, conspicuous under-eating. Indeed, crucial to the picturesque allure of the lunchtime seductions that filled popular midinette literature was the notion of the female garment worker as a frivolous under-eater cheerfully forfeiting food for fashion and pleasure. No longer the tragically starving workingwoman of nineteenth-century fiction and art, nor her virtuous, anorectic middle-class sister, whose physical wasting increased their moral fortitude, the under-eating midinette of the early twentieth century was envisioned doing so as a means of engaging more fully in the capitalist marketplace, making her body a more appealing advertisement for and object of urban consumption. This cultural fantasy of the midinette’s lunch hour, which fetishized the supposed moral precariousness of her lifestyle as well as the sparseness of her diet, was echoed by social reformers, who, in this same period, sought to carve out spaces for workingwomen’s lunches that kept them from the cafés and parks where they were believed to flirt much and eat little.